When Brent Walters stumbled upon a stack of sealed mail-in ballots on the side of Route 168 near Interstate 8 in San Diego, he knew they weren’t supposed to be there.
“I'd had a flat tire so I stopped in the middle section on the exit ramp and that’s where I saw them,” he said. “I had just done the mail-in ballot myself so I knew what they looked like.”
Walters found them on the day Californians were casting their ballots in the primary election.
“I thought that a mail person threw them out because it was on the curb so it seems like somebody had probably tossed them out there,” Walters told the Southern California Record. “There's nothing but freeway before that so it's unlikely they fell out.”
An investigation by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and San Diego County elections officials is underway, according to media reports.
“I had never come across anything like that before but I knew something had to be done about it,” he said. “If that's happening here, who knows where else it's happening because I only noticed a percentage of it.”
The North Park, San Diego resident contacted Toni Duran, who is campaigning for San Diego City Council District 3.
"She told me to contact the registrar's office," Walters said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 37 into law last year, which requires that every registered voter statewide receive a mail-in ballot and that they be mailed out 29 days before an election.
“Voting is an essential process and for somebody to be messing with that, whether it be intentional or accidental that's through negligence, something needs to be done about it,” Walters said.
As previously reported in the Southern California Record last month, 104 mail-in ballots in a box were also found abandoned on an East Hollywood sidewalk by a woman walking her dog in the 30th congressional district, which spans Burbank, Glendale, Hollywood, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, West Hollywood, Acton, Sunland-Tujunga and Sun Valley.
“What I noticed about the ballots was that none of them had the mark on it from being run through the machine with the post office,” Walters added. “They were all collected from multiple addresses in the same area so it seemed like they had been in the hands of the post office at some point.”