The U.S. Postal Service hit back at the Boston City Council’s claims that delivery failures were frequently leaving residents without pertinent financial documents and medications and could impact mail-in voting for the state and federal elections.

Two days after the City Council called for an emergency hearing to discuss ways to address “inadequate” USPS service in many Boston neighborhoods, the Postal Service said mail delivery in the city is thus far within “performance standards” during the current financial quarter, which began July 1 and ends Sept. 30.

“Regarding mail service in the Boston, Mass. area, the Postal Service is aware of a minor employee availability issue last week that we have resolved,” Stephen Doherty, USPS spokesperson for the Northeast region, said in a Friday statement. “Mail service is current and within service performance standards.”

Doherty cited statistics, seemingly tracked by the Postal Service, that show that in the fourth financial quarter of fiscal year 2024 to date, 96.87% of all first-class mail in Massachusetts arrived within a day of the service standard.

On average, Doherty said, mail in the state is delivered in 2.5 days. He noted that USPS is in the process of recruiting, evaluating and hiring qualified candidates for vacancies in the Boston area.

His statement also references the mail-in voting concerns raised by councilors, who mentioned during Wednesday’s Council meeting that service failures could prevent every vote from being counted in the state and federal elections in November.

Sharon Durkan, the lead sponsor of the USPS hearing order, said that with “up to half of the electorate” choosing to vote by mail, “unreliable postal service threatens the very foundations of our democracy,” and may lead to “voter suppression.”

“The U.S. Postal Service is committed to the secure, timely delivery of the nation’s election mail,” Doherty said. “We employ a robust and proven process to ensure proper handling and delivery of all election mail, including ballots. We are working in close communication with election officials, including in Massachusetts.”

In 2024, as USPS has with previous elections, he said, “we will deploy longstanding processes and procedures, as well as allocating additional resources, including, but not limited to, expanding processing procedures, extra transportation, extra delivery and collection trips, and overtime, to ensure that election mail reaches its intended destination in a timely manner.”

Doherty mentioned that voters choosing to vote by mail should return their ballots by the state’s deadline. He said, however, that as a “common-sense measure,” the USPS recommends that domestic, non-military mail-in voters send their completed ballots ahead of Election Day, and at least one week before the state deadline.

Per the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s website, voters must postmark their mail-in ballots by Election Day, but they will be accepted and counted by election officials until 5 p.m. on Nov. 8 for domestic mail, and by 5 p.m. on Nov. 15 for U.S. residents returning their ballots from outside the United States.

Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the Secretary of the Commonwealth, said Thursday that Secretary William Galvin’s office is “aware of resident concerns about delayed mail in general,” but has “not received reports of unusual issues with the delivery of election mail, though clerks haven’t yet begun mailing ballots for the November election.”

“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 said in a statement.

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While the USPS defended its performance, city councilors this week painted a different picture of what mail service looks like in Boston. Durkan insisted that the agency is violating federal law by not providing “prompt, reliable and efficient services to all patrons in all areas,” as mandated by the United States Code.

Henry Santana, an at-large councilor, said he’s heard from residents throughout the city, particularly in the neighborhoods of Mission Hill, Roxbury, Dorchester and Brighton, who have reported “critical shortcomings of postal services, especially the severely delayed delivery of mail or mail never getting delivered at all.”

Data tracked by Office of the Inspector General of the United States Postal Service show that as soon as last quarter, which encompasses April, May and June, delivery of first-class, two-day mail was well below the 93% on-time performance nationally and in the Massachusetts-Rhode Island district, at 85.6% and 86.9%, respectively.

The same 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.

The OIG for the USPS released an audit report in July that found issues tied to the 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.