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Elections Officials Seek ‘Dozens’ of Missing Ballots From Richmond Drop Box

Contra Costa County election officials have confirmed that ballots deposited into a drop box located at Richmond City Hall on Oct. 12 have gone missing.

Scott Konopasek, Contra Costa’s assistant registrar of voters, said Thursday that county officials do not know why “dozens, max” of ballots that were placed in the drop box at Richmond City Hall cannot be accounted for.

Konopasek said a two-person team from his office collected 84 ballots from that drop box on Oct. 12, a pick-up that happens six days a week.

“We are aware of reports by dozens of voters, and claims on social media, that they deposited their ballot into the Richmond City Hall drop box on Oct. 12 and the county has not been able to confirm receipt of the ballot,” Konopasek said.

He said the ballots could have been improperly processed and are not showing up as having been received.

“This is something that happened and we don’t know why it happened … but we’re making sure the voters get to vote,” Konopasek said.

His office found about 40 of those voters through “sleuthing” phone numbers and Nextdoor social media posts, he said. Those voters were able to take advantage of various ways to re-cast their ballots. “We’ve re-mailed ballots to most of them, and then others we’ve told how to vote in person between now and Election Day.”

But Konopasek said he does not know if all the voters whose ballots may have disappeared from that drop box on Oct. 12 know their ballot went missing.

The Contra Costa County Elections Department has 37 drop boxes stationed throughout the county; the Richmond City Hall box is one of three in that city. Nearly 150,000 ballots had been returned from those drop boxes as of Thursday morning, Konopasek said, who stressed that this one Richmond box is the only one with which problems have arisen.

“I just think that [it] feeds into whole narrative of discrediting our election processes in the country,” he said. “Yeah something happened, something that shouldn’t happen, but you can’t extrapolate that to the whole system being corrupt or broken or that there’s any kind of systemic problem.”

An internal investigation turned up no evidence of physical tampering with the drop box, Konopasek said, nor evidence of nefarious actions by elections workers.

“I suspect there’s some sort of handling error, but we don’t know where that is,” said Konopasek, who said the investigation will continue.

But there’s a “glass half full” element to this, as Konopasek put it. It’s thanks to an online ballot-tracking tool the county is using for the first time that voters could see there was a problem in the first place. The missing ballots were also cast early enough for those problems to be discovered, and for those voters to be offered a second opportunity to cast a ballot.

Konopasek said discussions have already taken place about installing electronic surveillance covering the drop boxes.

Contra Costa voters who want to verify receipt of their ballot can use the county’s “Track My Vote by Mail” feature or call the Elections Dept. at (925) 335-7800.

Konopasek said the 150,000 drop box ballots are among 370,000 overall ballots returned by Contra Costa voters as of Thursday morning — representing 52% of the county’s registered voters.

“The voters in Contra Costa are voting early, and are paying attention to what’s going on,” he said.

Bay City News and KQED’s Tara Siler contributed to this story.

Copyright 2020 KQED