Election officials weren’t consulted on the timing or the content of the mailer. And Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, actually sued to prevent more copies of the mailer from being sent in her state, where voters get ballots automatically and do not, as the flyer says, have to request a ballot.

A judge granted Griswold a temporary restraining order. DeJoy said on the call that the Postal Service intended to send one common national message educating voters about casting ballots by mail, though he did apologize for failing to preview the mailer for election officials before it started hitting voters’ mailboxes, according to remarks circulated by the Postal Service.

“We will be much more public in our efforts to educate voters who choose to use the mail to request their ballots early and to vote early,” DeJoy said in a video directed to postal employees and posted to the USPS’ website earlier on Thursday. “This is simply a common-sense best practice.”

“Chief Election Officials across the country are diligently working to ensure a smooth general election by educating voters on their respective voting by mail procedures and deadlines. Being able to meet as a group with Postmaster DeJoy allows us to impress upon him the finer details and importance of this,” New Mexico’s Democratic Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the NASS president, said in a statement. “Elections are a team effort, and as we approach November I hope for continued productive conversations with USPS around elections.”

Multiple officials on the call said DeJoy, when pressed, contradicted President Donald Trump on the safety of voting by mail — something he had previously done at congressional hearings.

“One of the things that makes our job more challenging as secretaries of state, or anyone who does elections, is we've got to counter misinformation and disinformation with the truth and the facts,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat. “And so to the extent that he is going to be helpful when it comes to using U.S. mail, that's music to my ears.”

Multiple secretaries of state praised DeJoy for saying the right things but said they reserved final judgment until they saw his actions. "He said all the right things, probably said a lot of what we wanted to hear," said Alex Padilla, California's Democratic secretary of state, stressing that it is important DeJoy actually follows through.

Election officials on the call said the conversation with DeJoy and other USPS officials also touched on other technical issues related to the fall election, including how the USPS plans on staffing up and how it is handling mail for those affected by wildfires in the West and hurricanes in the South.

DeJoy’s role at the agency has been under intense scrutiny for months over a series of policy changes he made, which included a stricter schedule for dispatching mail trucks and stopping extra trips — along with the removal of mail sorting machines and postal boxes. He has described the removals as “longstanding operational initiatives” that predate his tenure. DeJoy has since paused the changes but said he would not reverse the equipment that has been taken offline.

DeJoy has called the notion that he made changes in order to interfere with the election “false and unfair.”

Earlier this summer, USPS sent letters to nearly every state’s chief election officer warning of delivery delays in the states. State officials were also concerned that the agency had signaled that election mail, which is often sent at a lower bulk rate, would have to all be sent via first class mail to ensure timely delivery, adding an unprojected expense to state budgets already strained by the pandemic.

DeJoy has since repeatedly pledged to treat election mail with priority, regardless of postage rate.

“We have a sacred duty to deliver the nation’s election mail securely and on time,” he said in the video. “We will have the needed processing capacity. We will prioritize every ballot in our system.”

In the video, DeJoy also repeated calls for voters to send and return election mail as quickly as possible, noting the USPS “can’t control” when ballots are sent or returned. Some election experts have warned that some states’ statutory deadlines for either requesting or returning ballots are infeasible long before DeJoy’s tenure leading the agency.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, issued a report on Wednesday that detailed mail slowdowns, especially in July and August.

“On-time delivery dropped precipitously in every region across the nation, with tens of millions of pieces of mail delayed in a single week due to the Postmaster General’s action,” the report read.

In a statement responding to the report, USPS spokesperson Dave Partenheimer said the delay was due to “getting trucks running on time” that “created a temporary dip in delivery, which we previously acknowledged. That dip is now largely gone.”

Jeremy White contributed to this report.