ATLANTA — The U.S. Postal Service will treat Georgia Senate ballots as express mail in the days before the Jan. 5 runoffs, according to a Washington Post report Thursday.
The agreement is part of a deal with civil rights groups to avoid having the matter decided by a court. The Post reported the challenge to USPS policies had been brought by groups including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Vote Forward.
The agreement's provisions stipulate that the Postal Service will treat any ballots still at processing plants within three days of Jan. 5 as express mail, meaning they should be delivered the next day.
There reportedly are a number of other elements to the deal, including daily checks of facilities for ballots that should have gone out and the fast-tracking of ballots to Georgia from the printer in New York.
The deadline for Georgia voters to request an absentee ballot is Jan. 1, though because there can be hiccups in the mail system, voters are usually asked to make their request comfortably in advance of that date.
The agreement may provide some more wiggle room for stragglers.
According to The Post, the agreement stems out an original suit brought by the civil rights groups in the summer ahead of the Nov. 3 election. That focused on deficiencies in USPS ballot processing, and resulted in a judge overturning a number of budget-cutting measures that had been put in place by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
As of Wednesday morning, nearly 2 million ballots had been cast in the Jan. 5 runoff races already. More than 670,000 of those were mail-in absentee ballots, with more than 570,000 still yet to be returned.