Rep. Jim Walsh - Did Hundreds Of Ballots End Up In The Trash?

Hundreds of ballots from recent Washington elections were reportedly found sitting near a dumpster in a Renton strip mall parking lot, raising new questions about election security and chain of custody in the state’s mail-in voting system. Officials are now investigating as critics argue the incident could further damage public trust.

Rep. Jim Walsh joins the program to discuss what’s been uncovered, what investigators know so far, and whether Washington’s voting system is as secure as voters are told.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you. And I I want to invite your phone calls in a moment. But first, I want to talk about missing ballots that were discovered, and they were actually discovered back in February, but they came to Representative Jim Walsh's attention. And it seems the timing is just absolutely fantastic. I mean, Jim ought to be buying lottery tickets these days because as I understand it, the same day that he was told about the 400 ballots, most of them unopened and unvoted, that were brought into the Bellevue headquarters of the Washington State Republican Party came on the same day that Democrat U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell said on X, a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud in the Northwest. Hey, Representative Walsh, welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Good to talk to you, Lars. Yes. Senator Cantwell uh looks like we got struck by lightning 400 times. Um this is just a story that's coming together on a bunch of fronts, Lars. As you know, the in DC they're working on the SAVE Act, which is an election reform bill, requires voter ID and some other good reforms. Uh in Washington State, we've got an initiative outgathering signatures that requires voter ID and helps with these problems. But the uh this matter of these ballots, and I should say there's a little breaking news, the U.S. postal inspectors picked up the ballots today. So the federal agency is investigating what happened here and why. Uh but these ballots are proof and really undeniable proof that the broken chain of custody in how ballots are handled when they're mailed out to voters and mailed or dropped off back again to the election offices is not secure. I mean, the broken chain of custody is a security problem. And and while that's not a smoking gun of fraudulent votes, this is the opportunity for fraud. This is the occasion for fraud. And politicians like Senator Cantwell need to open their eyes and see that mail-in voting i needs improvement on security.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

It's not secure. Do you think it would help Representative Walsh if you pointed out to her that the guy who one of the guys who was in charge of a presidential commission just a few years ago, Jimmy Carter, had said uh the biggest opportunity for fraud was in absentee and mail-in voting. And he thought that was a that was a tremendous opportunity for fraud. And he's a Democrat. And she's a Democrat. You know, I did the did the postal inspectors, when they picked this up, did they indicate they might be able to find out where how these ballots went sideways somewhere? Because they should have, if they've got tracking numbers on them or anything else that would track them back to where they originated, uh that is that gonna give them enough to be able to find out how they end up found next to a dumpster in Renton? Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 3:11

Uh well, I mean, they're they're good, I mean, they're basically detectives, these postal inspectors. I mean, they're not gonna say too much about what their plans are for their investigation, but yeah, they're trying to figure out what happened, where this went off the rails. And and the thing is the ballots, it would be so easy, Lars, to put a conventional tracking code on the outside of the envelope to track it. They don't have that, at least not in Washington. And and we can't track them the way that that uh an Amazon package can be tracked or a a FedEx package can be tracked. Uh in in in most shipping these days, that technology exists and it's a it's a it's a given.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

And we're not doing that enough here. Well, except Representative Walsh, the only problem with doing it here is I have a I have another concern, and that is I don't want anybody to know what how I voted. I mean, the fact that I cast a ballot is a public record. Anybody can go down, look up my name, and and find out whether or not I cast a ballot in the last election or not, because I vote in Washington State. Um but but they don't know how I voted. And what I worry about is if those tracking numbers were somehow available to people, and they said at some point those ballots get taken out of the envelope. And if you can connect the votes that were cast on a ballot with the name of the voter, you have something that ordinarily Americans have an expectation, a legal expectation, that their votes will not be known. And that might go away.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

You're guaranteed the right of a secret ballot, anonymous voting in the United States. So it's it's more than just uh a tradition, it's a c it's it's a constitutional right you have. We all have as voters. Uh we can do this, Lars, without marking the ballot itself. Yep. The tracking could be on the outer envelope that goes from in in Washington, every state does a little different, but in Washington, it's from the counties are in charge of the mailing out the ballots. So the outside of the envelope is what comes goes from the county election official to you, the voter. And then there's a return envelope in there that goes from you, the voter, back to the county election office. We could put the tracking numbers on those outer envelopes without marking the ballot inside the envelopes. And and to a to a degree, that's what we do already, but we don't have the tracking technology set up on these envelopes so we know where they are step by step in the process. And ballots are valuable, Lars. I mean, it's like I I've said before, it's like putting a little sliver of gold in the mail and mailing it out and hoping for the best. Hey, Jim, just protect it.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

If if you went to Dino Rossi and said, hey, Dino, what what would an extra 500 ballots be worth to you way back when? And how much was a couple hundred votes, extra votes for Christine Gregoire worth? It was worth two terms, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:10

That is exactly right. And we've had close ones even more recent. In 2024, in the race for the Washington Commissioner of Public Lands, in the top two primary, the difference between second and third place was 50 votes large. And we had in this package, in this box of ballots that got lost and weren't delivered right, there were 30 ballots from that primary in 2024. Just in this one box.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

Well, and like you said, there is no chain of custody because chain of custody is important. I mean, whether it's evidence in a crime the police are investigating, whether it's showing that documents were signed in a certain order at a certain time for big financial transactions, and then you have something as important as an election, and you say, So how do you know this ballot actually came from Jim Walsh or Lars Lars? And you say, Well, we mailed it out to him three weeks before the election, and somebody marked it and somebody sent it back, and then we got it. We hope by election day, sometimes it's a couple of days later, and then we uh put it into a counting system and we kind of hope it got counted, but you know, we're not entirely sure whether the person casting the vote was Lars or Jim or somebody else entirely, because that is exactly what can happen. That is Jim Walsh. And Jim, of course, is State Representative Washington's 19th legislative district, and he's the guy who ended up with 400 ballots, most of them unopened and unvoted, brought to the Bellevue headquarters of the Washington State Republican Party. That was last week, and now they've been handed over to the Postal Inspection Service. They're gonna try and track down how did hundreds and hundreds of ballots go sideways. And do you believe Maria Cantwell, Democrat, who says, huh, you're more likely to be hit by lightning than to commit voter fraud? Sure, Senator, sure. Yeah, we believe that all day long. You got the Lars Larson show.