WaPo:

Election officials are racing to install more ballot drop boxes and secure large venues for Election Day voting, part of an urgent push to reassure Americans worried about trusting their ballots to a U.S. Postal Service engulfed in a political storm.

State and local election officials say they have been inundated with calls from residents who say they no longer trust voting by mail, given widespread reports of postal delays in recent weeks, as well as President Trump’s public hostility to voting by mail.

“We’re facing a crisis here, a major crisis,” said Steuart Pittman, the top official in Anne Arundel County, Md., outside Baltimore. “If this election is not carried out in a way that people accept the result, we’ll have a national crisis.”

The upheaval comes after months of planning by election administrators, who are expecting historic numbers of voters to cast their ballots by mail to avoid risking exposure to the novel coronavirus. Now, officials are worried that legions of voters won’t choose to vote by mail after all, forcing them to reexamine their capacity to safely offer in-person voting and to provide other ways to drop off ballots.

They are also trying to extinguish a growing public panic that ballots cast by mail will not be delivered in time.