A judge on Thursday ordered twice daily sweeps at US Postal Service (USPS) facilities serving states with extended ballot receipt deadlines as votes were still being counted in US election battleground states.
Some states, including still undecided Nevada and North Carolina, are counting ballots that are received after Election Day Tuesday. Plaintiffs lawyers in a lawsuit said the Postal Service delivered roughly 150,000 ballots nationwide on Wednesday. Of those, roughly 8,000 or 9,000, were delivered after Tuesday even though they had been mailed by Sunday.
US District Judge Emmet Sullivan said the processing centers must perform morning sweeps and then afternoon sweeps "to ensure that any identified local ballots can be delivered that day."
Sullivan issued a separate order requiring USPS to file additional data from districts covering North Carolina and Pennsylvania. He also ordered USPS to "coordinate with all local county Boards of Elections in North Carolina or Pennsylvania" in order to deliver all ballots "before 5:00 PM local time in North Carolina or Pennsylvania" on Friday.
He also directed additional steps to ensure delivery of ballots in two states before the deadline.
Sullivan previously urged USPS to take all possible steps to ensure ballots are delivered. He ordered sweeps in response to lawsuits by groups including Vote Forward, the NAACP, and Latino community advocates.
USPS must report to headquarters "the total number of ballots identified and confirm that those ballots have been expedited for delivery to meet applicable extended state deadlines," Sullivan added in one of his orders Thursday.
Ballots were still being counted by election officials in battleground states two days after polls closed in one of the most unusual elections in US history because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Democratic candidate Joe Biden was cutting into Republican President Donald Trump's leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia but retained slim margins in Nevada and Arizona.