CNN —
Minneapolis-area officials on Friday immediately fired an election worker who left several boxes of mail-in ballots unattended while delivering them to election offices.
employee car photo Outside Edina City Hall, an open trunk containing nearly a dozen boxes of ballots was circulated on social media Friday. Local Republican Party officials and supporters of Donald Trump, who has a large online following, shared the image and used the gaffe to question the security of voting by mail.
Officials in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis and the neighboring suburb of Edina, said in a statement Friday that there was “no evidence of tampering” while the ballots were unattended.
They posted 18 minutes of surveillance footage on YouTube showing that no one interfered with the ballots during the nearly nine minutes the parking lot was left unattended with the trunk open.
The speed with which Hennepin County released multiple statements and surveillance footage explaining the situation shows how aggressively election officials are trying to combat online disinformation that is spreading like wildfire to millions.
County officials issued a separate statement Saturday saying they had fired an employee after admitting that they did not follow procedures for taking ballots from drop boxes to election offices.
“Hennepin County acknowledges that this code violation occurred, should not have occurred, and is unacceptable. The county and its carrier have taken corrective action to prevent it from happening again,” the statement said. “The county has confirmed that the driver has been fired.”
Officials said the ballots in the boxes were fully “controlled” and that there was “no evidence of tampering” on the box seals. Additionally, he said all individual ballots are still in a “sealed state,” meaning no one has attempted to open them or change anyone’s vote.
“Election security is of the utmost importance and leaving ballots unattended is never acceptable,” Hennepin County Auditor Daniel Logan said in a statement. “Hennepin County has strengthened its transportation procedures with county staff and vendors. Incidents like this highlight the value of strong processing and storage processes to address risk and ensure integrity can be verified. .”
Experts say mail-in voting has no paper trail and no security measures to prevent fraud, despite President Trump’s years-long efforts to attack the process with false claims that it is plagued by widespread fraud. It states that it is safe due to double safeguards.
The ballots in question were not actually mailed, but instead were left in drop boxes by voters, picked up by election officials, and delivered to election offices for processing.
Trump and Republicans largely oppose Dropbox, saying it is susceptible to fraud and manipulation during the money transfer process.
Although isolated fraud and fraud have been linked to dropboxes, there is no widespread voter fraud through dropboxes or other means in U.S. elections.
Drop boxes are locked, sometimes chained to the ground, and in most jurisdictions are monitored 24 hours a day. Strict chain-of-custody rules are in place for how these ballots are handled.
