Pennsylvania’s mail scandal — that mail vendor Capitol Presort Services reportedly failed to deliver the state’s mail for a month — is another reason we should not trust the mail with our elections.
Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Gillian McGoldrick reported Saturday that 3.4 million official letters from Pennsylvania state agencies were stuck in limbo from Nov. 3 through Dec. 3. The communications did not get sent until last week, after the state fired the mail vendor and hired another one to send the letters.
It is not clear why state workers can’t handle mailing letters without the complication of a contracted vendor.
Some of the delayed letters contained time-sensitive communications about services with important deadlines, including notices for recipients to interact with agencies or lose benefits, according to McGoldrick’s report. Health coverage, SNAP food benefits, child abuse clearances, decisions about elder abuse and foster homes for kids, along with timely notices of hearings — all from the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services — reportedly piled up at the vendor instead of being given to the U.S. Postal Service for delivery.
Important communications from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation were also delayed. Halted mail included driver’s license and vehicle registration renewal reminders, vehicle registration cards, driver’s license camera cards, and address card updates.
Just weeks ago, Gov. Josh Shapiro was making the media rounds, attacking President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance about putting Pennsylvanians in peril because of the government shutdown, when at the same time his own administration was failing to deliver essential communications about these very services through the mail.
The Federalist asked the Pennsylvania Department of State if counties use a third-party vendor to send blank mail ballots to voters, and in light of this mailing failure, how can we ever say mailing ballots is secure? After all, the department’s website declares, “Voting by mail-in or absentee ballot is safe, secure, and easy.” The department did not respond.
As The Federalist recently reported, voting by mail increased in 2020 — in part a response to social distancing restrictions due to Covid — but mail voting has vulnerabilities that are erased by voting in person. Mail voting puts more hands on the ballots and risks time-sensitive ballots arriving late, or not at all. Consider how often missing mail turns up in the news:
In October in Durham County, North Carolina, a pile of undelivered, opened mail was found dumped in a ditch. In New Jersey’s Long Beach Island area, the U.S. Postal Service couldn’t say why some mail was not delivered for two weeks in September. Throughout 2024, a USPS employee from Beloit, Wisconsin, allegedly brought home mail it was his job to deliver and opened it. In March a Chicago resident found hundreds of pieces of undelivered mail stashed in an alley.
In Cobb County, Georgia, a local pastor reportedly found thousands of pieces of mail near the woods off Interstate 285 in January. USPS said the letters were “undeliverable” mail being transported by a contractor. In January 2024, “two Iowa postal workers were fired or forced to resign … after investigators found undelivered mail at their homes,” according to Iowa Capital Dispatch. One was accused of postal theft for taking a customer’s package home. The other brought “multiple containers” of undelivered mail home instead of delivering it.
The list goes on, and plenty of cases are specific to election mail.
In Erie County, Pennsylvania, just before the 2024 general election, thousands of voters requested mail ballots but did not get them. During the 2024 general election, two Colorado women, one a postal worker, engaged in an operation to steal ballots before they were delivered to the rightful voter and cast ballots that did not belong to them.
In Millbourne, Pennsylvania, three public officials used mail ballots to cheat in the 2021 election. They got caught and finally faced prosecution from the Department of Justice in 2025.
The newly discovered Pennsylvania mail scandal shows the scale at which mail can be mishandled. Consider these sobering numbers, using Pennsylvania as our example. In the 2024 general election, nearly 2 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail for Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Chase Oliver, or Jill Stein.
Trump won the state, receiving 120,266 more total votes (mail and in-person votes combined) than Kamala Harris. The margin of victory is just 6 percent of the number of mail-in ballots cast. Someone who feels strongly about the outcome of the election would have only needed to compromise 6 percent of the mail ballots to potentially change the results.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
