A California woman was walking her dog Saturday evening in East Hollywood when she found more than 100 unopened mail-in ballots.
Christina Repaci was walking her dog when she happened upon the box of ballots. “I turned the corner and I just saw this box of envelopes, and it was a USPS box. I picked some envelopes up and I saw they were ballots,” Repaci said, adding that she took the box home with her to figure out what to do with it.
Repaci called local politicians and the LA County Sheriff’s Department and also sent videos of the ballots to social media accounts.
“I actually called the Sheriff’s Department. I couldn’t get through, so I emailed them,” she said. “I got an email back from a deputy basically in so many words saying it wasn’t their problem and to contact the USPS.”
Eventually, Dean Logan with the LA County Registrar’s Office personally retrieved the ballots, according to the report. “Logan picked them up,” Repaci said. “I made sure he was legit. He gave me a card, and took a photo of the box.”
“It was so much stress and for just one person to get back to me. What do I do here? Now if it happens to someone else, they don’t know what to do. They’ll just put them in a dumpster or throw them in the trash. I just don’t think it should have been this hard to figure out what to do with legal ballots. This is a country of freedom and our votes should matter and something like this should never happen,” Repaci said.
The LA County Registrar’s Office released a statement saying they “reissued new ballots to the impacted voters.”
“Early signs indicate that this was an incident of mail theft and not a directed attempt at disrupting the election. We are cooperating with the United States Postal Service and law enforcement to investigate,” the statement continued.
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