Why election officials are pushing voters to ‘use the drop box rather than the mailbox’

By Jeremy Herb, Gabe Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — If someone tries to firebomb a ballot drop box again in Clark County, Washington, election officials will know about it immediately.

That’s because after about 500 ballots were damaged in 2024 by an assailant who set fire to drop boxes with an explosive device containing thermite, the county upgraded its drop boxes. They now include technology that sends a text message to officials if the temperature inside the box rises above a certain temperature, if the box receives a forceful blow or if it’s removed from its geo-fenced location, Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey told CNN.

Clark County also purchased upgraded fire suppressant devices to prevent the destruction of ballots in a fire, Kimsey added, and it’s installing surveillance cameras at all of its drop box locations, though cameras were in place where boxes were attacked in 2024.

“I’m really pleased that even just immediately following that horrible incident, voters continued to use ballot drop boxes,” Kimsey said. “We think we’ve taken the appropriate steps to ensure the safety of the ballots in the ballot drop boxes. We’ve been retrieving ballots on a little more frequent schedule than we have in the past.”

Drop boxes are available in most states as a way for voters to conveniently return their ballots ahead of Election Day. In the aftermath of the 2020 election and President Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, however, they became a source of baseless conspiracy theories about ballot stuffing and a target for attacks.

In the years since, both Republican and Democratic officials have taken a hard look at ballot drop boxes — but through sharply different lenses.

Some counties have invested millions of dollars into fortifying them and making them more high tech. Many Democratic leaders have pushed to expand their use, and states like Oregon and Pennsylvania are adding drop boxes to reach more voters.

Many Republican officials, meanwhile, have pushed to restrict or even ban drop boxes, arguing they need tighter surveillance and stricter chain-of-custody rules. They contend the boxes can enable unauthorized ballot collection — what some call “ballot harvesting” — and that safeguards vary too widely from county to county.

But election officials who advocate for drop boxes say they’re a more important tool than ever to ensure all ballots get returned on time. Even though the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to significantly restrict mail voting, election officials are warning that a change to the way the US Postal Service processes and postmarks the mail risks ballots arriving too late.

To cut costs in recent years, the Postal Service has reduced trips between thousands of local post offices and processing centers, which means some mail may sit longer before being postmarked. In states that use postmarks to determine whether late-arriving ballots count, that delay could put otherwise valid votes in jeopardy.

In Washington state, Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell and Secretary of State Steve Hobbs released a report finding mail ballots rejected for arriving late increased 32% in the state’s August 2026 primary compared with the 2024 primary. In two of the state’s counties, the number of rejected late ballots spiked more than 300%.

A Brookings study of primary ballots in three states this year — California, Washington and North Carolina, which all release public data on the reasons mail ballots are rejected — found that the rejection rate for late-arriving ballots roughly doubled in areas affected by the USPS processing changes.

“We’re really emphasizing to our voters that they use the drop box rather than the mailbox. And if they are going to use the mailbox, just mail it early,” Hobbs told CNN. “If you’re 10 days from the election, that’s the danger area where your ballot may or not make it.”

The US Postal Service insists that ballots should arrive on time if voters mail them back at least a week before Election Day.

USPS says it delivered 97.94% of election mail “with an on-time score” during this year’s primaries. In the 2024 general election, USPS says it delivered 99.6% of ballots within three days.

“As we move closer to the election, we will implement procedures consistent with past Federal election cycles to ensure completed ballots are expedited to election offices,” a USPS spokesperson told CNN, referring to the “extraordinary measures” it uses during elections to speed up ballot delivery.

After 2020, a push to restrict drop boxes

Drop boxes have been frequent objects of suspicion for Trump and other 2020 election deniers. Trump himself has called for states to ban them.

The widely debunked film “2000 Mules” alleged that drop boxes were used for widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election through so-called mules stuffing them with ballots. The film’s creator admitted in 2024 that some of the claims were flawed.

But that hasn’t stopped conspiracies surrounding drop boxes from percolating — and from a backlash toward the boxes among red-state legislators.

Drop boxes are banned or not used in more than 10 states, including 2026 battlegrounds Texas and North Carolina, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Voters in states without drop boxes still typically can drop off ballots at an election office during business hours.

Sixteen states passed laws since 2021 to ban or restrict drop boxes in some ways, including eight that outlawed them, according to Voting Rights Lab, which tracks state election laws. Other states have limited where they can be deployed or how many can be used, such as in Ohio, which allows only one drop box per county.

In Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court blocked drop boxes for the 2022 election when it was controlled by Republicans. Then in 2024, after the makeup of the court shifted back toward Democrats, the state changed course and allowed them. The state leaves the decision to use drop boxes up to each locality running elections.

“What we have in many situations is oddly a blue-red division whether or not a community has drop boxes,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic commissioner on the Wisconsin Elections Commission. “Many of the red communities, thinking they’re still somehow illegal and not proper, are not having them available to their voters. Oddly, that makes absentee voting harder for their voters because they can’t just turn them in.”

In deep-red Wyoming, however, the Republican-controlled Legislature has balked at banning ballot drop boxes outright.

Last year, at Secretary of State Chuck Gray’s urging, the state House overwhelmingly approved a full ban. But it died in the state Senate, where lawmakers favored a compromise: requiring new, more secure receptacles built into government buildings such as courthouses.

