The development comes after independent photojournalist Diana Lejins brought the issue to LBREPORT.com's attention and complained to the City Clerk's office last week. The City Clerk's office expressed puzzlement since its paid-vendor said it had delivered all the printed presorted materials to USPS in Los Angeles for distribution in Long Beach.

LBREPORT.com was first (again) to report the issue on Saturday Mar. 15. A USPS spokesman (contacted by us on Monday Mar. 17) declined to identify the area or number of residents impacted, but the affected area apparently icludes at least part of the voter-rich 5th Council district, where its Council representative, Gerrie Schipske, is a Mayoral candidate. Residents in the same area are also deciding hotly contested races for a new 5th district Councilmember and a new LBCC Trustee...and vote by mail ballots for many voters have already arrived, and some voters may have already cast their ballots in those races and others.

LBREPORT.com is interested in pursuing the full extent of this story. If you are among those who didn't receive a sample ballot/election pamphlet, LBREPORT.com is interested in hearing from you. If this happened to you, let us know at mail@LBReport.com or via Facebook to www.Facebook.com/lbreport.

Mayoral candidate Schipske said she became concerned last week when two of her three Mayoral mailings hadn't reached voters while mailings from other Mayoral and other citywide candidates did. She contacted the City Clerk's office last week, then went to the USPS mail sorting/distribution facility on Bellflower Blvd. north of Spring St. on Monday morning Mar. 17 to find out what was going on.

Schipske tells LBREPORT.com that on Mar. 17, she observed piles of bundled election and campaign related materials undelivered at the Postal Service facility. LBREPORT.com has learned that later that day, two of Schipske's mailers were delivered at the same time, included among multiple other campaign mailers from other candidates.

A few hours later, LBREPORT.com went to the location where an employee declined to provide specific information but said all 1st class mail is distributed as soon as it comes in.

But the sample ballots/election pamphlets mailed by the City and most campaign materials sent by candidates aren't 1st class mail.

City-mailed sample ballots and election pamphlets are sent via what USPS calls "standard mail" in which the sender presorts the mail (saving USPS the cost) for which USPS then applies a lower postage rate with different delivery priorities. In contrast, vote-by-mail ballots are sent by 1st class mail, explaining why some voters who requested vote-by-mail ballots in the affected area already received them but didn't receive the their sample ballots and election pamphlets -- which contain the candidates' statements and ballot arguments pro/con for some of the races on which they're now voting (and may have already voted.)

In an email responding to LBREPORT.com's Mar. 17 morning inquiry, Richard Maher (regional rep in corporate communications) told LBREPORT.com at late afternoon Mar. 17:

[USPS spokesman Maher email text] The Sample Ballots in question were mailed Standard Mail, Carrier Route. With that lower-cost class of mail, there are several possibilities that can impact when customers receive the mail:

First, Standard Mail does not have the same delivery standard as First Class Mail. It can be held back in order to first deliver all First Class Mail that arrives in a delivery unit. Every Long Beach delivery unit was inspected today after your call. All units were clear of any Sample Ballots, with the exception of one station that held some ballots back today on 16 routes due to heavy Monday volume and will deliver them tomorrow.

Second, this mailing was sent at a "carrier route" postage rate, where the mailing house sorts and bundles the pieces directly to the letter carrier. If the most recent carrier route information was not available and/or utilized, missorts have to be sent back to the processing plant in LA to be resorted and transported to the correct postal station and letter carrier. This could possibly be another reason why residents may receive the Sample Ballot mail pieces on different days over a period of time. We did verify that some letter carriers reported misrouted ballots in their carrier route bundles.

Third, Standard Mail does not include free forward service if someone moves. As a national average, about 14-percent of the population moves to a new address every year. So on a large Standard mailing like this it would not be unusual for 10 to 20 percent of the pieces to end up being non-deliverable due to people no longer living at the address on the sample ballot. (Absentee Ballots, on the other hand, are mailed First Class Mail and are forwarded to the new address.)

Delivery of political mail is very important to the election process and the U.S. Postal Service takes its role very seriously. Approximately two weeks before an election, all political mail is upgraded to be processed and delivered as expediently as possible. The Los Angeles District will continue to monitor the delivery of these sample ballots in Long Beach.

The LB City Clerk's office surmised (accurately) last week that whatever happened was a USPS issue and urged consumers to be patient and use the 21st century, cutting edge digital tools implemented by his office that allow voter access to sample ballots/candidate statements on-demand 24/7 [but not to candidates' campaign materials.]

[In a separate snafu, the City Clerk's office acknowledges that the names of the ballot proposition argument writers were erroneously omitted in the printed election pamphlet, but notes that the argument texts pro/con do appear in full in the print versions and the argument writers' names have been added to online versions.]

LBREPORT.com also learned and reported that at least one USPS LB delivery person simply left a load of sample ballots/election pamphlets in the lobby of a downtown residential building (roughly 150+ units) on or about Mar. 8 instead of putting them in individual mail boxes. (It's also visibly alongside some commercial and political mail.) Here's a photo provided by an LBREPORT.com reader.

[Editor's opinion: LBREPORT.com has long urged Congress to end USPS' monopoly on 1st class mail and forbid the continued subsidy of commercial "junk mail" by 1st class mail rates.]

While the Postal Service is using last century's delivery systems, the LB City Clerk's office is using 21st century digital methods, debuting a 2014 Election App available for free download in the App Store and Google Play.