Jury summons sent by mail to outdated addresses go undeliverable at scale

Courts send jury summons exclusively via USPS first-class mail to addresses drawn from voter registration rolls and DMV records that are often years out of date. The average American moves every 5-7 years, and younger Americans move far more frequently — yet there is no mechanism to verify addresses before mailing. In Harris County, Texas, the overall jury summons non-response rate reached 48% in 2022, up from 37% in 2019, and a significant portion of these non-responses are simply undelivered mail. When a summons goes to an old address, the intended juror never learns they were summoned. If the mail is not returned to sender (e.g., a new tenant discards it), the court may record the juror as a non-respondent and potentially issue a bench warrant or fine for failure to appear — punishing someone for mail they never received. Meanwhile, courts have no email notification, no SMS alerts, no digital verification system. The person has no way to know they were summoned and no way to prove they never received the summons. This persists because court administrative systems were built around physical mail infrastructure decades ago, modernization requires legislative authorization and IT budgets that court systems chronically lack, and there is no single federal standard for jury notification methods.