“We just couldn’t get past that disagreement,” Wyoming state Sen. Brian Boner told CNN, adding that lawmakers are still discussing a path forward.

Boner, a Republican, said he supports eliminating stand-alone drop boxes for security reasons, but he represents a rural, working-class district where many constituents rely on early voting, since Wyoming law grants workers just one hour off to vote on Election Day.

“Frankly, in rural Wyoming, that’s just not enough time to even do the round trip into town and back,” he said. “We have lots of coal miners, oil and gas field workers, and ranchers who maybe that’s their only opportunity — when they come in, perhaps after business hours, to vote early if that’s what they want to do.”

Protecting drop boxes from potential attacks

Since the false claims of a “rigged” 2020 election, drop boxes have been a target of both suspicion and physical attacks.

In 2022, following the release of “2000 Mules,” masked men with telescopic camera lenses stalked voters outside drop boxes, prompting voter intimidation referrals from the Arizona secretary of state to the Justice Department.

Ahead of this year’s June California primary, ballots were burned at a drop box in Los Angeles, according to Los Angeles County’s Registrar-Recorder.

And in 2024, three ballot boxes were bombed in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, incidents the FBI connected to the same assailant, but a suspect was never arrested. In Portland, where the boxes had better fire suppressant technology, only three ballots out of 400 inside were damaged.

“It’s one of those nightmare scenarios. You don’t really plan for it,” Hobbs said. “Thermite was used, which you can’t just pick up anywhere. You can’t just put it out with water or your standard fire extinguisher. You need a special chemical that takes oxygen out of the air. The drop box in Washington did not have that.”

Election officials across the country are turning to more advanced technology, both for protection and ballot tracking.

Clark County’s boxes, for instance, now have more advanced fire suppression, part of a broader push to retrofit existing boxes with sensors that detect heat or smoke and automatically deploy safeguards to protect the ballots.

Counties in Pennsylvania, Illinois and California have spent millions of dollars on a new generation of high-tech drop boxes that aim to combine tamper-resistant design and fire protection with a digital audit trail. The boxes photograph each person who makes a deposit, scan the ballot-return envelope to initiate chain-of-custody tracking, and create a detailed record for election officials.

“There’s a range of drop boxes: There’s the really, really good ones with fire suppression, then ones that are pretty good, then there’s crummy ones which look like you bought at Home Depot or something,” said Scott McDonell, clerk of Dane County, Wisconsin. “So, I tell the clerks, if you’ve got a Home Depot one, don’t do it. Get the money to get a decent drop box.”

How USPS changes have impacted mailing ballots

It’s long been the guidance from both election officials and the US Postal Service for voters to return ballots through the mail at least one week before the election to be safe.

Some election officials in Wisconsin are now urging voters to mail them at least 14 days before Election Day.

“Ballots are taking this trip across the state, so they’re driving hours upon hours for no good reason,” Jacobs said.

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read said there’s now one facility that processes postmarks for nearly all mail in the state. Local mail from the southwest corner of the state now make a 500-mile roundtrip to Portland to be postmarked.

“We don’t want people to count on what used to be the case for when a piece of mail is postmarked,” he said.

The US Postal Service has spent the past several years overhauling how mail moves across the country to cut costs. It has shifted more mail from air to ground, extended expected delivery times for First-Class Mail and consolidated processing at regional hubs. More recently, USPS has reduced trips between thousands of local post offices and processing centers — meaning some mail may sit longer before it is postmarked.

While the agency insists it is improving efficiency, USPS has missed most of its recent service targets, according to a September report from the US Government Accountability Office. Its cost-cutting measures “have slowed service for some mail and had a disproportionate impact on rural customers,” the report said.

Those delays can be critical for mailed ballots, which face strict legal deadlines. Even a one-day delay can put a ballot mailed close to Election Day at risk. And because machine postmarks generally show when mail is processed — not necessarily when USPS receives it — a ballot mailed on time could receive a later postmark. However, voters can request a manual postmark at a Post Office, the USPS spokesperson said.

Starting October 24, USPS plans to implement “extraordinary measures,” as it has in past elections, to speed up ballot delivery with extra pickups, Sunday processing and expedited handling. In some cases, workers will pull ballots from the regular mail stream, postmark them by hand and deliver them directly to election offices.

Roughly 15 states allow ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted, provided they were postmarked on time — grace periods the Supreme Court left intact this year. In other states, ballots must reach election officials before the polls close, leaving less of a buffer for voter procrastination or mail delays.

“We try very hard to work with folks to know that Arizona is not a postmark state, we’re an in-hand state,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. “We want folks to just make it clear they’ve got options to return it in person if they don’t want to return it by mail.”

Fontes said his state is encouraging voters to track their ballot online and sign up for text alerts so they know when it’s delivered — a tool now offered in a growing number of states.

In states where drop boxes aren’t allowed, voters also often have alternatives to return mail ballots, like in Indiana, where they can deliver them to an early voting center.

Kate Sweeney Bell, the clerk in Marion County, Indiana, said she’s heard more from voters this cycle who are fearful of using the mail to vote.

“They think that something hinky is happening at the United States Postal Service, and instead of mailing them, they want to know whether they can put them in a drop box,” said Sweeney Bell, a Democrat. “And I have to tell them, ‘No, we don’t have that, but here are your options.’”

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