Late ballot postmark by Everett post office canceled our vote
Published 1:30 am Thursday, August 21, 2025
About 2 p.m. on Aug. 5, election day, I took the primary election ballots that my husband and I had filled out into the downtown Everett Post Office. To ensure that our ballots were postmarked Aug. 5, I put them into a slot in the lobby). The signage above the slots showed the last collection for that day was 5 p.m. My assumption was that the ballots made the deadline for the postmark. Several days after the election, however, I checked online to see if our ballots had been accepted. To my great surprise, a banner came up for both of our ballots saying that they had not been accepted because they were postmarked after Aug. 5. How could that be?
I went to the downtown Everett Post Office to speak with a supervisor. He told me that the mail collected from the lobby slot boxes is not postmarked in their facility, but is instead shipped to Renton to be postmarked the next day. What? First of all, the signage should indicate that any mail posted in the slots will be postmarked the next day. Especially if there is an election deadline! The supervisor said that if mail is taken to the counter, it is postmarked that day. How is someone supposed to know that the slots in the lobby are not treated the same? He understood the issue and said he would talk to his boss about improving the process around ballot collection. Too late for the two votes that came from our household!
In these times of election integrity being questioned, this is very serious. I believe in mail-in voting and have never had a problem before. I’ve always thought the conspiracy theories targeting mail-in voting are just that. Now I know from personal experience that there actually is an issue at the downtown Everett Post Office with how it handles ballots. The county elections office needs to ensure that bullet-proof processes are in place with respect to election deadlines. Going forward, I will never trust the downtown Everett Post Office again and will use only the ballot drop box at the Court House.
Connie Chapman
Everett
