No. Only ballots received by the clerk by 8 p.m. on Election Day were counted.
UPDATE: The US Postal Service Inspector General issued a report on December 14, 2020 (see attached below). The report concluded:
The USPS OIG investigation determined all allegations against [REDACTED] were false.
Based on the investigative findings this case will not be presented for criminal, civil, or administrative consideration and the allegations against [REDACTED] were resolved as unfounded.
Many people have asked about the recent testimony of a temporary truck driver for a third-party mail contractor about his experience picking up and delivering mail to the post office in Madison before the November 3 election. The WEC has reviewed the driver’s testimony and does not believe that it provides any reliable evidence that late absentee ballots were counted.
The driver testified, “During the runup to and on Election Day, I was working as a temporary hire at United Mailing Services, a USPS subcontracting company in Madison, Wisconsin.”
According to Mark Kolb, vice president of United Mailing Services, the company is not a USPS subcontractor. UMS provides a variety of mailing services to companies and local governments, but it does not work for USPS.
The driver testified that “my job was to pick up mail on a predetermined route that went through Cottage Grove, Windsor and the Stoughton Road area of Madison around UMS. And then I would take this mail to UMS, where it would be sorted and metered, and then I would take sorted mail on final box truck run to USPS on Milwaukee Street in Madison, Wisconsin.”
According to village and town clerks in Cottage Grove and Windsor, they do not use UMS. According to UMS, the company stopped handling outgoing absentee ballots for its municipal customers more than a month before the election.
The driver testified, “In September or October, I began to deliver mail-in ballots from United Mailing Services to USPS as part of my evening box truck run. I knew that I would be taking ballots because there would always be a cart marked for me for ballots only with a special green tag that said, ‘For Ballots Only.’”
According to UMS, the only absentee ballots they handled came from employees who worked at companies served by UMS. For example, an employee places his or her absentee ballot in an outgoing mail bin with other work mail, which is picked up by UMS and delivered to the USPS. According to UMS, there were less than 20 to 30 such absentee ballots delivered to USPS each day.
The driver testified that one US Postal Service employee told him USPS was looking for 100,000 missing absentee ballots the morning of Wednesday, November 4. “He then told me that his post office, the one at Milwaukee Street in Madison, Wisconsin, had dispatched employees to look for the missing ballots around 4 a.m. November 4th. He said, and I quote, ‘around 4 a.m.’ And that only seven or eight ballots were found at United Mailing Services, my work. Based on my previous experience of double-checking for the ballots, I believed that to be a lie immediately.”
According to UMS, nobody came to their facility to look for absentee ballots.
The driver testified that on November 5, a different USPS employee “admitted” to him that they were ordered to “backdate ballots that were received too late to be lawfully counted.” The implication of his testimony was that USPS workers backdated late absentee ballots so they could be counted.
The USPS Inspector General investigated and found no evidence that ballot envelopes had been backdated. (See attached report below.) Even if USPS employees somehow backdated absentee ballot envelopes or records, Wisconsin law and clerks would still not permit late ballots to be counted.
Wisconsin is what is called an “in-hand” ballot state. This means postmarks on return ballots are irrelevant. The ballot must be in the hands of the proper election official by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted. If a clerk receives a ballot after that deadline, or in the days after the election, it cannot be counted. Municipal clerks did not consider postmarks on return ballots because they are irrelevant.