A box containing over 100 mail-in ballots was found on a Los Angeles, California sidewalk over the weekend, less than a month before the state’s primary elections on June 7.
FOX 11 Los Angeles reports that a woman named Christina Repaci, who was out walking her dog, found the ballots on Saturday evening.
“I turned the corner and I just saw this box of envelopes, and it was a USPS box,” Repaci said. “I picked some envelopes up and I saw they were ballots.”
Repaci said she tried to contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, but “I couldn’t get through, so I emailed them,” and “I got an email back from a deputy basically in so many words saying it wasn’t their problem, and to contact the USPS.”
The woman was reportedly eventually able to contact the county Registrar’s Office, and registrar Dean Logan drove to her house to recover the ballots.
“It was so much stress and for just one person to get back to me,” Repaci said. “What do I do here? Now if it happens to someone else, they don’t know what to do. They’ll just put them in a dumpster or throw them in the trash.”
Repaci noted, “I just don’t think it should have been this hard to figure out what to do with legal ballots. This is a country of freedom and our votes should matter and something like this should never happen.”
In a statement, the LA County Registrar’s Office said it “was notified over the weekend of a mail tray found containing approximately 104 unopened, outbound Vote by Mail ballots and additional mail pieces,” and “Thanks to the cooperation of the person who found the ballots, we were able to quickly respond and coordinate the secure pickup of the ballots.”
“Early signs indicate that this was an incident of mail theft and not a directed attempt at disrupting the election,” the statement continued. “We are cooperating with the United States Postal Service and law enforcement to investigate.”
