I didn’t get to vote in the recent presidential election because a chain of mishaps meant my ballot was accidentally lost in the mail.

It was an inadvertent mix-up, but it made mail-in voting, which relies on the reliable workings of the U.S. Postal Service, seem more fragile to me. And recent news from Washington, D.C., heightened that sense of unease.

For the most part, people in Hawaiʻi have loved the convenience of voting by mail. Hawaiʻi was one of the first states in the nation to shift to primarily that form. Then, when the coronavirus epidemic hit, it seemed almost providential that the state had made the transition in time.

But nobody seems to have stopped to think that Hawaiʻi might have been grafting its election system onto an increasingly fragile infrastructure.

At a recent press conference at Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Donald Trump said he was considering “privatizing” the Postal Service, which has been steadily losing money in the face of heavy labor costs and as internet communication grows and snail mail withers. The changes are more obvious at the holidays as the Christmas card tradition disappears. Some European countries facing the same problems, including the Netherlands, Great Britain and Germany, have sold off their traditional postal service to private firms or introduced new corporate competitors.

In November, the Postal Service reported an annual loss of almost $10 billion. The demands of mail-in voting nationwide have added to the pressures. In December, a three-hour House congressional oversight committee grilled Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on his failure to stabilize the agency’s finances, with Republican chairman James Comer saying “its solvency remains a major concern.”

Trump, who has convened a presidential advisory cost-cutting commission called the Department of Government Efficiency, led by tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, said privatizing the Postal Service is one of the ideas on the table.

“Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, really isn’t,” Trump said, responding to a question about how the Postal Service was losing money. “It’s a lot different today between Amazon and UPS and FedEx, and all the things that you didn’t have. But there is talk about that, it’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at it.”

Hawaiʻi Is Particularly Dependent

In Hawaiʻi, we overwhelmingly depend on mail-in voting to conduct our elections, and for the most part, the system has worked smoothly, although discussions on this topic before the Hawaiʻi Elections Commission have been contentious, in part reflecting a partisan divide.

Hawaiʻi election officials said it’s too early to consider the potential effects of any changes in the Postal Service.

“We are unclear as to what the impact of privatizing the U.S. Postal Service entails,” wrote Scott Nago, Hawaiʻi’s chief elections officer, in an email. “Given that, to comment on any impacts to the election would be premature.”

Nago noted that the state is not entirely dependent on the Postal Service, because voters can also drop their ballots at the county clerk’s office, or at a drop box. There were 57 drop boxes in Hawaiʻi in 2024, he said.

But there were only two voter centers open for traditional in-person voting on election day on Oahu, and only two on Maui, forcing voters to wait in long lines to cast their ballots.

Some long-time postal industry observers say privatization is unlikely to occur because the Postal Service is so popular in so many places.

Steve Hutkins, a long-time Postal Service observer who runs the website Save The Post Office and tracks postal news developments nationwide, called Trump’s words at the press conference “just hot air.”

“I don’t think he gave it any serious thought,” Hutkins said in an interview. “It’s not going to happen. I wouldn’t think there is cause for concern.”

The U.S. Postal Service is one of the oldest federal agencies. Benjamin Franklin was the first postmaster general. It was a government department until 1971, when it became an independent agency. It is self-supporting and does not typically get taxpayer dollars.

But in 2006, Congress forced the Postal Service to fund its future medical benefits and pension costs in advance, which placed a large and unwieldy financial burden on the agency just as mail usage began to drop off. In 2022, the Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the need for the agency to prepay retiree health benefits and also forgave $57 billion in Postal Service debt. That helped, but hasn’t fully solved the financial concerns raised by some fiscal conservatives.

The Postal Service’s infrastructure needs are mounting, too. It desperately needs new delivery vehicles. In 2022, the federal government gave the agency $3 billion through the Inflation Reduction Act to purchase electric postal vans, but production problems have opened the agency to additional criticism. According to news reports, Oshkosh Trucks, which was supposed to deliver 3,000 electric vehicles, had built only 93.

But, as with the election services it renders Hawaiʻi, the Postal Service also serves important social needs, particularly in rural areas, where post offices are sometimes among the only few surviving brick-and-mortar institutions. The agency’s efforts to consolidate and reduce service to cut costs have been hugely unpopular.

For remote places like Hawaiʻi and Alaska, the Postal Service offers essentially subsidized mailing rates that could soar if customers had to pay at commercial levels for sending letters or postcards. A first-class Forever stamp costs 73 cents in Hawaiʻi, the same price as the rest of the nation, even though any mail to the mainland has to travel at least 3,000 miles. Privatization would likely mean higher mail and shipping costs for everyone but could be particularly damaging in Hawaiʻi.

Feeling Disenfranchised

It wasn’t the Postal Service’s fault we lost our votes this year. My husband and I were traveling on the East Coast to attend my mother’s memorial service. We weren’t worried about voting because we expected our ballots to arrive by mail, and a reliable neighbor was ready to forward them to us. But our home mailbox here on Oahu got vandalized and our neighbor didn’t notice the ballots stuck inside until the box was being hauled to the dump. He mailed them to us by express mail but it was too late to get them back to Hawaiʻi in time.

We had been following the election avidly and considered flying back to Hawaii just to vote but ultimately decided that it was too expensive. We reasoned that our votes wouldn’t make that much difference in Hawaiʻi anyway. But it underscored to us the fact that mail-in voting has its own risks.

We were visiting in Maryland, where they have both mail-in voting and a wide network of community voting centers. That night we strolled over to a polling station where people were voting the old-fashioned way, by lining up and entering their own little curtained stations to cast their ballots.

We remembered how good it feels to vote in person.

We stood there watching other people vote. As they entered, they looked purposeful and determined. They exited with looks of satisfaction on their faces.

We remembered how good it feels to vote in person, to check the squares that represent the candidates you want to win, and to drop your ballot into a secure box at the polling station.

Some people showed up at the polling station with their children in tow, and their kids watched as their parents cast their ballots. I remembered how my mother would take me with her when she went to vote, and how we felt our family was playing a role in shaping the nation’s destiny. Even as she was dying, she had been discussing with the staff at the nursing home where she lived what they could do to boost voter participation there. But she didn’t make it to the election.

Mail-in voting mostly works fine. On this issue, the staunch partisan divide is easing. It has been easy voting from the convenience of our living room in recent elections, with more chance to double-check details on ballot amendment questions and to look up the histories of minor candidates we had hardly noticed were running for office.

But next time I will vote in person.