CHINO VALLEY, Ariz. — Joe Delgado of Chino Valley gets a package every couple of months from his sister in Seattle, but lately, it’s taking longer to get to Arizona.
”Three days at the fastest five days at the slowest,” Delgado said. “The last several weeks a care package will be coming in like after two weeks.”
And no explanation why.
In Phoenix, Nita Coronado-Bom experienced big delays in receiving her primary ballot.
“We were gone all of July and when we got back on the 31st, we went and picked up our mail and our ballots were not there,” Coronado-Bom said.
She got her ballot on Aug. 15, after the primary.
A spokesman for the post office in Arizona said service “continues to run well in Arizona,” and directed 12 News to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s congressional testimony on Monday.
“The postal service is fully capable and committed to delivering the nation’s ballots securely and on time,” DeJoy said.
DeJoy was slammed by critics who questioned the removal of mail sorting equipment and drop boxes.
We wanted to test mail service ourselves, with a mail drop experiment.
We bought 20 cards that we’ll use as ballots; 10 red, 10 blue.
They were all hand-addressed the same way, with a return address in Phoenix stamped on the back.
We dropped them off at post offices in Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale and Phoenix, and waited for them to be delivered.
The post office says they should generally take about two days to be delivered in town.
The next day, we got six cards back from four post offices, all of them had red cards.
Two days later, the rest of the red cards arrived, but still none of the blue cards.
Three days later, the blue cards finally started being delivered.
The final blue card arrived four days after we dropped it off at the post office.
The spokesman for the postal service in Arizona did not specifically comment on why some cards took three days to deliver.
As for any explanation for the red cards arriving first and faster, the spokesman said the automatic sorting machines may have some problems reading envelopes that are close in color to the ink, like the blue cards.
But if that happens, he said, someone types in the address and the card gets a barcode that the machine can read.
If you’re having issues with the mail let us know by sending an e-mail to connect@12news.com.
