WASHINGTON (CN) — Postmaster General Louis DeJoy may be held in contempt for the failure of the U.S. Postal Service to comply with a federal judge’s Election Day order.
U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan indicated the possible outcome on Friday as he wound down a long week of closely monitoring timely delivery of mailed ballots, holding daily hearings and ordering troves of Postal Service data produced.
When a lawyer expressed alarm over a contempt order issued earlier in the case, Sullivan explained that the filing was a clerical error and not to worry.
“Putting that aside,” the judge continued, “I can’t say the same thing about Mr. DeJoy.”
His comment lacked some of the fury Sullivan first showed upon learning that the Postal Service had not followed his order to sweep processing centers on Tuesday afternoon for misplaced ballots. The judge also suggested Wednesday that DeJoy would be called in to testify after election mail processing has concluded.
When he was called before Congress to testify about Postal Service changes that were poised to slow down election-mail processing, DeJoy insisted that they were part of an agency plan that had gotten underway before his June appointment. Sullivan was one of multiple federal judges who blocked any planned operational changes from taking effect before Tuesday’s election.
his removal of mailboxes and machines, among other and DeJoy has told Congress that the removals were part of an agency plan underway before he took over.For many of those operational changes, the litigation blocked them from going into effect before Tuesday’s election.
Since Election Day, the Postal Service handed over new data showing that batches of ballots are still making their way to election officials to be counted.
While 300,000 ballots can’t be tracked to their destination, the agency’s head of election-mail processing said the Postal Service was confident the majority reached boards of elections.
With former Vice President Joe Biden securing a slim lead ahead of President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Friday morning, the hearing before Sullivan focused closely on the battleground state.
The Postal Service reported to the court that sweeps of processing facilities on Nov. 5 — similar to those Sullivan ordered on Tuesday afternoon — located just over a thousand ballots in the Keystone State. With tens of thousands of ballots still to count, Biden was the frontrunner in the state by just 9,746 votes around noon on Friday.
Shankar Duraiswamy, an attorney for the advocacy group Vote Forward, raised concern over discrepancies in the data filed just after midnight on Friday from the “all clear” searches in Pennsylvania.
“Those numbers are not matching up,” Duraiswamy said.
Justice Department attorney Joseph Borson said the difference of 668 ballots reported in two sets of data for Pennsylvania's postal districts was “growing pains.”
The Postal Service managers reporting the figures had included misplaced ballots located in days prior to Nov. 5, he explained.
The total number of ballots located Thursday across the country and delivered the same day for processing tallied at around 40,000.
Duraiswamy, with Vote Forward, raised concern about data showing that 21 Postal Service districts had scored below 80% for delivering ballots — falling under the agency’s service standard set by “extraordinary measures” adopted to ensure timely election mail processing.
He added that 33% of those districts were outside the service standard by at least one day, meaning the ballots were mailed Sunday but did not reach their final destination until Thursday.
Sullivan agreed to issue an order Friday directing the Postal Service to hand over data on whether the identified misplaced ballots delivered Thursday were local ballots, sent to voters and then turned around to election officials in the same postal district.
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