"Upstanding citizens" found hundreds of ballots on the side of a road and turned them in — undamaged and untampered with — in Florida's most populous county.
Containers filled with ballots of Miami-Dade County voters fell out of a county truck when a worker "forgot to lock the back" of the vehicle, Christina White, the county’s elections supervisor, told the Miami Herald on Tuesday morning. The worker drove off and a sealed bin and sealed bag fell out, she said.
White said the containers remained sealed and the ballots inside were previously scanned and tabulated at an early-voting site a day earlier.
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“Thankfully, this was observed in real time by upstanding citizens who did the right thing and turned the bin and bag into the police department,” White said.
A driver found the container and satchel filled with ballots on a roadway near Florida’s Turnpike in Cutler Bay. Video showed the driver exiting his vehicle, rescuing the ballots from an intersection, and remarking the containers were "sealed" and labeled "official materials."
"That's crazy!" the driver said in the video.
White told the newspaper that even though it was "unintentional," the elections department has "zero tolerance for error" and terminated the worker.
The incident comes days after a contract postal worker in Orange County, Florida, was criminally charged after authorities said he tossed election-related mail in the woods.
In that incident, the postal worker left "with a very large quantity of U.S. Mail' to deliver Tuesday but instead finished the route earlier than expected," authorities said, according to Florida Politics. The worker's boss checked the GPS under his vehicle and discovered he veered off route.
A coworker drove to the lot and found mail strewn around bushes and trees. Surveillance footage nearby showed the postal worker dumped the mail. Around 1,000 mail items were discarded, including 400 political mailings, and at least one mail-in ballot.
Watch the video below or at this link.
Last night, an individual came across a box full of ballots and other documents on exit 11 of the Turnpike, at the intersection of 211th St. in Cutler Bay. He immediately picked them up and took them to the police station, where they have been properly secured. No information yet… pic.twitter.com/HQP6glsm9b
— ONLY in DADE (@ONLYinDADE) October 29, 2024