Auditor says approximately 475 damaged ballots recovered from burned drop box in Washington state

VANCOUVER, WA – About 475 damaged ballots were recovered from a ballot box that burned Monday in Southwest Washington, a county official said Tuesday.

Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey said workers on Wednesday will begin searching damaged ballots for voter information in order to contact them about obtaining a new ballot. He said officials believed that although damaged, workers would be able to extract voter information from the ballots.

Kimsey said the damaged ballots are separate from an unknown number of ballots that were destroyed.

Incendiary devices damaged and destroyed hundreds of ballots in a drop box in Vancouver, Washington, and damaged three ballots in a drop box in Portland, Oregon, in what federal, state and local authorities condemned as an attack on democracy ahead of a hotly contested election day.

Authorities said enough material was recovered from the incendiary devices to link the two fires that occurred on Monday, as well as an incident that occurred Oct. 8 when an incendiary device was placed in another ballot drop box in Vancouver. No ballot papers were damaged as a result of this incident.

Surveillance photos captured the Volvo pulling up to a drop box in Portland just before nearby security personnel discovered a fire inside the box, said Portland Police Bureau spokesman Mike Benner. Incendiary devices were attached to the outside of the boxes.

The FBI is one of the agencies investigating the case. U.S. Attorney Tessa M. Gorman and Greg Austin, acting special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle Field Office, said in a joint statement Tuesday that they wanted to assure residents that they are cooperating with the investigation into the fires and will seek to apprehend the person or persons responsible “fully responsible”.

No arrests had been announced as of Tuesday evening.

Police said a box fire in Portland was quickly extinguished thanks to a suppression system in the box and a security guard nearby.

Hours later, another fire was discovered in the drop box of a transit center across the Columbia River in Vancouver. Vancouver is the largest city in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District and the place where it’s supposed to happen one of the closest races in the US House of Representatives in the country between first-term Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent.

According to Kimsey, the Vancouver ballot box was also equipped with a fire suppression system, but that did not prevent hundreds of ballots from being burned. He urged voters who dropped off their ballots at the transit center’s drop box after 11 a.m. Saturday to contact his office to obtain a replacement ballot.

Kimsey said the office is increasing the frequency of ballot collection and moving collection hours to the evening to prevent ballot boxes from filling up overnight, when similar crimes are believed to occur more frequently.

Officials in at least two other Washington counties – including King County, where Seattle is located – announced Tuesday that mailboxes will be checked more frequently leading up to Election Day.