Authorities in Greenville, Wisconsin, discovered three full trays of mail, including absentee ballots, discarded in a roadside ditch. The trays were due to be delivered to the local post office for processing.
The Outagamie County Sheriff’s Office said the trays of mail were found in a ditch near the Appleton International Airport. The reclaimed mail trays were turned over to the United States Postal Service (USPS) and an investigation into how the trays left the custody of USPS employees has been launched.
“The United States Postal Inspection Service immediately began investigating, and we reserve further comment on this matter until that is complete,” USPS spokesman Bob Sheehan told a local media outlet. Sheehan did not indicate exactly how many pieces of mail were involved in the incident.
The Washington Examiner reported in May of this year that thousands of absentee ballots went uncounted in Wisconsin’s Primary Election with 1,600 ballots left uncounted because they were found in a mail processing center on the day after the election. An additional 2,693 ballots were never delivered to voters who requested them because of a technical glitch in creating the mailing labels.
Nine states and the District of Columbia have made the decision to automatically mail ballots to all registered voters regardless of whether the voter requested a mail-in ballot or not. California, Nevada, Vermont, and the District of Columbia join Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington – who had already had the election law on the books prior to the COVID-19 pandemic – in engaging in universal mail-in voting.
Montana, North Dakota, and Nebraska let individual counties decide whether to mail ballots to all registered voters.
President Trump and US Attorney General William Barr have consistently railed against the vulnerabilities in the mail-in voting scheme, calling the wide-spread employment of the practice “very open to fraud and coercion,” and “reckless and dangerous.”
Both the President and the Attorney General point to the potential for ballot harvesting, voter fraud, and voter disenfranchisement as was evidenced in Wisconsin and elsewhere as reason enough concern.
