The United States Postal Service and the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters are investigating after a woman reported finding a bag stuffed with valid and completed Santa Clara County ballots in a ravine in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The ballots reportedly ended up in a torn bag off Sugarloaf Road near Highway 17.
Lou and Janet Witkin, two of the people whose ballots were recovered, told NBC Bay Area they dropped their ballots off last Saturday at a post office on Payne Avenue in West San Jose.
"How? How did it get from the mailbox to Santa Cruz?" Janet Witkin said. "Just disappointing to me that something could have transpired."
"I’m interested in the facts," Lou Witkin said. "Wanted to see, well, what was the situation? Was it something that was dropped in transit? What were the circumstances?"
Julie Nieman would like to know as well.
She told NBC Bay Area she was riding her motorcycle to work when she spotted the torn bag and noticed the ballots.
Nieman said she feels like someone was trying to make sure the bag of ballots wouldn’t be found.
"They were trying to make it look like people wouldn’t find them," she said. "That’s the way I saw it. They were dumped over the edge of the road down this deep ravine. It goes pretty far and it’s very steep."
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NBC Bay Area reported the discovery to the Registrar of Voters and the postal service late Friday afternoon, so the investigation is in its early stages.
The Registrar of Voters was reluctant to speculate on exactly what happened or how the ballots reportedly ended up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, but it closely examined the pictures NBC Bay Area provided.
"Well, it appears in the pictures that there are ballots mixed in with non-election material," Shannon Bushey with the Registrar of Voters said. "So, with seeing that, you would think this may have come from the postal stream somehow."
The Registrar of Voters wanted to remind voters that they can track their ballot by going to its website to make sure it ends up where it’s supposed to.
The Santa Clara County Registrar's Office told NBC Bay Area Sunday that the postal inspector has the ballots now and is processing them as evidence.
The county attorney is working on getting the ballots back to the elections office, so they can be counted.
