Release:

On behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Public Citizen Litigation Group and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) announced today a settlement in the case NAACP v. United States Postal Service. The lawsuit, pending in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, was filed in the summer of 2020 to challenge U.S. Postal Service delivery delays and inadequate measures to ensure timely delivery of mail-in ballots.

The NAACP, the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights grassroots organization, and its members rely on the timely delivery of mail for a variety of important functions, including mail-in voting. Under the settlement, the Postal Service agreed to meet with NAACP in the months before each national primary and general election through 2028 and to provide weekly reports on service performance during the six weeks leading up to general elections. 

The Postal Service also will issue guidance documents to address its plans for prioritizing the monitoring and timely delivery of election mail for the national general elections through 2028. The parties expect that these measures will be similar to the “extraordinary measures” used in the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election. Those measures, which the court required the Postal Service to implement in response to motions by the NAACP, helped to ensure that the vast majority of mailed ballots were delivered to the boards of elections in time to be counted….