A mystery involving county Bureau of Elections envelopes and a Woodlyn dumpster
A strange situation has emerged where a smattering of envelopes of the Delaware County Bureau of Elections was found in the vicinity of a Woodlyn dumpster miles away from that county office.
Some residents, some of whom have questioned election practices in the past, voiced concern about an impact to the chain of custody while county officials said nothing is amiss as these particular envelopes are not required to be retained and are tantamount to a sticker.
Both sides agree that the envelopes did not contain either completed mail-in ballot applications or ballots themselves.
It begins as Joy Schwartz of Drexel Hill told county council when she received a message and photos Feb. 18 from a resident of Woodlyn who’d been feeding stray cats in the back of a Woodlyn shopping center.
In the pictures, she said, was a red dumpster with snow and ice around it as well as business-sized envelopes that Schwartz said were addressed to the county Bureau of Elections.
“They’re postage paid and date stamped by the Philadelphia Post Office Feb. 6 or Feb. 7,” she said. “I found it really odd that mail from the Bureau of Elections would be discarded at that location.”
Upon getting that message, Schwartz said she and some others went to the site.
“I brought some of them home,” she said of the envelopes, “put them out on the radiator to dry them. Once they were dried, I could see that they had been sliced across the bottom and that they had been emptied, so apparently they had been received by the Elections Office.”
Schwartz said a group known as the Delco Election Deep Divers are now called the Delco Election Dumpster Divers.
“We were perplexed that these are potentially important records that were discarded in this sloppy manner at a private business location,” she said. “Now, we’re not alleging any fraud here, but I really would like to know in what possible scenario would returned, sliced, emptied, postage-paid, date-stamped, mail-in ballot request envelopes labeled “Official Election Mail” be doing all around a random dumpster in a random parking lot behind a random shopping strip about 4 miles from the Delco election offices?”
A Radnor resident, John Child, said 300 envelopes were found.
“If something is timestamped, it’s not trash,” he said. “It’s not stationery … This is part of the election record. It has to be kept for 22 months.”
Concord resident Carris Kocher added, “Preserving the application form tied to its original postmarked envelope maintains this chain … Discarding this envelope severs this evidentiary link.”
County: Envelopes ‘irrelevant’
But county officials emphatically state no wrongdoing on the county’s end occurred and no election law was violated.
Delaware County says that while it is a mystery how these county envelopes ended up scattered around miles away from the election offices, no election laws were broken.
County Council Vice Chair Christine Reuther explained that what matters with an application for a mail-in ballot is actually being received by county staff, not a postmark on an envelope.
“It’s not a question of when they were mailed,” she said. “That’s not relevant. They have to be received by the date that’s no later than … one week prior to the election. They have to be received. What matters is the timestamp on the application itself. The envelopes are really irrelevant.”
Delaware County Elections Director James Allen said mail-in ballot applications can be received in a variety of ways — by mail, in person and online, with proper identification — and that the actual applications are timestamped when they arrive at the county office.
Both he and Reuther also emphasized that the return envelope is not required to be kept.
“We are required, and we do keep, all records that are requisite to voting,” Allen said. “For example, the application we keep … That return envelope for the application — not for the ballot but for the application — is not requisite to voting.”
The director said the election process has not been tainted.
“It’s completely false to say that this is some kind of element in the chain of custody,” Allen said. “This is a nonserious set of claims. This is just the latest in frivolous complaints. We properly disposed of them in Chester. How some of them ended up elsewhere is open to debate … Somehow someone either pulled or got a hold of a bag of trash, and it is trash. It’s not some holy grail record that’s supposed to be maintained.”
Of those bringing the issue up, Allen said, “Their consistent MO is to accuse first and ask questions later.”
‘Who’s littering?’
Reiterating that the county does dispose of its trash appropriately, Reuther read the email response Allen gave to Child regarding the envelopes:
“These empty business reply mail envelopes are not documents, papers or records that are requisite to voting. They are not now and never have been required to be retained. They are in the same category as ‘I Voted’ stickers and polling place signage.
“The application themselves, which contain the voter’s signature, identifying information and requests under the law for ballots are records that are requisite to voting and must be retained for a period.
“The secrecy envelopes that the ballots are legally required to arrive in, the ballots not the ballot applications are legally required to arrive in are records that are requisite to voting and must be retained for a period.
“The declaration envelopes that the voters are legally required to sign to declare their ability to vote in the election are records that are requisite to voting and must be retained.
“The provisional ballot envelopes that the voters and the poll workers are required to fill out and sign are records that are requisite to voting and must be retained.
“These general business, postage paid envelopes that we send out along with the annual letter every year to people or the annual application that goes out every year to people who have requested it so that they can get mail-in voting, they can file applications for mail-in ballots are not records that are requisite to voting that must be retained.”
The council vice chair said the crux of the matter is how these envelopes got here.
“The only nefarious thing that I can think about is why were these ballots found artistically spread about upon the snow in three different locations and how did that happen,” she said.
Allen said he only knew of similar empty envelopes that were also found in Swarthmore.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me because nobody at the county is going to haul empty envelopes around and drop them off in three different places,” Reuther said. “My question is who was dumpster diving to pull those things out and scatter them around to get photo ops? That’s my question. To me, the big issue is who’s littering?”
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