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Jami Visaya found 16 ballots addressed to different people delivered to her apartment. (Credit: KING 5)

A Washington woman was stunned to discover 16 unopened ballots addressed to different names, flooding her mailbox just days before the critical Election Day.

Jami Visaya, who moved into her new Bellevue apartment in early October, received the ballots that raised immediate red flags about the reliability of Washington’s mail-in voting system.

“I was in complete shock,” Visaya told KING 5. Moving in with her son only four weeks ago, she never anticipated the heap of ballots, all with unfamiliar names, being sent to her new address.

The issue emerged with the first wave of nine ballots, which Visaya attempted to return to the USPS for proper handling.

“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.”

“[I] 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 said.

Jami Visaya found 16 ballots addressed to different people delivered to her apartment. (Credit: KING 5)

Days later, another seven ballots, also addressed to unknown individuals, arrived. With her ballot now surrounded by others with last names indicating possibly “Indian descent and possibly Middle Eastern,” Visaya found herself grappling with whether Washington’s vote-by-mail system is prepared to protect the integrity of every vote.

“I feel like it’s not fair for these individuals who do not have their ballot,” she said, and pointedly added her concern about the election’s integrity as a whole.

When KING 5 News reached out to the King County Elections Office, Chief of Staff Kendall LeVan Hodson suggested the ballots could have been meant for previous tenants who hadn’t updated their addresses.

But this reasoning fell short as Visaya noted that her building management confirmed no one had lived in the unit for at least three months prior to her move-in.

In a phone call arranged by KING 5, Visaya confronted Hodson, stating, “In 30 years of voting, I’ve never had that many ballots that don’t belong to me, you know?”

KIRO 7 also reported on this alarming incident:

Visaya returned them to the King County Election office which is working to find the status and location of the people whose names are on the envelopes.

“We won’t know until we get into the weeds a little bit but we should be able to figure out what the story is and they ended up going to places when they should have been going to somewhere else,” said Kendall Hodson, the King County Elections Chief of Staff.

If they find the voters moved, they will try to get them replacement ballots by November 5. If they show up on another state’s voter rolls, they will be removed from Washington’s. Jami said she has voted without issue and hopes the people who don’t have their ballots can make their voices heard.

“My real hope is that they somehow find their way to their owner,” Visaya said.

Hodson wasn’t surprised this happened at an apartment complex but says 16 ballots is more than what usually gets reported.

“If you don’t update your mailing address when you move, we’re still going to mail that ballot to your old house and that’s totally fine,” Hodson said.

If someone more nefarious than Visaya tried to fill out the ballots, Hodson said the unique bar code would have verified if the voter was registered, caught if the real voter had already voted and signature verification would catch a fraudulent signature.

“We’re not going to even open that ballot until we’ve done those three things to confirm that they are able to vote,” Hodson said.

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