County officials initially voted to reject her ballot but later reconsidered, under pressure from the Bush campaign, and accepted it even though the postmark made it illegal.
They told boards that mail for overseas military members was routinely postmarked when it arrived in this country.
She worked on Sept. 19, the day after the NBC letter was postmarked, and it is possible that the crate that held the letter was given to her the next day.
The lack of postmarks made it impossible for canvassing boards to answer the threshold questions that determined the validity of an overseas vote: Was the ballot indeed mailed from a foreign country?
In Alachua County, which was carried by Mr. Gore, the canvassing board's insistence on postmarks prevented it from counting the ballot of Jeff Livingston, a staff sergeant at an Air Force base in England who acknowledged voting for Mr. Bush after the election.
However, Stoop threw the envelope away and it was therefore not possible to check its postmark to see where it had been sent from.
Under the system, as it separates mail bound for Chile, DHL applies the Swiss postmark at its sorting facilities.
Intuit acknowledges when a return was filed and forwarded to the I.R.S., he said, "giving it an electronic postmark that is positive proof with the I.R.S. that it was filed on time".
Postmarked Virginia, 1937, it is a letter from a poetry teacher to his former wife.
Taxpayers should not face penalties because of delays in delivering their payments, because deadlines are based on when a letter is postmarked, not when it is delivered, tax officials said.
