On Christmas Eve, when most of us–including the news–were focused on wrapping presents and preparing to gather with family and friends, the United States Postal Service (USPS) finalized a policy change with newly binding legal consequences. It has the potential to put you in violation of the law or invalidate your mail-in ballot during upcoming elections.

According to the Federal Register (Postal Service 39 CFR Part 111), as of December 24, 2025, you can no longer count on your mail being postmarked on the day the post office receives it. Now, your mail will be postmarked when it is processed at a regional processing facility–not when the USPS takes possession of the mail.

Mail from every post office in Chautauqua County is typically processed in Buffalo, not locally.

This sounds boring and bureaucratic–who cares about postmarks?–but here’s why it matters.

Postmarks are the official federal record of when mail is considered legally sent. They are used to prove compliance with deadlines and are routinely introduced as evidence in legal proceedings–including to establish whether taxes or mail-in ballots were submitted on time.

In the past, you could rely on mail delivered to your local post office, mailbox, or post office box before the final pickup to receive a same-day postmark.

You can’t count on that anymore.

We need to reset our expectations, because legal deadlines depend on it.

For decades, we have relied on the simple expectation that mail received by our local postal workers would be legally recognized that same day. That shared understanding–quiet but essential–has underpinned everything from filing taxes to casting a mail-in ballot.

Now, in Chautauqua County, we can count on our mail sitting in the post office overnight–longer on a weekend or over a federal holiday–before being picked up and transferred to the processing center for postmark in Buffalo the following day.

Tax filing season offers a clear illustration of why this matters: when legal deadlines hinge on postmarks, even a one-day delay between local drop-off and regional processing can determine whether a filing meets the deadline or is considered late.

As importantly, 2026 is an election year. In the last election, according to federal data in the Election Administration and Voting Survey 2024 Comprehensive Report, over 100,000 mail-in ballots were rejected because they arrived too late.

In New York State, mail-in ballots are counted during a grace period after election day. That means that ballots must be received by a date certain after election day. That date has yet to be defined by the state’s Board of Elections for 2026. New York uses your mail ballot’s postmark as well as a final received-by date to validate mail-in ballots. A delayed postmark compresses that window.

USPS leadership has enacted this change in the name of cost savings, eliminating evening mail pickups from post offices more than 50 miles from a regional processing center. All of Chautauqua County falls within that range. The result carries a clear election-related consequence: mail-in voters now face a higher risk that their ballots will be rejected as late.

While local postal workers can still postmark important mail at the counter when you drop it off, that protection is no longer automatic–it requires voters to know to ask.

The Trump administration has repeatedly worked to discredit mail-in voting, and changes like this–quietly shifting when mail is legally recognized–make that skepticism operational. If you have difficulty getting to a polling place on Election Day, or if you have friends or family members who vote by mail, it is essential to understand these changes and plan accordingly.

This is a quiet rule change–one that most people haven’t even noticed. But deadlines matter.

Who benefits if you miss the postmark?

Julie Jackson-Forsberg is a Jamestown resident.