A Los Angeles woman found discarded mail-in ballots on the ground near a drive-thru ATM in south Los Angeles.
“I guess most people were just driving over them and ignoring them,” Kandace Rushiddin, who tried to recover all the ballots, said. “So I took my paper towel, and I grabbed the ones I could.”
Rushiddin told reporters that finding the ballots made her emotional, and she wondered if they were discarded on purpose.
“You know, is this intentional?” Rushiddin said. “Is this meant to suppress the vote? I don’t know.”
“You know, I know lies are being told,” she continued. “People are talking about they found them in creeks, and that turned out to be a lie. So I’m thinking, ‘OK, this isn’t happening,’ and then what do I drive up on? You know, it’s just very disheartening.”
All the ballots were bound for residents of one apartment complex near the ATM, but Rushiddin was unable to collect all of them.
“That’s scary,” Mars Quinonez, a resident that lives at the complex, said. “But, honestly, our building constantly gets broken into.”
Quinonez added this isn’t the first time mail has been tampered with at the complex.
“It’s worrisome, because how are you going to vote,” Quinonez continued. “Or some people might still be waiting for their ballots thinking that they’ll just come later and not get them, and by the time they realize and ask for another one, it might be too late.”
The news comes as disputes continue to rage in Washington, D.C., over the practice of mail-in voting. President Trump has voiced concerns mail-in voting could lead to more voter fraud, while Democrats have insisted the practice is a necessary step during a pandemic.
Trump’s concerns have recently been bolstered by multiple incidents involving the Postal Service, including cases where ballots were put at risk.
In Virginia, six U.S. Postal Service drop boxes were broken into, raising concerns about election security. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, the Department of Justice recovered discarded military ballots. In Wisconsin, three trays of mail were found discarded in a ditch. Initial reporting indicated some absentee ballots were found in the discarded mail, but a later investigation revealed that was not the case.
