Burning Ballots

It’s not what we normally expect in American elections, but it was all too predictable in this election cycle.

This morning in Portland, Oregon, an incendiary device attached to the outside of a ballot drop box started a fire inside of it. Fortunately, only three ballots were damaged there, according to Oregon's Multnomah County Elections Division. In a statement, they wrote that “fire suppressant inside the ballot box protected virtually all ballots.” The voters whose ballots were damaged will be contacted so they can cast new ones.

A car believed to be associated with the incident pictured outside a Portland, Oregon ballot drop box

Damaged drop box in Vancouver, Washington

However, what officials characterized as “hundreds” of ballots were badly damaged a few hours later in nearby Vancouver, Washington, when a drop box was set on fire and the drop box’s fire suppression system failed.

Police are looking for the vehicle in the first picture, a Volvo believed to be connected with the arsons. The devices used are similar to one used in a failed attempt in Vancouver earlier this month. The case is clearly now a priority for law enforcement, as it should be. The geography—Vancouver is just across the river from Portland—makes it likely these are related incidents.

I’m told by Jenny Durkan, the former U.S. Attorney in Seattle during the Obama Administration and the city’s mayor from 2017 to 2021, that drop boxes don’t register bar codes in Washington. That doesn’t happen until they are collected and received at the counting center. So, individual voters need to check to see if their vote was received and, if not, vote a substitute ballot. Tracy Record’s West Seattle Blog has great information on how King County, Washington ballot boxes are protected for anyone in the local area.

The Democrat in the hotly contested race for the House of Representatives in the district that includes Vancouver, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, won her 2022 election by less than 3,000 votes. Her Republican opponent, Joe Kent, called the fire “a cowardly act of domestic terrorism.”

It’s important for us to call this what it is: an attack on democracy.

Regardless of who turns out to be responsible, this is domestic terrorism. I’m confident that the local U.S. Attorneys and the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force consider this a top priority, because this is the kind of cowardly action that not only damages ballots, it’s intended as an attack on our elections, an effort to prevent people from voting using drop boxes, and to spread the impression that our elections are chaotic and unsafe, that the results can be called into question. It’s imperative that there be a prompt arrest and prosecution, because we are at risk of having a real outbreak of attacks on ballots.

Like mail-in voting, Trump disparaged drop boxes in 2020, tweeting “Some states use ‘drop boxes’ for the collection of Universal Mail-In Ballots. So who is going to ‘collect’ the Ballots, and what might be done to them prior to tabulation? A Rigged Election?” After he lost, drop boxes became a part of his baseless claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election in part by using ballot “mules” to stuff ballot drop boxes with fraudulent votes. That lie was spread by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s movie 2000 Mules. His publisher ultimately halted distribution because of the falsehoods. Before then, drop boxes were viewed as safe and secure.

In 2022, men who were frequently armed and/or wearing body armor surveilled drop-off locations in Arizona. A Judge ordered them to stay at least 250 feet away. But the damage had been done. A DHS bulletin issued in September of this year reported that participants in online forums frequented by domestic violence extremists were discussing ways to damage drop-off locations. As in so many things where there used to be bipartisan agreement about how we conducted our elections, Trump has split us apart.

Only cowards attack elections. True public servants, leaders, run in them based on their ideas, their policies, and their personal appeal. Hoodlums resort to attacks against mail-in and drop-off voting, two tested applications that make it easier for more eligible voters to participate in elections.

Drop boxes are widely used in our elections. The dark green boxes are the states where they are widely used. The attacks on them harken back to the darkest days of the civil rights struggle in the South, where Black voters and their ballots were attacked.

In a 2019 CommonWealth Interview, John Lewis said, “The vote is precious. It is almost sacred. It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democracy.” That’s why people try to take it away. That’s why Donald Trump is so afraid of it.

Make sure you share this with the young people in your lives. They may not read newspapers or be following along, but the idea that a political candidate would be working so hard to keep them from voting drives home the importance of casting a ballot. Despite all of the cynicism about our government that they have, and understandably so for those who came of age while Trump was commanding the political landscape, I’m convinced that they are smart enough to understand what’s at stake. So make sure you share with them your belief that someone who wants to take away rights from women and immigrants, someone who says Jews are at fault if he loses, and someone who displays casual racism, Islamophobia, and homophobia is not someone who can be trusted with their future.

We’re in this together,

Joyce