Woman receives 16 ballots by mail in Bellevue, WA

A woman in Bellevue, Washington, has revealed that she received 16 mail-in ballots all addressed to her unit but under names she had never seen before.

Jami Visaya told KING 5 that she and her son moved into the two-bedroom apartment in early October, and that the first batch of around nine ballots arrived in her mailbox on October 25. "I was in complete shock."

"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 recalled speaking with an employee at the post office, saying, "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."

She opened her mailbox again a few days later to see an additional seven ballots, all with different names but addressed to her unit. "It's all names of, like, Indian descent and possibly Middle Eastern," she said.

King County Elections Office Chief of Staff Kendall LeVan Hodson questioned whether the ballots were for former tenants of the apartment who never changed their address once they moved.

However, Visaya said the ballots all contained different last names, leading her to believe that the ballots did not belong to different households that may have lived there before her, and she added, "Management said no one's lived here for three months" before she moved in.

"Why didn't I get all of their other mail forwarded here, or junk mail, or anything like that?"

KING 5 connected Visaya with LeVan Hodson for a call, during which Visaya said, "In 30 years of voting, I've never had that many ballots that don't belong to me, you know?"

LeVan Hodson told the outlet that they have daily calls with the post office and would bring the topic up to them immediately. "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," LeVan Hodson said.