Officials say ‘no evidence of tampering’ after mail ballots left unattended near Minneapolis

By Marshall Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Minneapolis-area officials swiftly fired an election worker who left several boxes of mail-in ballots unattended while dropping them off at an election office Friday.

A photo of the employee’s car outside Edina City Hall — with an open trunk containing nearly a dozen boxes of ballots — circulated Friday on social media. Local Republican Party officials and Donald Trump supporters with large online followings shared the image and used the lapse to question the security of mail-in voting.

Officials from Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis and the neighboring suburb of Edina, said in a statement Friday that there was “no evidence of tampering” while the ballots were unattended.

They posted 18 minutes of surveillance footage to YouTube, showing that nobody interfered with the ballots while they were unattended with an open trunk in the parking lot for roughly nine minutes.

The speed at which Hennepin County released multiple statements explaining the situation, plus the surveillance footage, shows how election officials are trying to actively combat online disinformation that spreads to millions at breakneck pace.

County officials released another statement Saturday admitting the incident did not follow the protocol for bringing ballots from drop boxes to the election office — and announcing that the employee had been fired.

“Hennepin County acknowledges that this lapse in protocol occurred, should not have happened, and is unacceptable. Corrective actions have been taken by the county and its courier to prevent any recurrence,” the statement said. “The county has confirmed the driver has been terminated.”

Officials said the ballots in the boxes were fully “accounted for” and that there was “no evidence of tampering” with the seals on the boxes. They further said all of the individual ballots were still “in sealed condition” — meaning nobody had tried to open the ballots or change anyone’s votes.

“Election security is of utmost importance, and leaving ballots unattended is simply unacceptable,” Hennepin County Auditor Daniel Rogan said in a statement. “Hennepin County is reinforcing its transfer protocols with county staff and vendors. An incident like this underscores the value of strong chain-of-custody processes, so that risk can be addressed and integrity can be verified.”

Experts say mail-in voting is secure, with paper trails and duplicative safeguards to prevent fraud, despite a yearslong effort by Trump to attack the process with false claims that it is plagued by widespread fraud.

The ballots in question weren’t actually mailed but were left by voters at drop boxes to be picked up by election workers and delivered to election offices for processing.

Trump and Republicans largely oppose drop boxes, claiming they are vulnerable to fraud or manipulation during the transfer process.

While isolated incidents of fraud or wrongdoing have been linked to drop boxes, there isn’t widespread vote-rigging through drop boxes or any other means in US elections.

The drop boxes are locked and sometimes even chained to the ground, and in most jurisdictions they have round-the-clock surveillance. There are strict chain-of-custody rules for how these ballots are supposed to be handled.

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