Washington officials link rising late-ballot rejections to Postal Service changes

Data from Washington's secretary of state's office show that about 20,000 ballots in the August primary were not counted because their postmarks were too late. The comparable total in the 2024 primary was about 16,000 invalidated late ballots. The figures establish that late-postmark rejections rose between the two primary elections, without indicating that every rejected ballot encountered the same mailing circumstances.

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell and Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs described the increase as unacceptable and connected it to changes in Postal Service processing. Under the new arrangement they identified, ballots are not postmarked at local post offices but at regional mail-processing centers. The officials said that added transit time before postmarking has caused some ballots to receive dates too late for the votes to remain valid.

The increase was uneven across Washington. An analysis by Cantwell's office found that 19 counties recorded more than twice as many primary ballots disqualified for late postmarks in 2026 as they did two years earlier. The effect was especially pronounced in rural counties, making the statewide total an incomplete picture of how strongly the rise in rejected ballots was concentrated in particular parts of the state.

Other counties moved in the opposite direction. King County's rate of late-ballot rejection in the August primary was 25% below its level two years earlier. Pierce, Spokane and Clark counties also had fewer late-postmark disqualifications than in 2024. Those county-level declines establish that several of Washington's more populous jurisdictions recorded improvement in late-postmark rejection rates or totals compared with the previous primary.

Late-postmark rejections remained a small share of all voting in the two primaries. They accounted for 1% or less of the roughly 2 million ballots cast in each election. That scale puts the affected ballots in context: late-postmark invalidations represented no more than 1% of all ballots in either primary, even though the total number of such rejections rose between the elections.

Cantwell and Hobbs urged voters to reduce their exposure to postal timing by mailing ballots early or depositing them in ballot drop boxes, which do not depend on the Postal Service. Drop boxes were already the more common route in the August primary, used by nearly 70% of voters. Their guidance gave voters two specific ways to submit ballots while reducing reliance on ordinary mail.