BELLEVUE, Wash. — Washington is a vote-by-mail state, meaning all registered voters receive a ballot in their mail to fill out.
But one King County woman told KING 5 Wednesday that she never could have anticipated receiving 16 unopened ballots addressed to her unit, under different names she had never heard before.
"I was in complete shock," said Jami Visaya, who rents a two-bedroom apartment in Bellevue. "My son and I moved in here on Oct. 3.”
Visaya said she noticed the first batch of ballots in her mailbox on Friday.
"There were about nine voter registration ballots that were not mine. They were addressed to other people, and so I thought that was strange, so I ended up returning them to the post office here."
She said she turned them into the employee at USPS.
"And said, 'Can you please make sure that these get to who they're going to?' And he just said he had a process that the post office follows," Visaya said. She said he took the nine ballots and did not give any further detail.
A few days later, Visaya said she opened her mailbox again and, this time, found seven additional ballots with different, unknown names. She said, again, they all were addressed to her building and unit.
"It's all names of, like, Indian descent and possibly Middle Eastern," she said.
At first, when KING 5 reached out to the King County Elections Office, Chief of Staff Kendall LeVan Hodson said she wondered if it may have been because the tenants who used to be registered at her apartment didn't update their address when they moved.
However, Visaya said most of the ballots are addressed to different last names, which leads her to believe the ballots do not belong to one, two, or even three prior households.
Plus, she said, "Management said no one's lived here for three months" before she moved in early October.
Visaya wonders, "Why didn't I get all of their other mail forwarded here, or junk mail, or anything like that?”
She said the mix-up gives her concern about a democratic election.
"I just feel like it's not fair for these individuals who do not have their ballot," said Visaya.
KING 5 helped to connect Visaya with LeVan Hodson at the elections office.
On that call, Visaya told her, "In 30 years of voting, I've never had that many ballots that don't belong to me, you know?"
LeVan Hodson explained to KING 5 that they have daily calls with the USPS, so they said they would bring the topic up to them immediately. The carrier delivers mail by address, not by name.
"Would you be alright with our folks coming to pick them up from you? That's gonna be probably the easiest way for us to sort it out," said LeVan Hodson. Visaya agreed.
LeVan Hodson told KING 5, "Even if someone gets a second ballot (or more), whether under their name or someone else’s, we’ll only ever count one ballot per registered voter with their matching signature."
On the phone call, Visaya asked her, "Are you going to make sure that it gets expedited to the recipients?”
"We can actually see in our system, like, where we have mailed ballots to them and updated their address and things like that," said LeVan Hodson. "Yeah, if we need to get them a replacement ballot, we’ll get that out. If we need to, you know, update their registration to a different address, we'll do that as well.”
Time is of the essence: if you’re mailing your ballot in, the Washington Secretary of State’s office recommends you mail it by a week prior to Election Day, Nov. 5. However, mail-in ballots postmarked by Nov. 5 will be accepted, and people can still utilize ballot drop boxes, or vote in person.
For more info on Washington's vote-by-mail process, click here.