Dozens of pieces of election mail, including blank mail-in ballots, were found strewn along Lake Wohlford Road in North County San Diego this week. The stretch sits east of East Valley Parkway, near the junction of Valley Center and Escondido, just weeks before the Nov. 3 election.
Scott Harmes stopped at a turnout along the road Thursday morning after hearing about the discovery. He found a few dozen pieces of election mail on the ground, roughly half of them unsigned mail-in ballots.
Harmes photographed the scene but deliberately did not touch anything. He drove straight to the sheriff’s office to report it.
Deputies went to the location later that day, but the ballots were already gone. The Sheriff’s Office says another driver had collected them and handed them to the Valley Center Post Office.
The San Diego County Registrar of Voters later confirmed the details. Twelve unvoted, unfilled mail ballot packets and 14 voter information pamphlets were found on the side of the road.
The Registrar said a concerned individual collected the materials a few hours later. The Postal Service confirmed the items were redelivered to addresses in Pauma Valley and Valley Center.
Harmes noted that the only mail on the road was ballots and voter guides. That detail, he said, casts doubt on the theory that a mailbag simply fell off a truck. In his words, the way the items were spread out looked as if they had been tossed from a moving car.
Harmes, a Republican, stressed that this is not a partisan issue. He asked whether the cause was negligence or malfeasance and said the episode shows the need for greater concern about the chain of custody of ballots.
Some of the affected voters could be identified from photos. Sandra Carey of Pauma Valley said no one should be taking people’s mail and dumping it on a road. She was told to call the Registrar back Monday to confirm whether anyone had voted in her name.
The county Registrar says there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in California or San Diego County, and that tampering reports are rare but taken seriously. The Postal Service said it forwarded questions to the Postal Inspection Service, and the Registrar said it would contact postal investigators.
Here is what remains unknown. No one has said how the ballots got to the roadside, whether mail was stolen, or who was responsible. Nothing reported so far suggests any ballot was filled out or altered.
The setting makes the question harder to wave away. California sends a ballot to nearly every active registered voter, and more than 85 percent of the state’s voters cast their ballots by mail. In Sacramento County, the share tops 94 percent.
Under state law, those ballots must go out at least 29 days before Election Day. That means millions of live ballots are moving through the mail system at once, each one a potential target for theft.
This is not the first time California ballots have turned up in the wrong place. In November 2022, roughly two dozen completed ballots were found tossed in a ravine near Sugarloaf Road and Highway 17 in Scotts Valley. Investigators said the Postal Service had been in possession of them.
In October 2024, weeks before that year’s election, a Sierra Madre homeowner pulled nearly a dozen mail-in ballots out of a storm drain. They were mixed in with junk mail and addressed to neighbors a block away in Arcadia.
In 2022, a woman walking her dog in East Hollywood found a tray holding about 104 unopened outbound ballots on a sidewalk. Los Angeles County reissued new ballots and said early signs pointed to mail theft.
And in August 2021, Torrance police found more than 300 unused recall election ballots in the car of a man passed out in a parking lot. Officers also found methamphetamine and a loaded gun. County officials said nothing indicated the ballots were taken to affect the outcome.
Each time, officials offered reassurance, and each time the ballots turned up in a place no voter would expect. The pattern is what fuels the argument that a system built on mailing a ballot to everyone leaves too many gaps.
That argument is now headed to the ballot box. Proposition 39, the voter ID initiative backed by Reform California and Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, will appear on the same Nov. 3 ballot.
If approved, voters would show government-issued ID at the polls, and mail voters would write the last four digits of a government ID number on their ballot envelope. That number would be matched against their registration record before the ballot counts. The measure also requires a free voter ID card and citizenship verification.
