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by specialist 4731 days ago
Great info, thanks.

How reliable is the mail delivery? Do you know how much mail is lost? One percent, more, less? (I believe one kind of failure is called UAA - undeliverable as addressed.)

I'd love to learn more, but don't know where to start.

Some of us election integrity activists are deeply concerned with the transition to vote by mail (all postal ballots, no more poll sites). One practical complaint is our assumption that 1% of all mail is lost. In a big county like mine, that's 12,000 ballots.

My FOIA requests were rebuffed. Apparently the data gathering is done by third parties, so is considered proprietary. (A nice dodge, illustrating how privatization reduces government transparency and accountability.)

The best information I found was looking at court cases, where USPS' customers (eg bulk mailers) dispute the UAA, and don't want to pay extra.

2 comments

In general, I think mail delivery is very reliable. But given the volume, there will be outliers. Even if we assumed 99.9999% reliability (a hypothetical number), given that they sort 300MM pieces per day, 300 pieces per day will be affected.

If you have the money, you should try an experiment: mail a large number of ballot-like pieces from different mailboxes all over the county (say, 10,000 letters) and see how many reach the destination. Sure, it'll cost $5K, but you may have a better answer.

The Royal Mail in the UK quotes ~99.74% reliability (for delivery, not on-time delivery), FWIW.
I'm curious how much mail also gets lost due to being delivered to the wrong mailbox. I average at least one mail per month that is not addressed to me in my mailbox.