Summary
- The Washington, D.C., Board of Elections sent this Daily Signal writer the mail-in ballots of four strangers.
- “It’s concerning that anyone could just take that, theoretically, and vote in my place,” one of those voters said.
- This situation is no one-off. It’s happening nationwide.
Two weeks ahead of the 2026 November midterm elections, which could change the balance of power in Congress, the Washington, D.C., Board of Elections sent me four strangers’ mail-in ballots.
This is not a one-off. It is happening to Americans across the country. Early voting has already begun for the midterms, and millions of unsecured mail-in ballots could have already been sent and submitted.
The Daily Signal decided to investigate these four ballots further. By obtaining the D.C. voter registration list, we confirmed the identities of the rightful owners and contacted one of them, a former tenant of my current residence.
D.C. Voter Says Mail Ballot Could Have Reached Wrong Hands
“It’s concerning that anyone could just take that, theoretically, and vote in my place,” said the D.C. voter who was granted anonymity to protect his privacy. The voter was registered as not affiliated with any party.
This would be a clear case of voter fraud, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.
“This is a pretty good example of how mail-in ballots can really be used to one party’s advantage, or one person’s advantage and to another person’s disadvantage,” he said, explaining that it’s the person doing his due diligence as a citizen who ultimately ends up harmed in the end.
“I think it’s pretty scary to think about how if these mail-in ballots are getting sent to the wrong addresses or people’s old addresses, I think that could have a pretty consequential impact in what’s going to be a really, really close election cycle,” he continued.
“You want to trust that people are going to do the right thing, but when it comes down to it, in a lot of these races, probably a couple of hundred votes are going to make a difference, that could be people taking someone else’s ballot and voting with it,” he said.
This voter did all the right things. He did his due diligence in exercising his right to vote. He voted in person, on Election Day, at the correct polling place. However, no one told him that in D.C., all voters are automatically sent a mail-in ballot for every election. A few months later, when the voter moved to a new address within the district, he didn’t think about updating his address on his voter registration because he lived in the same district.
“I would have liked to have had the option to sign up for a mail-in ballot, rather than just being blindly sent one,” he told the Daily Signal.
“I’m personally not a huge fan of the mail-in-ballots because I think this happens a lot,” the voter continued.
“Voter security is obviously a pretty big topic this election cycle, and so I think we’re seeing firsthand just how mail-in ballots especially, can really be a cause of concern in an area where people can definitely manipulate,” he said, referring to mail-in ballots.
The Wide-Open Door to Election Fraud
This situation is far from unique. People across America are receiving mail-in ballots at their home addresses, addressed to strangers. At the same time, people’s ballots are being placed in the hands of strangers, allowing a wide-open door for election fraud.
“You can find others in your same situation [with] these mail-out states all over the country,” Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and current chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Signal.
Two weeks out from Election Day, Cuccinelli says there is no way to ensure votes are secure, emphasizing the need to secure the election on the front end.
“It is a completely unsecured election. They’re virtually inviting you to vote all those ballots,” Cuccinelli told me, referring to the four ballots I received.
“This unbelievably disastrous abandonment of security of ballots is being repeated in maybe a dozen states,” he said.
California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington are all states that mail ballots to voters every election cycle, regardless of whether they want one or not. Even if you update your address and re-register to vote, there is no way to ensure a state’s secretary of state or election board will update the voter roll.
Cleta Mitchell, founder and chairman of the Election Integrity Network, says that once you are added to the voter rolls, it is nearly impossible to remove someone because they are so rarely checked.
“We need to return to in-person voting. That should be the default, in-person voting. The default should never be remote voting. That should be the exception, and then you can establish guardrails around that to manage the exception. What no one can manage is this massive unsupervised voting,” she told the Daily Signal.
Voting Rights Should Share No Party Lines
“All these concerns about the elections are shared by Democrat voters and unaffiliated voters. The voters, the general public, agrees with us,” Mitchell continued.
“We’re not the extremists. It’s the Democrat members of Congress, the Democrat elected officials, and the left wing advocacy groups. They’re the ones who are the outliers. The American people want to be able to trust that the elections are accurate and that they are transparent. I think the public gets sick of the quote glitches and errors.
“The Left likes the mess,” Cuccinelli said, “because it’s to their strategic advantage that there be a mess.”
The Washington, D.C., Board of Elections did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Daily Signal. I have also submitted a civil rights voting violation claim with the Department of Justice, and the outcome is pending.
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
