Ballot box fires stoke fears of election violence

Two ballot drop box fires in the Pacific Northwest this week have stoked concerns about election security and the risk of violence in the 2024 election days before voting concludes.

Arson burned hundreds of ballots in what one official called “a direct attack on democracy” in Vancouver, Wash., and harmed a small handful in nearby Portland, Ore. The pair of incidents mark rare disruptions to election administration, experts stressed, but they raise worries about whether more threats or attacks are to come amid a tense, polarized race — and whether the incidents could sow voter distrust in the systems. 

“There’s this larger environment of distrust in our elections that has generated a set of security and safety concerns that ballot drop boxes are just one part of,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. “These sorts of actions, like bombing these drop boxes, I think … are ultimately about increasing fear, increasing distrust and potentially discouraging people from voting.”

Officials in Oregon and Washington have said the evidence suggests the two incidents this week, plus a third possible arson incident in the Evergreen State last month, are connected. A suspect description and vehicle have been identified, and the Portland Police Bureau said Wednesday that investigators believe “it is possible that the suspect intends to continue these targeted attacks.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been on alert in the run-up to Election Day that drop boxes could be targeted by “domestic violent extremists” this cycle, according to internal bulletins, and experts are now concerned about continued or copycat attacks after the Pacific Northwest fires. 

“Some social media users are discussing and encouraging various methods of sabotaging ballot drop boxes and avoiding detection, likely heightening the potential for targeting of this election infrastructure through the 2024 election cycle,” the DHS concluded in a September memo.

The Vancouver drop box was notably in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where incumbent Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D) faces a rematch against Republican Joe Kent in one of the cycle’s most competitive races. The Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman noted on social platform X, replying to the arson reports, that the Democrat beat Kent by just 2,629 votes in the midterms. 

The incidents also risk shaking voter confidence in an already fraught election cycle. 

Though a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Research Center found most voters have confidence their local and state officials will accurately count ballots, more than half of Republican voters in a YouGov survey last month said they’re worried poll workers could tamper with their ballots. Roughly three-quarters of voters in the AP polling also said that they’re at least somewhat concerned about violence over the election outcome.

“Sometimes the fear, the concern around it is enough to impact people’s sense of security. … People will see the headlines and wonder ‘Could this happen to my local drop box?’” Romero said. 

That’s why experts, who have been working overtime to debunk rumors and break through misinformation online ahead of Election Day, are pointing to how this week’s ballot drop box fires were handled as a positive sign of voting security for 2024.

An incendiary device was placed inside the Portland ballot box, officials said, but fire suppressant inside protected “virtually all” the ballots. Just three ballots were identified as damaged, and the affected voters were contacted for replacements. 

Hundreds of ballots were damaged at the Vancouver location, where a suspected incendiary device was found next to the drop box. It’s possible some ballots were completely burned, and a half-dozen were unidentifiable. But elections staff were able to identify 488 damaged ballots, according to the county. 

As of Tuesday evening, 345 of those voters had already contacted the Clark County office to request a replacement, and new ballots were mailed to the remaining identified voters on Thursday. 

“This is certainly a threat that election officials have anticipated could happen in any given election from the moment we started installing drop boxes. So officials in Oregon and Washington really tried to make plans to respond to this, and prevent it from happening,” said Kim Wyman, a senior fellow with Bipartisan Policy Center's Elections Project and former Republican secretary of state in Washington. 

“The good news is that election officials have really been preparing for this week for the last four years, and they’ve tried to build in as many security measures that they can for voters at polling places and early voting centers, [and] around mail-in ballots,” Wyman said, though she noted experts are bracing for “a spike in activity” as Election Day nears. 

Oregon and Washington are both vote-by-mail states and have long used drop boxes to collect ballots. More states began embracing the tools last cycle to grapple with administration difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic. The boxes served as a way to avoid large crowds at polling places and have been seen as a more reliable delivery method than the U.S. Postal Service, due in part to confusion with postmarks and deadlines.

The boxes have nevertheless drawn controversy amid an ongoing swirl of election conspiracies in recent years. Former President Trump, for one, has previously cast doubt on mail-in voting and argued the boxes opened ballots up to be tampered with. An Associated Press investigation in 2022 debunked those claims, finding that the expanded use of drop boxes in 2020 did not lead to fraud, theft or other issues that could have swayed the results. 

“There’s almost no method of voting that’s invulnerable from somebody going to do something unexpected,” said Paul Gronke, director of the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland. But for the individual voter, he said, drop boxes are one of the safest methods of ensuring their votes are delivered on time.

Still, other election security-related concerns loom over the 2024 homestretch. Threats and scrutiny often linked to false claims of voter fraud have contributed to a mass exodus of local election officials in recent years, raising alarms about understaffed and inexperienced teams left to handle the process — and to face potential new threats. 

Experts are also worried about misinformation, artificial intelligence and foreign influence on elections. And, as Trump and others continue to tout disproven claims about widespread fraud in the 2020 results, experts are on high alert for protests and violence postelection, nearly four years after the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol. 

The presidential race is on a razor’s edge as Election Day nears, and the latest polling averages from Decision Desk HQ and The Hill put Harris up by 0.3 points nationally, with similarly tight margins in key battlegrounds. 

Jim Messina, who served as a White House adviser to former President Obama, said last month that Trump “is going to try to steal this.”

Trump’s former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin has said the Biden administration “needs to be ready to secure the Capitol and state capitols.” 

"When you tell the population repeatedly, over and over again for years, that the election has been stolen and that election officials can't be trusted— that's inevitably going to lead to distrust of our election system and the risk of violence,” Ben Berwick, counsel at the nonpartisan nonprofit Protect Democracy, told The Hill in an interview last week. 

But even in the face of “all this gloom and doom” around threats, conspiracies and potential violence, Wyman urged voters to remember that election officials have been readying to take on 2024 since 2020. 

“A lot of planning has gone into this election by election officials across the country. They’ve been trying to think about those threats and have plans in place if something does materialize. They’ve been working with law enforcement and their federal partners to really vet those plans and be ready,” she said. “People should feel safe going to their polling places on Election Day and participating in the election.”