(The Center Square) – King County Elections and the Washington Secretary of State say they have no record of a private citizen making contact with their offices after finding a large box of ballots recently near a dumpster in Renton.
Washington GOP Chairman Jim Walsh was contacted by the man who found the box after that person said he tried to get the attention of King County Elections and the Washington Secretary of State. According to the man, he received no response from either.
“He got in touch with me a week or maybe two weeks ago saying he found this box on the ground next to a dumpster behind a strip mall in Renton,” said Walsh Friday in an interview with The Center Square. “He brought it into the Republican office in Bellevue, and there were about 500 ballots. They’re unopened ballots, not processed. They were delivered to people, it looks like, primarily who had mailboxes at a private mailbox shop, where you can rent a mailbox, use the street address as your mailing address, but then have the mailbox.”
He said the bulk of the unopened ballots were from the November 2024 primary and general election.
“While most are from King County elections, there were a couple from Snohomish County,” Walsh said. “We organized these and they are from several years with the earliest, like 2022, but then through 2025. The biggest single chunk of them are from the 2024 general and primary elections.
“We went ahead and opened a couple, and we checked the names on the ballots to see if those people had voted and for about half of the ones we checked, the people voted and the other half did not,” said Walsh, noting they only checked a small amount of the ballots.
He explained that voters who do not receive their ballot can still vote by either printing out a ballot or voting in person at the elections office.
“Or somebody may have voted for them,” he added. “And that’s the part that we are continuing to investigate.”
King County Elections Communications Manager Halei Watkins said they found no evidence they were contacted about the box of ballots.
“Our office is looking into these claims,” Watkins wrote in an email to The Center Square. “However, I can confirm that we have absolutely no record of someone reaching out to us about this. If this person had talked to our team, we would have told them to bring the box directly to our office so that we could look into it further. Never would our team say that we’re not interested in any box of election-related mail. It’s tough to get more specific about the rest of these claims without more information on who and where they were found, and the ballots themselves.”
The Washington Secretary of State also said they were not notified as the man who found the ballots alleged.
“We have no record of this situation being reported to us through phone, email, our website or direct messages on social media,” wrote Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs in an email response. “If a person finds undelivered mail that has been improperly disposed of, there are several steps they should take to ensure it is fully investigated. Posting a video on social media is not one of them. Washington elections are safe and secure. We check the signature on every ballot to determine that the ballot sent to a voter was signed and returned by that voter.”
Helen Smith, spokeswoman at the Office of the Secretary of State, wrote in an email that voters can check “VoteWA at the beginning of an election period to check if they’ll be receiving a ballot for the election” and “sign up for ballot status text notifications at votewa.gov to ensure their ballots are counted.”
Walsh said it’s really about the integrity of our elections and the lack of any tracking for a ballot’s chain of custody, which he believes could be remedied by a citizen initiative WA GOP is backing.
“We’re supporting initiative IP26-500…,” he said. “And what it requires is when people register to vote, not when they vote, but when they register to vote, they have to prove citizenship. They have to show some form of ID that establishes they are a citizen and therefore a legal proper voter.”
Walsh says the measure will help clean up the voter rolls so election officials aren’t sending out ballots to people who don’t live here any longer or shouldn’t be voting.
“We mail these [ballots] out to anybody on the mailing list,” Walsh added. “We don’t do any verifiable due diligence on who gets mailed a ballot in Washington, and we ought to do better there. Remember, we are a 100 percent mail in voting state. We mail ballots out to anybody registered to vote, and we don’t check to make sure that registered voters are rightly registered.”
The state GOP tried this months ago with a similar initiative to the legislature, but they fell short of collecting the nearly 309,000 valid signatures necessary.
This time they have until July 2 to qualify and if successful, the measure will go directly to voters on the November ballot, bypassing lawmakers.
