The Boston City Council called for an emergency hearing to address U.S. Postal Service failures that it says have caused residents to miss out on “vital” documents and prescriptions and raised mail-in voting concerns ahead of the election.

Councilors Sharon Durkan, Henry Santana, and Benjamin Weber introduced a hearing order Wednesday to discuss the impacts of “inadequate” USPS delivery services in Mission Hill and other Boston neighborhoods. The order states that the services are “causing hardship and inconvenience to residents and businesses.”

While Durkan said the measure was initially supposed to be focused on Mission Hill specifically, she decided to expand its scope after hearing from other councilors who indicated that the service issues are “happening all over the city.”

The “significant deterioration in postal service,” Durkan said, “isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a violation of federal law and a threat to our community’s well-being.”

She went on to cite the United States Code, which the councilor said “clearly states that the Postal Service shall provide prompt, reliable and efficient services to all patrons in all areas, and shall render postal service to all communities.”

Durkan said the USPS has not adhered to that mandate in Boston neighborhoods like Mission Hill, where she said residents have reported missing “critical communications,” such as legal and financial documents, and “vital medications.”

“Most importantly, considering the time of year we’re in, in an era where vote by mail has become increasingly prevalent, with up to half of the electorate choosing to vote by this method, unreliable postal service threatens the very foundations of our democracy,” Durkan said. “We cannot allow postal inefficiencies to become a form of voter suppression.”

Weber added that as more people are choosing to vote by mail, “We need every vote to count. We need to make sure our Postal Service is working correctly.”

The USPS delivered just 85.6% of two-day mail on time in the third quarter of fiscal year 2024, which for the postal service encompasses April, May and June. Numbers were slightly higher in the Massachusetts-Rhode Island district, at 86.9%, but still well below the 93% target for on-time mail, according to data from the Office of the Inspector General of the United States Postal Service.

The data show that nationally, two-day mail on-time performance decreased by 6.2% over the same period last year, and that national three-to-five-day performance was even worse, at 72.5 % in the third quarter of this fiscal year, representing a 13.7% decrease over the same period last year.

Despite the concerns, Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the Secretary of the Commonwealth, said it’s been relatively smooth sailing thus far for mail-in voting ahead of the state and federal elections.

“We have not received reports of unusual issues with the delivery of election mail, though clerks haven’t yet begun mailing ballots for the November election,” O’Malley said in a Thursday statement. “We are aware of resident concerns about delayed mail in general, in parts of Boston and in other communities.

“Our office works closely with our postal contact to work through any issues that may arise, and Secretary Galvin has personally spoken with our contact at USPS to address these concerns ahead of the election,” O’Malley added.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service did not immediately respond to a Herald inquiry as to what is causing the issues stated by the city councilors in Boston, but a variety of reasons have been reported generally over the past year.

The OIG for the USPS released an audit report in July that found issues tied to agency’s 10-year plan to overhaul services, Delivering for America, which, while promising to make the USPS more efficient in the long run, has led to a failure to meet today’s service performance goals for ground advantage and priority mail.

The USPS website also notes that service is impacted at times by weather-related and other natural disasters, special events or “other changes.”

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The Boston City Council’s order for an emergency hearing states that the discussion would be centered around addressing the deterioration of USPS services, identifying the reasons for the inadequacy of service, and developing actionable recommendations to restore full services in accordance with federal law.

While the order’s language focuses on Mission Hill, Santana, an at-large councilor and co-sponsor, indicated that discussion at the hearing will be all-encompassing.

For months, Santana said, he’s been “hearing from many residents across the city, particularly in the neighborhoods of Mission Hill, Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and Brighton, about the critical shortcomings of postal services, especially the severely delayed delivery of mail or mail never getting delivered at all.”

He stated that the matter has evolved from a mere inconvenience, to a hardship for residents awaiting pertinent documentation and medications — a situation that he described as an “issue of fairness and equity.”

“We cannot allow certain communities to be underserved while others continue to benefit from reliable postal services,” Santana said. “Our residents deserve better, and we are here to demand answers and action to restore full service to these neighborhoods.”

The matter was referred to the Committee on PILOT Agreements, Institutional and Intergovernmental Relations for a hearing that has not yet been scheduled.