• Philadelphia has an equity issue with mail ballot drop boxes. To understand it, let’s start with the 2020 election.

• As mail ballot demand surged, the city set up 14 drop boxes for voters to securely return their ballots. It also set up 17 elections offices that provided even more services.

• Those locations blanketed the city, and almost half of Philadelphia adults lived within a 15-minute walk of one.

• Just over half of all white, Hispanic, and Asian residents lived within walking distance of one of those ballot drop-off locations.

• But there was already a gap: Those locations encompassed only about 43% of Black adults. And that gap has grown since then.

• Facing logistical and funding challenges, the city hasn’t reopened any of the elections offices it used in 2020 to serve several Black, Hispanic, and lower-income neighborhoods. And it’s only added three drop boxes.

• Now, only about half as many people live near a ballot drop-off site as in 2020. Three out of four voters live outside a 15-minute walk from one.

• As coverage has fallen, racial disparities have widened. Today, about a third of white and Asian residents can walk to a drop-off within 15 minutes…

• … while only half that proportion of Black and Hispanic residents can.

• Elections officials acknowledge the inequities and say they hope to set up more than four times as many locations as they have.

Philadelphia’s elections chief wants more mail ballot drop boxes. She’s been trying for two years to get more installed, and to better spread them out across the city.

“We’re not happy with where we are,” Lisa Deeley said.

As chair of the Philadelphia city commissioners, the office that runs elections, Deeley said she’s worked to find suitable locations for more drop boxes and to restart the satellite elections offices that were used in 2020. But the logistics are complicated.

The careful planning from the 2020 election doesn’t apply to the current reality, including because satellite offices were set up in schools that were empty during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The commissioners have struggled to recreate their network of ballot sites, let alone expand it. Philadelphia has more drop boxes in storage — they’ve never been used since being bought in 2020 — than it has in use.

“We definitely need to do better,” said Omar Sabir, another commissioner.

Partly to address the inequities, the commissioners have hosted a series of pop-up events where voters can return their ballots.

But until there are more sites, voters in different communities across Philadelphia continue to have differing access to drop boxes and elections offices. An Inquirer analysis has found:

• 48% of Philadelphia adults lived within a 15-minute walk of a drop box or satellite office in 2020, a number that has fallen to 26% today.

• White, Asian, and Latino adults were about equally likely to live within walking distance of a ballot site in 2020, but Latino access has fallen significantly behind.

• Black residents were already less likely to live within walking distance, and that gap has grown.

• And white and Asian residents are now twice as likely as Black and Hispanic residents to live within a 15-minute walk of a drop box or satellite office.

“The city commissioners missed the mark,” said Salewa Ogunmefun, the head of Pennsylvania Voice, an umbrella organization of advocacy groups focused on expanding representation of voters of color.

How locations were carefully chosen in 2020

Following a new law enacted in 2019, the 2020 election was the first time all voters were allowed to use mail ballots.

As the pandemic fueled surging demand for the new voting method, city elections officials wanted to provide options for returning ballots. But they knew different neighborhoods had different needs, said Seth Bluestein, who at the time was the chief deputy for Al Schmidt, the lone Republican commissioner.

» From 2020: Pennsylvania now lets everyone vote by mail. But poor people in Philadelphia remain forgotten.

Drop boxes can be used around the clock but are only for voters to return completed ballots — instead of sending them through the mail.

Satellite elections offices are staffed by workers who provide additional services, including voter registration. They became a kind of in-person early voting site, because voters could request, receive, fill out, and submit mail ballots in one visit. In predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, bilingual interpreters helped Spanish speakers.

“In parts of the city that had the heaviest vote-by-mail use, they would need more drop boxes,” said Bluestein, who succeeded Schmidt. “But in the parts of the city that were slower to take up using vote-by-mail, they would need more direct, in-person services.”

Satellite offices, targeted to the neighborhoods where they could do the most good, were generally popular. On many days they drew long lines, prompting various groups to help distribute food and water — or turn them into dance parties.

Why access is worse now

Election administration is chronically underfunded across the country, and setting up new services is expensive.

Satellite offices, for example, need to have enough space for voters to wait in line and then fill out ballots in secret. There needs to be infrastructure for secure computers and ballot printers. And they have to be filled with trained staff.

Drop boxes, by contrast, need to be placed on public property that is constantly monitored by security cameras. Staffers have to constantly visit drop boxes to empty them, and on election night every single one has to be locked at exactly 8 p.m. when polls close.

“It’s a big pain in the ass to manage,” said Jim Allen, the elections director in Delaware County.

The suburban Philadelphia county has 42 drop boxes, and Allen rattled off a series of issues he’s had to deal with, like the time a delivery truck backed into a drop box, or when a security camera couldn’t get enough power because its solar panel was being blocked by tree branches. (The branches were bare when the camera was set up, so officials didn’t discover the problem until the leaves grew back months later.)

Cameras have been the biggest challenge for Philly. Officials had hoped to use existing security cameras put up by other agencies. That’s how the current drop boxes are monitored, but adding more has been difficult.

The new plan is to set up a camera network specifically for drop boxes using Comcast infrastructure.

“We can’t move until we have the camera network questions answered,” Deeley said.

Until then, officials said, it’s been extremely difficult to find suitable locations, let alone staff them.

But the fact that it’s harder in some neighborhoods is exactly the problem the commissioners need to address, City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier said.

Her West Philadelphia district has no drop boxes.

“If you do not have a direct plan around equity, then you’re just going to end up with the same outcomes that have always benefited people who are whiter and wealthier,” Gauthier said. “It can’t just be, ‘Oh, we couldn’t have the drop boxes in West Philly because the rec centers don’t have cameras.’ That just builds on inequity that already exists.”

The future is uncertain

Money has also remained an issue, Deeley said. A $10 million grant in 2020 helped the city buy drop boxes and run satellite offices, but that’s not recurring funding.

The city budget is currently being set, and Deeley is pleading for more money. But she hasn’t yet requested funding for drop boxes or satellite offices, because officials are still working on the security camera issue — they don’t even know yet how much the whole effort will cost.

Things would move faster, Deeley said, if she had received money last year to hire more staffers.

During a City Council budget hearing in mid-April, she said she’d have a drop box budget estimate within a few weeks.

Gauthier said she and other Council members want the commissioners to have the funding they need. But she wants to see a real plan for how they’ll ensure equity.

The commissioners said they plan to add a drop box to Gauthier’s district before November’s general election.

“We have heard Jamie Gauthier’s concerns,” Sabir said. “Definitely for the November election there will be a drop box in her district, we’re just finalizing locations now.”

Deeley says the ideal level of coverage for voters would be 72 drop boxes, not the current 17, and 11 total elections offices, not the current two. But for now, all she can commit to is one additional drop box this year in West Philly.

The push to get more drop boxes will continue into 2023, when Philadelphia has major city elections — including an open mayoral race and likely multiple open City Council seats. It could potentially go into 2024, when all eyes will again be on the city and state during the presidential election. It could take even longer.

“I wish I could say when, but the answer to that question is not only up solely to me,” she said. “It’s money, it’s technology, it’s staff. It’s a question that I can’t answer as the commissioner of elections.”