Vice President Kamala Harris greeted former president Donald Trump at a New York ceremony [Source: Yahoo News]

A group of about three dozen US state and local election officials have raised serious concerns about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver millions of ballots for the 2024 presidential election.

The letter, from the National Association of State Election Directors and other state and local election officials, said election officials “have raised serious questions about processing facility operations, lost or delayed election mail and front-line training deficiencies impacting USPS’s ability to deliver election mail in a timely and accurate manner”.

The officials said despite repeated meetings with USPS election staff “we have not seen improvement or concerted efforts to remediate our concerns”.

Former president Donald Trump emerged on Wednesday from a rocky debate against Vice President Kamala Harris looking to regain his footing with 54 days until US election day on November 5, the first ballots already going out in Alabama and other states on the cusp of early voting.

Trump was on the defensive on Tuesday night as Harris controlled much of the debate.

Harris’ campaign immediately pitched the idea of a second debate afterwards.

Fox News has proposed an October match-up but with moderators that Trump has indicated he does not prefer.

Trump and Harris were together briefly on Wednesday in New York, where they joined President Joe Biden and other dignitaries to mark the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

They shook hands for the second time in 12 hours, with the first coming when Harris approached Trump on the debate stage to introduce herself in the first sign of the aggressive approach she would take during the event.

The former president, who flouted convention with a surprise appearance late on Tuesday in the post-debate spin room, insisted he had won the night although he also criticised the ABC moderators as unfair.

The presidential debate attracted 57.5 million television viewers across seven TV networks, according to preliminary Nielsen data released on Wednesday.

Tuesday night’s event was the first time the candidates had met face to face.

The viewing figure tops the roughly 51 million people who watched Trump debate then-candidate Biden in June.

It does not capture the full extent of online viewing, which has grown in popularity as traditional TV audiences decline.

Nor does it reflect viewers who watched the debate in bars and restaurants – final audience data that includes those viewers will be available later on Wednesday.

The record TV audience for a presidential debate occurred in 2016 when 84 million people tuned in to watch Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton debate Trump.

with AP