11 ballots found in someone else’s mail

SANTA FE, N.M. – A Santa Fe couple said they received 11 mail-in ballots addressed to different people, raising questions about how the voted ballots ended up in their mail.

With less than a week until New Mexico chooses its next governor, Santa Fe County Clerk Katharine Clark said the ballots appeared with the couple’s vacation-hold mail and were already live.

“I looked at them and I realized they were voted ballots, meaning that they had they were supposed to have come back to us because you know voted ballots were inside of them,” Clark said.

Clark said she picked up the ballots herself after seeing a Nextdoor post from the couple.

“He was waiting for me by his gate, he escorted me back to his house. We, you know, I photographed the ballots. We, you know, signed the chain of custody form,” Clark said.

She said she could not bring the ballots back into the clerk’s office right away because the absentee board has to review them.

“What the absentee board is checking is to make sure those voters haven’t somehow already gone voted in person because their ballot was so delayed in getting back to us.” Clark added with elections, mistakes can happen, “You know, unfortunately elections is a very human process. You know humans gonna human, and some mistakes do get made.”

Clark said her office has seen an uptick in mail problems.

“We’ve actually seen several pieces of mail that have been absolutely torn in half, ballots that have been damaged by the sorting equipment, and we’ve had to alert the voter,” Clark said.

She said the county has seen an uptick in mistakes from the Postal Service during the high-volume election season.

“We have had some mistakes made by the postal service, or just things that were, you know, part of the fact that the mail is processing a lot of high-volume bits of mail during election season.” Clark said, “So I think what happened is probably I’m guessing the you know outgoing mail was stuck there, and then you know, whoever put it there forgot that that’s where they put it. So we do know the postal service is understaffed. We do know there’s been some changes at the national level, and so we’re we’re certain it was a human error.”

Clark said the county alerted the post office and said it is looking into what happened.

A spokesperson with the United State Postal Service sent us the following statement:

“The Postal Service takes seriously its role to deliver the nation’s Election Mail in a timely manner. The incident in question has been reviewed by local management and determined to be an isolated, inadvertent error. 

The issue has been resolved, we have been in communication with the election office, and the employee involved has been reminded of proper mail handling processes and procedures.”

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