A top election official for the state of Wisconsin announced Friday that none of the mail recovered from a ditch on Sept. 23 included mail-in ballots.
The Outagamie County Sheriff’s Office said last week that it had found three trays of mail discarded in a ditch near Appleton International Airport, according to WLUK. After the mail was returned to the post office, the Postal Inspection Service announced that it would conduct an investigation.
At the time, the sheriff’s office told the Washington Examiner that the mail discovered was “mail going to the post office.” A Postal Service spokesperson said that the mail included absentee ballots, according to Fox 11 News.
Wisconsin Elections Commission Director Meagan Wolfe contradicted that claim, saying Friday that “there was mail found outside of Appleton and that mail did not include any Wisconsin ballots.” She said she didn’t know whether the mail included ballots from other states, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Before the director’s statement, the White House cited the news as an example of how widespread use of mail-in ballots could hurt the integrity of the November election, along with a story about nine discarded military ballots found in Pennsylvania.
The discarded Wisconsin mail became the subject of a heated exchange on Thursday between a reporter and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
“The other day, [the president] said, ‘They found a lot of ballots in a river.’ Who is ‘they?'” Fox News Radio White House correspondent Jon Decker asked.
“What the president was referring to are something that we’ve seen just in the last seven days where, in Wisconsin, there were trails of mail ending up in a ditch,” McEnany replied. “I believe the specific he was referring to — and that included absentee ballots.”
During Tuesday night’s debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump claimed that ballots had been found in creeks, a likely reference to the Wisconsin story.
Following the exchange with McEnany, #WhereIsTheRiver trended on Twitter.
