Authorities investigate ballot burning in Washington and Oregon

Published at: 29/10/2024 07:40 PM

In the United States, authorities announced an investigation after the burning of hundreds of ballots in the states of Washington and Oregon, the Prensa Latina website reported.

It points out that reports from law enforcement authorities in Portland, Oregon identified a “suspicious vehicle” linked to the incendiary devices that caused the fire in electoral boxes in both states, located in the northeast of the country.

At a press conference, police spokesman Mike Benner said that surveillance cameras captured a vehicle (Volvo) that stopped at a mailbox in Portland on Monday shortly before security officers detected a fire inside the box.

According to the authorities, the flames affected three ballots in the Portland box and that hundreds of ballots were destroyed in the fire in the city of Vancouver, Washington.

They also said that enough material had been recovered from the incendiary devices to demonstrate that the two events were linked to each other and to a similar one that occurred on October 8 in Vancouver.

The polls in Washington and Oregon have fire extinguishing systems specially designed to neutralize any event of this nature.

The devices are activated when the temperature inside the mailboxes reaches a certain point, and coat the ballots with a fireproof powder.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security issued a recent intelligence bulletin in which they expressed concern about possible outbreaks of violence that could generate national extremists before and after the presidential elections in the current electoral context.

“They continue to create, exploit and promote narratives about the electoral process or legal decisions involving political figures, and we are concerned that these complaints may motivate some domestic violent extremists to participate in acts of violence, as we saw during the 2020 election cycle,” the text underlines.