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FACT CHECK
fact-checking

Fact check: False claim that 27% of mail-in ballots in South Florida not delivered

McKenzie Sadeghi
USA TODAY

The claim: Twenty-seven percent of mail-in ballots in South Florida were not delivered

Republicans saw victories in Florida on Election Day, but viral posts on social media claim that if it weren't for mail-in ballots purportedly going undelivered, the battleground state could have turned blue. 

"USPS failed to deliver 27 percent of mail-in ballots in South Florida: report," reads a screenshot of a tweet from Raw Story posted to Facebook with hundreds of shares.

"What we actually need is a recount of #Florida. With all the ballots present!!!" the user captioned the post. 

In a message to USA TODAY, the user pointed to articles from Essence and the Miami Herald on undelivered ballots found at a Miami-Dade post office.

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The claims on social media started after website Raw Story posted an article on Nov. 4 about data on ballot delivery. 

"The United States Postal Service failed to deliver thousands of absentee ballots around the country before the cut-off times," the article reads. "And one of the worst failures occurred in South Florida, where 27 percent of mail-in votes may have never been received."

The number cited in the story is based on a tweet from John Kruzel, a reporter for The Hill and a former PolitiFact reporter. 

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Data is misleading

A later tweet in the thread by Kruzel shows that the U.S. Postal Service said 300,000 mail-in ballots lacked a delivery scan. The article by Raw Story also later states that in order to speed up the deliveries, the ballots were not being scanned. 

Vice reported on Kruzel's tweet and noted that "the stats might look worse than they actually are." This is because postal workers were manually postmarking ballots for expedited delivery, resulting in ballots never being scanned into the system. 

The Postal Service wrote in a Nov. 3 court filing that many facilities arranged for "'local turnaround,' meaning that ballots stay in the delivery unit (i.e., when a voter drops off a ballot, the ballot is postmarked and then provided to the board of elections), as opposed to being sent to mail processing."

The local turnaround allows the ballots to be expedited, but it is not captured in service performance data, the court filing also states.

Steve Vancore, spokesman for Broward County, Florida, one of the largest counties in South Florida told PolitiFact that there were zero undelivered ballots in the county. 

According to the site for the Miami-Dade County supervisor of elections, another large county in southern Florida, the county processed a total of  506,857 mail-in ballots with votes for president. 

U.S. Postal Service investigators said 6 completed ballots and 42 blank ballots were found in a pile of undelivered mail in a post office near Homestead in Florida's southern tip, The Associated Press reported  Oct. 31. 

Miami-Dade County elections officials said 18 of the affected voters had already cast ballots through a replacement mail-in ballot or at an early voting site. Six completed ballots had been received and the department said it had contacted the remaining 24 voters to help them get their ballots, also according to The Associated Press.

The Sun Sentinel reported that Robert Rodriguez, assistant deputy supervisor of elections, said 130 vote-by-mail ballots did come in on Nov. 4, however, it is still unclear how many, or if any, came from sweeps by the Postal Service. 

Alison Novoa, spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County supervisor of elections told the Sun Sentinel that 134 vote-by-mail ballots were received in the mail Nov. 4. 

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Postal Service responds to claims

The USPS said in a statement that "the assumption that there are unaccounted ballots within the Postal Service network is inaccurate. These ballots were delivered in advance of the election deadlines. We employed extraordinary measures to deliver ballots directly to local boards of elections." 

Postal Service spokeswoman Martha Johnson told USA TODAY in a statement that claims being made about Postal Service data supplied to the court are "flawed and inaccurate." 

"It cannot be assumed the ballots will not be counted. The vast majority were destined for postmark states and would be delivered on-time under state election law," she said, adding that the Postal Service is required by law to deliver all mail deposited in the system. 

More: False claims have been spreading about Election Day. We fact checked viral ones and found false claims.

Our rating: False

The claim that 27% of mail-in ballots were not delivered in South Florida is FALSE, based on our research. The claim uses data that did not account for ballot delivery speed and U.S. Postal Service officials have confirmed that the claim that there are undelivered ballots is false. One large county in Florida did not find any unaccounted for ballots and the other county found 48 and contacted voters to resolve the issue. There was also a report that two counties had roughly 300 ballots total delivered in the mail on Nov. 4, the day after Election Day.

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