RUTHFULLY YOURS

After primary day, an initial count of 40,000 ballots had Rep. Carolyn Maloney beating progressive challenger Suraj Patel by 648 votes. The canvassing of some 65,000 absentee ballots didn’t start until July 8, but unofficial data last month showed a preliminary rejection rate of 28% in Brooklyn. Mr. Patel joined a federal lawsuit, and Judge Analisa Torres held two days of hearings last week. The court transcript is a bracing read.

City officials were deluged. Eleven days before the election, “the Manhattan borough office had something like 30 or 40,000 pending applications for absentee ballots, and I was told that they could only process 5,000 per day,” testified Douglas Kellner, the co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections. “Basically my view is that they threw up their hands and said, ‘Well, there’s nothing more that we can do.’”

As a result, many ballots were sent to voters late. Allen Tanko, a marketing manager with the U.S. Postal Service, said that one day before the voting, on June 22, the city Board of Elections dropped 34,359 items, presumably ballots, into the mail stream. Postal workers tried to expedite them, but some of these ballots were sent to New Yorkers temporarily out of state, who could not possibly have received them in time.

New York lets voters request an absentee ballot with a mail application, which can be postmarked a mere seven days before the election. “The state Board of Elections has repeatedly advised the legislature and the executive chamber that that date is unrealistic,” Mr. Kellner said. Fourteen days would be better, he added, but New York’s political leaders “have rejected that because they don’t want to be perceived as doing something that’s not voter friendly.” For the record, the USPS suggests that voters allow seven days for mailing their completed ballots.

The USPS’s policy is to postmark all ballots, and the city was assured it would happen. What went wrong? Testimony by Michael Calabrese, a manager at a New York postal processing facility, offered two possibilities. First, postmarking machines can reject mail if, for example, it isn’t “folded over properly.” On Election Day, USPS staff were ready to grab bypassed ballots and postmark them by hand. “We were doing so for thousands of ballots,” Mr. Calabrese said. He wasn’t sure, however, if this happened before June 23: “That’s the only day I recall doing so with a hundred percent certainty.”

Second, most prepaid mail usually skips postmarking altogether and goes “directly to a sortation machine,” Mr. Calabrese said. On Election Day, USPS staff overrode that procedure and forced everything through the postmarking system. But again, he wasn’t sure about before June 23, saying it was “very possible” that some ballots went straight to sorting.

Stranger mishaps suggest carelessness. Raymond Riley, the chief clerk at the Kings County Board of Elections, testified that someone on his staff went to a local USPS office to drop mail, and postal workers unexpectedly gave over “a hand cart of ballots.” His office then complained to the USPS: “Obviously, staff safety was my biggest concern.”

Another incident: In the spring of 2018, Mr. Riley said, the USPS delivered “several hundred absentee ballots from the previous November.” Many of these votes were valid, except “this was five months after Election Day.”

Under oath, the skepticism of the USPS was broad and deep. “We certainly did alert the governor’s office to the fact that partnering with the U.S. Postal Service in running an election has a lot of risks,” Mr. Kellner said. Later he was more direct: “I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the U.S. Postal Service.”

Emily Gallagher, a Democratic candidate for state Assembly, testified: “I myself had an absentee ballot and went and voted in person because I had a sense of distrust of what would happen with my ballot once I mailed it in.” City attorney Stephen Kitzinger, in his closing argument, said that if voters dropped their ballots in a mailbox, “they bore the risk of it not being postal marked, timely or otherwise, if they relied on the postal service for delivery.”

Judge Torres issued a preliminary injunction on Monday. Because the USPS’s delivery process takes two days, she said, it’s a “virtual certainty” that any ballots received by election officials on June 24 or 25 were in fact mailed by Election Day, even if they don’t have any postmark saying so. Judge Torres therefore ruled that all such ballots, statewide, must be counted.

On Tuesday the city certified Ms. Maloney as the victor, up by about 3,500 votes, not including the ballots Judge Torres ordered counted. New York state officials plan to appeal her ruling. Mr. Patel is refusing to concede.

What a fiasco. Meantime, the national debate over mass mail voting proceeds like two postcards passing in the night. President Trump uses the word “fraud.” The factotums of conventional wisdom hit their computer hotkeys for phrases like “no evidence” of “widespread fraud.” Why focus on criminality? Old-fashioned government incompetence is clearly sufficient to create a mail-vote debacle the country might come to regret in November.