Rejected Ballots Skyrocketed in Five States Thanks to USPS

Mail-in ballots are being rejected at a growing rate in rural areas thanks to U.S. Postal Service cuts. 

ProPublica reports that in the primaries this year in Oregon, North Carolina, Washington, California, and Ohio, a staggering amount of ballots arrived too late to be counted due to delays in mail delivery. Three days after primary elections in Stevens County, Washington, election workers checked the mail for late ballots. They found over 500 envelopes when they were only expecting a few dozen. 

The same thing happened in all of eastern Washington’s 11 rural counties. Over 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to just 600 late ballots in 2022’s midterm elections. The nonprofit news outlet traces the issues to a number of changes at the USPS. 

First, over the past three years, the postal service moved to process first-class mail at regional hubs instead of smaller plants closer to local post offices. Then, just after the presidential election two years ago, the USPS cut in half its pickups from post offices at least 50 miles away from those hubs.

That increased delivery time by at least one day. Postmarks, which are critical for legally verifying if a ballot can be counted, were also pushed back as those stamps aren’t added until mail reaches a regional processing center. In rural counties in the five states, late ballots have a grace period as long as they are postmarked by Election Day, but rejections still shot up compared to 2022 according to ProPublica’s findings. 

The postal service’s policy changes were pushed by Trump administration officials, and likely unintentionally hurt the Republican Party.  

“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, told ProPublica, noting that his state has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”

USPS officials claim that delays are much less likely for November’s general election because of “extraordinary measures.” The postal service sent a memo to every post office in the country earlier this fall instructing them to separate ballots from other mail for the 10 days preceding Election Day on November 3. The memo said that the post offices should deliver the ballots on the day they arrive. 

“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said the chair of the Postal Service board of governors Amber McReynolds in a press conference last week, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”

If they are wrong, though, many races could be affected. A few thousand or even hundred ballots could swing many contests in rural areas, leaving voters across the political spectrum disenfranchised. Trump’s attempts to undermine the entire process aren’t helping, either. 

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen demanded answers Thursday from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after the company suspended the No Kings Coalition’s official Instagram account during the group’s nationwide day of action.

In a letter shared exclusively with The New Republic, Van Hollen asked why the coalition’s Instagram was mysteriously shut down for more than an hour during a major day of early voting activations over the weekend. The administrators did not regain access for hours, restricting their ability to communicate with supporters.

Van Hollen asked the MAGA-friendly technocrat whether Meta had communicated internally about the No Kings Coalition, and to explain why it took so long to restore the administrators’ access to the account. So far, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden, Chris Murphy, Richard Blumenthal, and Jeff Merkley have joined Van Hollen’s probe.

Van Hollen also demanded an explanation for Meta’s vacillating excuses for the incident. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone initially claimed Sunday that the account was shut down due to high frequencies of posting, sharing, and commenting. The next day, however, he claimed it had to do with the account’s “reading” behavior.

“Not only are Meta’s shifting explanations alarming, the substance of the claims paint the picture that one of the largest social media companies in the world is somehow incapable of handling technical concerns about an account without shutting it down for hours,” Van Hollen’s letter stated.

The Maryland Democrat also questioned why the account was not included in Meta’s cross-check program, which allows the company to designate civic entities to ensure human review before a decision is made that could severely jeopardize participation in significant political events.

“This is not the first time that Meta has experienced shutdowns or lapses around political speech leading up to the 2026 elections,” the letter stated, referring to a so-called “glitch” that disrupted Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown’s campaign ads on Facebook and restrictions placed on Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Instagram ahead of his country’s elections. On Tuesday, Meta’s Oversight Board called the incidents part of a series of “recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts,” and that it was unclear why the error was not caught by the company’s mistake-prevention systems.

“How will you guarantee that accounts sharing critical election and civic information are not incorrectly shutdown in the future? What steps will Meta take between now and election day to ensure that accounts sharing this information are not taken offline without notice?” the letter asked.

With the midterm elections fast-approaching, Van Hollen asked that Zuckerberg provide lawmakers with responses by October 29.

The incident raises serious concerns about Meta’s impartial handling of voting information and political speech—particularly in light of the company’s close financial relationship with the Trump administration. The company awarded nearly $25 million straight into Donald Trump’s pocket, $10 million to a Trump-aligned dark money group, $5 million to the president’s White House ballroom, and $1 million to his inaugural fund. In return, Meta stands to make billions in hefty government contracts and data center handouts.

