PORTLAND, Ore. — Incendiary devices were set off Monday at two ballot drop boxes — one in Portland and another in nearby Vancouver, Washington — destroying hundreds of ballots in what one official called a “direct attack on democracy” about a week before a heated Election Day.
The early morning fire at the drop box in Portland was extinguished quickly thanks to a suppression system inside the box as well as a nearby security guard, police said, and just three ballots were damaged there.
But within a few hours, another fire was discovered at a transit center drop box across the Columbia River in Vancouver. Vancouver is the biggest city in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country, between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent.
The ballot box in Vancouver also had a fire suppression system inside, but that failed to prevent hundreds of ballots from burning, said Greg Kimsey, the longtime elected auditor in Clark County, Washington, which includes Vancouver. He urged voters who dropped their ballots in the transit center box after 11 a.m. Saturday to contact his office for a replacement ballot.
“Heartbreaking,” Kimsey said. “It’s a direct attack on democracy.”
The office will be increasing how frequently it collects ballots and changing collection times to the evening, Kimsey said, to keep the ballot boxes from remaining full of ballots overnight when similar crimes are considered more likely to occur.
Ballot drop boxes have faced increasing criticism from Republicans and have been the focus of baseless right-wing conspiracy theories in recent years, tied to former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. An Associated Press survey of state election officials across the U.S. found that there were no widespread issues with drop boxes in 2020, and none that could have affected the results.
Six states have banned ballot drop boxes since 2020: Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina and South Dakota, according to research by the Voting Rights Lab, which advocates for expanded voting access.
Washington and Oregon, which are both vote-by-mail states, have long used ballot drop boxes.
Authorities said at a news conference in Portland that enough material from the incendiary devices was recovered to show that the two fires Monday were connected — and that they were also connected to an Oct. 8 incident, when an incendiary device was placed at a different ballot drop box in Vancouver. No ballots were damaged in that incident.
The FBI was also investigating.