ANOTHER Ballot SNAFU In Washington State Where—POOF!—Hundreds of Ballots Have Simply Disappeared

Can America just have Election Day back, please? If bad guys aren't setting mail-out ballots on fire, or hijacking them, the mailman's losing them! And just WHO is in charge of this train wreck of events they're calling an election in Washington state, anyway?

While Governor Jay Inslee was very, very busy tweeting and looking for retirement property in the free state of Idaho, on Wednesday came the news that some 300 Whitman County ballots have just disappeared. Whitman County is on the Palouse—the home of Washington State University in Pullman.

As we understand it, here's basically the chain-of-custody of the ballots:

Ballots are printed.
Some guy at a third-party company stuffs the ballots into envelopes.
That guy gets the ballots to the a "processing facility" in Spokane.
99.6% of the ballots made it to the "processing faciliity."
.04% ballots disappear into thin air. Pfft.

Ballots were supposed to have been mailed out by October 19, or 18 days before the election.

Some Whitman County ballots are missing after being processed by the U.S. Postal Service in Spokane.

https://t.co/NXfObW3D0D
— KREM 2 NEWS (@KREM2) October 30, 2024

The Spokane Spokesman Review reported that the U.S. Postal Service had no idea that the ballots had gone missing until they got complaint phone calls, which begs the question: Don't you think that when our elections become a complaint-driven system we've got a fundamental problem? Is this the way we treat our fundamental rights, like somebody calling the city to report a dog barking or that somebody left their trash can on the sidewalk for too long?

Anyway, back to the Spokesman Review's wild conversation with the election lady.

Whitman County has a third-party vendor that inserts the ballots into envelopes and drives them to a main processing facility, like in Spokane and most other Washington counties. [Whitman County Auditor Sandy] Jamison said she knows the ballots made it to the facility, but when she checked the Postal Service report last week, it showed 99.6% of the ballots were successfully processed.
“My question is, where are my missing ballots?” she said.
Jamison said she was able to narrow it down to people with P.O. boxes in the town of Garfield.
“We don’t know who is missing a ballot, we only know because we are getting calls,” she said. “We are all concerned.”

Hey! Anybody! There's another possible attack on democracy™ over there. Anyone?

Have they checked the post office in Ferndale, Washington, on the other side of the state? The last time we checked, in 2022, ballots were piled high in the backyard in the leadup to their election. That place appears to be a problem.

Why does the pmg still have a job...I have a post office at full stop b/c they can't deliver a mountain of packages...they want folks to wait hours in unusual heat to pick-up. Kinda sure there is medical items in that pile. #FactsMatter #Ferndale #WhatcomCounty pic.twitter.com/E1LLFKyli3
— Heather Flowering Shrub (@Heather_3000) July 29, 2022

Maybe the ballots ended up like these tossed bags of ballots in Miami. Passersby found bags of undelivered ballots strewn about in the middle of a highway.

Or possibly in a storm drain somewhere, as happened in Southern California.

If the Whitman County auditor is right, however, all the ballots are from one town and the intended recipients all have P.O. Boxes, which means those ballots, if they were delivered to the local Post Office, would have never left the Post Office.

We're sure there are nice people working at the Post Office, but strange things have happened in Washington state this election season. In Southwest Washington about 500 ballots were burned up by a 30- to 40-year-old white man driving an old Volvo who attacked three ballot drop boxes. The man wrote on his "incendiary devices" "Free Palestine" and "Free Gaza."

Washingtonians well remember the "found" ballots in the trunk of a car which changed the trajectory of Washington state politics for more than a generation. In 2004, Republican Dino Rossi withstood an onslaught of the Al Gore-like election lawfare demanding recounts until he lost the last recount, after those mysterious ballots turned up. Then everything was just fine and no more recounts were needed when the Democrat won. All better now.

It was the closest governor's race in state history, with Rossi's "win" by 2000 votes evaporating into a 129-vote loss.

But what's months of torpor and 129 votes?

Vote-by-mail states are now in the age of do-it-yourself elections. The Whitman County auditor helpfully suggested that voters "will need to be proactive with us“ and let her know if they haven't received a ballot yet, because she has no idea where the hell their ballots are.

"Time is of the essence here."

Thanks, lady. Very helpful.

Full disclosure: My mom was a mail lady.