Delivering the vote: How 4 pressures are testing the Postal Service’s role in American elections

Every election cycle, tens of millions of Americans vote without setting foot in a polling place. Their local election office mails them a paper ballot, they mark it at home, and they hand it back to a letter carrier to return. Over the past three decades this has grown from a niche convenience into how almost a third of the country votes: the share of voters casting a ballot by mail rose from 7.8% in 1996 to 21% in 2016, surged to 43% in the pandemic election of 2020, and settled at 29% in 2024 (Figure 1). In that election, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) carried roughly 99 million ballots to and from voters.