CENTRAL COAST REGION, Calif. (KEYT) – On Wednesday of last week, the U.S. Postal Service made changes to when mail is postmarked that could impact your bills and your ballot.
Starting Dec. 24, 2025, the nationwide mail delivery service will now only postmark mail on the, "date of the first automated processing operation" at a processing facility instead of your local post office.
The new policy, known as section 608.11 "Postmarks and Postal Possession" of the Domestic Mail Manual, was, "intended to improve public understanding of postmarks and their relationship to the date of mailing" explained the U.S. Postal Service in its Federal Register input regarding the change.
People sending mail who want to ensure their postmark matches when they gave their mail to a post office will have to ask for a manual or local postmark when handing in their mail in at a local post office or U.S. Postal Service retailer.
That manual postmark request is free, but additional verification of when your mail was mailed, such as Certified or Registered Mail, will still cost money.
"[T]he postmark was not previously defined in any current Postal Service regulations, and the Postal Service considered it appropriate to reflect these existing practices in the DMM [Domestic Mail Manual] to ensure that customers have a clear understanding of the postmark and what it means," noted the U.S. Postal Service in its Federal Register input about the change.
The Postal Service received 130 comments once the changes were shared with the public in August 2025, and members of the public noted the potential impact on mail-in ballots.
"Section 608.11 in no way signals a change in our postmarking procedures," argued the U.S. Postal Service in response to public comments. "[W]e have informed our customers who choose to vote by mail that they can 'ensure that a postmark is applied to [their] return ballot by visiting a Postal Service retail [location] and requesting a postmark from a retail associate when dropping off the ballot'."
Changes implemented by the U.S. Postal Service in April and July of this year have already impacted mailed ballots locally.
In October, the San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder's Office warned that people living more than 50 miles from a postal processing hub should no longer assume their ballots will be postmarked the day they mail it.
Every single voter in San Luis Obispo County lives more than 50 miles from the U.S. Postal Service hub in Goleta and voters are now encouraged by the local elections supervisor as well as the U.S. Postal Service to mail their ballots at least one week before Election Day.
State law allows ballots to be received up to seven days after an election and still be counted, butRead more