A judge has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to end its investigations into noncitizen voting in nine states. 

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled Wednesday that DHS’s data  contains multiple inaccuracies and could be used to target U.S. citizens, The Washington Post reports. She barred the department from using the records in “elections-related field operations and field interviews” but delayed the order, allowing the Trump administration until 5 p.m. Friday to appeal. 

DHS agents have recently been spotted going door to door to look for noncitizen voters. Under the order, DHS would be barred from using the program to continue these operations in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Wisconsin. 

According to the Post, the department built target lists from commercial voter files, official state voter rolls, and other lists comprising 48.2 million voters that Martínez-Olguín, appointed by President Biden, said came from “questionable provenance.”

Because of pressure from administration officials, DHS employees were only given up to 12 minutes to clear someone from the list, Martínez-Olguín said. She ruled that this had a high likelihood of error because the government doesn’t keep a true master list of people living in the U.S. that includes their citizenship status. 

Groups including the California Nurses Association sued the government, claiming that the White House was violating the Voting Rights Act by intimidating people who try to increase voter turnout or help with voting. Martínez-Olguín ruled that these groups had valid claims. 

“The fear is objectively reasonable, and compounded by [DHS’s] use of data that is widely known to inadvertently include U.S. citizens, leaves citizens afraid that their name will be wrongly included in the hundreds of thousands identified for investigation,” Martínez-Olguín wrote. 

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice admitted that its list of noncitizens who illegally voted in California may not be accurate, and officials in the state as well as Los Angeles County attested the same in court. That hasn’t stopped the federal government from arresting people based on that faulty information, though. 

Major American banks have reported unauthorized artificial intelligence bots inside consumer accounts, sources told Axios Thursday.

The infiltration is happening faster than the financial institutions can respond to it. Even more concerning, some of the agents appear to be acting independently, performing actions that users did not request or automate.

Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Wells Fargo are just some of the banks racing to contain the AI-related risk. Part of the containment strategy involves rapidly rewriting and redeploying terms of service to their clients in order to firmly restrict the use of AI from their platforms.

Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Citi are in the process of restricting third-party agents from accessing their platforms entirely, according to Axios.

Bank executives described the situation to Axios as “horrifying.” One official told the digital newsroom that the industry has “grave concerns” about whether the rampant threat could impact user finances.

Executives reportedly recognize that a growing demographic of banking clients are interested in using their own AI agents to perform financial tasks and transactions. However, the risk is currently too high to allow individual clients that kind of access, particularly at the rate at which the revolutionary technology is adapting and changing.

Another banking executive told Axios that it is difficult to distinguish between authorized AI agents and agents that have “gone rogue” and inappropriately accessed a customer account.

“Banks are investing in preventing worst-case scenarios, but they are also preparing in case they do happen, including with ‘day after’ scenario planning that would allow them to quickly secure or restore customer access,” Axios reported.

The Department of State has asked civil servants up for promotions who they voted for in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 presidential elections.

Top State Department officials have indicated that the only candidates eligible for mid- to upper-level foreign service roles were people who had supported President Donald Trump, and that political donations to any Democrat would be disqualifying, The Washington Sun reported Thursday.

The publication spoke to six current and former State Department officials with knowledge of these conversations, including three sources who spoke directly to employees who were asked about their politics.

Federal law prohibits federal officials from making personnel decisions based on political affiliation, but it has seemingly become a regular practice during the second Trump administration. This latest move comes as the State Department has attempted to push out its most senior career officials, in order to ensure the top ranks are all politically loyal to the current president.

In a statement to the Sun, a spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the outlet’s reporting about voting history questions, but expounded on the importance of employees’ “fidelity.”

“Fidelity means upholding the Constitution and the law and executing policy with loyalty to the American people and their interests,” the spokesperson said. “It emphasizes the critical importance of service, integrity, and policy alignment across the Foreign Service. It is not about partisan behavior but rather about executing the president’s vision for foreign policy.”

In July 2025, the State Department added a “fidelity” section to the foreign service’s performance-evaluation process, requiring managers to assess whether their employees had succeeded at “completely aligning oneself and one’s team to the most current [U.S. government] goals.”

Apparently, the agency has taken that to mean high-ranking diplomats are required to have personally supported all of Trump’s bids for presidency over the last decade.