MIAMI — Greg Torrales could see his ballot — a photograph of it, at least — on Oct. 20. That day, an email from the U.S. Postal Service to his sister showed scanned images of two pieces of mail. "COMING TO YOUR MAILBOX SOON," said the message, a daily report of incoming mail headed to his sister's address in Plantation.
One of the images showed Torrales' ballot from the Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections, properly addressed to his sister's home where he's currently living. But the ballot never arrived, Torrales says, nor did the other piece of mail for his sister. He says his sister has otherwise been getting her mail regularly.
Torrales, 33, ultimately gave up on voting by mail and instead voted early in-person in Aventura. But he's still perplexed that a ballot that only needed to travel from Miami-Dade to Broward County — and was evidently scanned at a local processing facility more than 16 days ago — never made it to his door.
"It doesn't make any sense," Torrales said Thursday.
Torrales isn't alone in facing confusion and desperation while trying to track down a missing ballot in recent weeks. His experience and others, along with USPS data, suggests the extraordinary measures the Postal Service put in place to ensure no ballot was left behind were not completely successful.
Shortly after noon on Election Day, a federal judge ordered sweeps for ballots at postal facilities across the country, including at the Miami Processing and Distribution Center on Northwest 72nd Avenue. That came after the Postal Service released data that showed slow on-time processing rates for ballots in several regions, including South Florida.
The data suggested that, on Monday, about 74% of South Florida ballots bound for election offices met USPS processing standards. That score was well below Monday's 90% rate nationwide.
On Election Day, when the national score was about 93%, South Florida's processing score was 67%.
The Postal Service warns that the scores aren't reliable for several reasons, including that some ballots were expedited and didn't receive final scans, meaning they were left out of the metrics. In other cases, election officials retrieved ballots directly from post offices, bypassing USPS processing plants where the data is collected.
But the data mean some people who mailed their ballots by last Saturday — meaning they should have arrived by Tuesday — "didn't have their votes counted because the Postal Service didn't meet its targets," said Jonathan Manes, an attorney for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Postal Service in Miami federal court.
"There are people out there whose ballots you would have hoped would have been counted," Manes said.
On Thursday, USPS data filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., showed more than 150,000 ballots nationwide were delivered from its processing facilities Wednesday, after Election Day, according to The Washington Post. That included at least several hundred ballots in South Florida, which had an on-time processing rate of 78%.
Nationally, the Postal Service said it processed about 95% of the Wednesday ballots on time, leaving about 8,000 ballots around the U.S. that didn't meet its standards — meaning they were mailed between last Thursday and Saturday but weren't delivered until Wednesday. The USPS defended its efforts in a statement Thursday, saying it "cannot control when voters choose to mail their completed ballots."
Weekly data on first-class mail delivery, data the Postal Service touts as more reliable, are also troubling. During the week of Oct. 17, the most recent week for which data are available, the South Florida postal district had an on-time delivery rate of 79% for first-class mail, its lowest since July. The national rate was 81%, the lowest since August.
Asked for additional comment, USPS South Florida spokeswoman Debbie Fetterly emailed a statement: "The Postal Service processed and delivered ballots as they were presented to us. The daily processing scores are not as reliable as being suggested."
Since Oct. 1, she said, the average time of delivery for first-class mail, including ballots, was 2.5 days, with 97.43% of all measured first-class mail delivered within five days across the country.
Peter Ehrlich, a Miami-based real estate investor and local activist, said he mailed his ballot with priority status from upstate New York Saturday, Oct. 31, so that it would arrive in Miami-Dade by 3 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2.
"That way I had a 24-hour buffer," he said.
But by Tuesday afternoon, his tracking number showed his ballot was still at a processing facility in White Plains, N.Y. His ballot was finally scanned in Miami on Tuesday at 9 p.m. — past the 7 p.m. deadline to get it to the elections department.
"I'm very sad," he said. "Not that this is affecting me, but I'm afraid it could be affecting hundreds of thousands of other voters."
On Thursday, the focus in a Washington, D.C., federal court hearing about mail ballot processing was primarily on hotly contested states in the presidential election, including Pennsylvania, where ballots will be counted if they were postmarked by 8 p.m. on Election Day and are received by Friday.
But every vote counts in Florida, too. The race for Senate District 37 is likely headed for a recount after the results Tuesday had Democratic state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez trailing Republican challenger Ileana Garcia by just 21 votes. More than 215,000 votes were cast in the race.
Experts say pressure on the Postal Service, both from the public and the courts, has made a difference in forcing the agency to prioritize election mail after a summer of destabilizing budget cuts and policy changes by the Trump administration. That has been critical in a year of unprecedented numbers of mail-in votes due to COVID-19.
"There will inevitably be ballots that arrived late after the deadline," said Steve Hutkins, a retired New York University professor who runs a blog about the USPS. "But probably not nearly as many as if everyone wasn't paying so much attention, including the voters who became much more aware of the deadlines."
That awareness may have been useful in Miami-Dade, where Deputy Supervisor of Elections Suzy Trutie said only 131 mail ballots had arrived past the deadline by midafternoon Thursday. That number will likely increase in the coming days. In the August primary, 4,691 mail ballots arrived too late.
Trutie said she attributes the low numbers so far to the department's education efforts and to the drop boxes that were stationed at early voting sites. Nearly one-third of all mail ballots in the county were delivered via the drop boxes rather than the USPS.
Still, mail delays made voting a challenge for many voters.
Manes, the attorney in the Miami lawsuit, said he spoke to one voter who mailed her ballot to Miami-Dade County from Atlanta around Oct. 12. It wasn't marked as received by the elections department until Nov. 3 — Election Day — just in time to be counted.
There were bigger issues, too. An elder-care facility in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood said its 120 residents weren't getting mail for about a week in mid-October. And, most notably, a backlog of 180,000 pieces of mail, including 62 ballots, was discovered days before the election at the Princeton Post Office in South Miami-Dade.
As for Torrales, the Plantation resident whose ballot was scanned by the Postal Service but never delivered, that wasn't his first unsuccessful attempt to obtain an absentee ballot for this election.
The process began Oct. 1, when Miami-Dade elections sent a ballot destined for Torrales' address in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he had been living when he requested a ballot earlier in the year. Torrales moved to South Florida, where he grew up, in July, but a friend of his who checked his mail in Massachusetts told him the ballot never arrived.
He tried again Oct. 8, asking Miami-Dade election officials to send a replacement ballot to his new Plantation address in Broward County. Records show the ballot was sent out that day with the correct address listed.
That ballot hadn't arrived more than a week later, Torrales said. So he asked for a second replacement ballot, the maximum allowed in Florida. Election officials sent it out, again to the Plantation address, on Oct. 19. One day later, his sister got the email from the Postal Service saying it was on the way.
But the third mail ballot, like the first two, never came.
"At that point," Torrales said, "I didn't trust that whole process."
