How long is the mail actually taking?
Every voting site tells you to allow about a week. That comes from a USPS guideline, not from measurement. This page measures it: volunteers mail themselves a postcard, report the two dates, and we publish the county and state averages.
Until there are, every mail-by date on this site uses the USPS service standard: a median of 3 days and 5 days for the slow tail, plus a day of slack. That's an estimate, and it's labeled as one everywhere it appears.
How to read this
- Typical is the median: half of mail arrived faster, half slower.
- Slow tail is the 90th percentile, which is the number that should drive your decision. Nine in ten pieces arrived within it.
- Numbers are blended with the USPS service standard until a county has 20 reports, so a handful of postcards from one town can't swing the estimate. The label says which you're looking at.
- Inside two weeks of Election Day we add a day to the slow tail, because election mail volume spikes and USPS says so itself.
What this is and isn't
A postcard mailed to yourself travels the same class through the same local facility as your ballot, so it's a fair proxy. It isn't identical: a ballot may travel further, and election mail gets handling that ordinary postcards don't. Treat this as the best available measurement rather than a guarantee, and give yourself more time than the number suggests.
Raw aggregates are public at /api/transit. Individual reports are never published or shared, and we don't collect anyone's address.