Ballots Won’t Be Forwarded

[New mail carrier]

A heads up: if you’ve moved and put in a forwarding request with USPS but haven’t updated your address with the Elections office, you won’t get a ballot for the upcoming election. We have been told ballots won’t be forwarded. I believe they’ll be returned to the Elections office as undeliverable but not 100% sure of that.

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[CarDriver]

I always chuckle at the amount of mail to return in my building. There’s a LOT of people that can’t figure out their mail won’t magically follow them to their new address.

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[WSB]

This is NOT TRUE. After reading this, I contacted the media reps at King County Elections. Their reply:

If USPS has a forwarding address for someone, they will automatically forward their ballot on to them, even if the voter has not updated their address on their voter registration.

King County Elections receives data from USPS regularly with updated addresses and, after doing voter outreach, makes those changes in our system.

If USPS does not have a forwarding address for the voter, their ballot would be returned to us as undeliverable. When a ballot is returned as undeliverable, if the voter does not vote in the election another way (i.e. In-person at a Vote Center or by printing out their ballot online and mailing it that way), then their registration record would become ‘inactive’. If this happens we send a notice to the voter asking them to update their address with us and they will not automatically receive a ballot in the next election – unless we hear back from them first. It’s incredibly easy to move from ‘inactive’ to ‘active’ and prompt that automatic ballot once again, we just have to hear from the voter to confirm their address.
This is one of the reasons we try to be clear with voters about contacting us if they do not receive a ballot and they believe they should have. If a voter gives us a call before October 26, we can get a new ballot out to their new address. After October 26, they would need to come in person to update their address. Or they can go online and print their ballot from home if they would prefer to do that instead.
If voters want to contact us they can email us at elections@kingcounty.gov or call 206-296-VOTE (8683).

• This reply was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by WSB.

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[New mail carrier]

The Elections office may think we’re forwarding the ballots but the instructions to the carriers are to not forward them.

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[anonyme]

Based on my experiences with the local P.O., I believe New mail carrier’s version. Not only is it next to impossible to nail down the actual, written policies of the USPS, but local branches also make up their own rules. Given the Tricky Dick politics employed by Postmaster General DeJoy so far this year, I think these claims need to be closely examined – not dismissed.

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