Brian Kernagis, a Vancouver-area marketing manager, voted early.
Around 5 or 6 p.m. on Oct. 27, a week before the general election last year, he put his and his girlfriend’s ballots directly in the ballot box drop box at the Fisher’s Landing Transit Center in Vancouver.
Their ballots laid there for hours, nestled among hundreds of other ballots in the drop box — ballots filled out by recent high school graduates and an 80-year-old married couple. Ballots from a speech pathologist. A wine consultant. A retired missionary. A bus driver. An online gaming obsessive. A middle-school Spanish teacher.
Then, just before 2:30 a.m., every single one of their ballots was set on fire. Someone else — someone still unknown — had inserted a custom device, welded from scrap metal and containing thermite, a dangerously volatile mix of aluminum powder and rust shavings. Security camera footage showed the ballot box exploding into flame. At least 494 ballots were damaged. And that’s only the ones they could successfully piece together.
As the news spread, partisan commenters across the country quickly speculated as to who the culprit might be — far-right extremists or left-wing radicals. Some longtime critics of Washington’s vote-by-mail system used the ballot box arsons to attack the process.
“WA needs to get back to in-person voting,” Washington GOP Chairman Jim Walsh declared in a statement to the Washington State Standard. “Our experiment with ‘100% mail-in-voting’ is not secure.”
To Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey, who has overseen elections in Vancouver for 27 years, it was an attack on democracy in the most literal sense. A ballot box in Portland, just across the river, had been hit too. His office scrambled to contact the 488 Vancouver voter names they could identify from the wreckage and urge them to vote again.
“They called me and said, ‘Your ballot was destroyed,’” Kernagis said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Three months later, the arsonist has not been caught. And Kimsey has scrambled to find ways to upgrade security for Clark County’s ballot boxes, including outfitting them with new security cameras and fire suppression systems. Yet the state funding that counties have been using to upgrade ballot box security is set to expire, meaning election offices may soon have even fewer options to bolster security to prevent future attacks.
He was hoping the Washington Legislature would take up the charge to improve ballot security statewide. But while lawmakers have floated a few minor proposals aimed at addressing ballot boxes this year, Kimsey said that, overall, he was “a little bit surprised about the lack of interest in the subject.”
Late last year, Kimsey presented to the Legislature a list of more robust reforms — ranging from reducing the number of potential ballot box targets to requiring observers to watch key ballot boxes at night.
But since then?
“Crickets,” he said.
Brain dump
Ever since the attacks on the ballot boxes, Kimsey has heard all kinds of concerns about ballot security.
“The hardest question I've had to answer,” Kimsey said in his December presentation, “is ‘How can I be confident that a ballot placed in a ballot drop box has been received by the elections office?’”
Kimsey presented his own “brain dump of ideas” to the Legislature as to what could be done to restore that confidence. Those ideas include:
“I certainly didn’t think all those ideas would be adopted into the law this session,” Kimsey said.
But even discussions that Kimsey was hoping for didn’t appear to have taken place, he said.
Several bills this year make modest attempts to address drop-box security. Senate Bill 5011, from Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, would simply require that the drop boxes be clearly labeled with warnings that tampering with the box could violate state or federal election laws.
"I'm not offering up that we're going to end this,” Wilson said. "Maybe we'll deter someone. Maybe a copycat.”
Kimsey is skeptical it will make much difference.
“Will it deter bad behavior? I think it’s pretty obvious that those people who did damage the drop box were quite aware it was illegal,” Kimsey said.
Wilson said he hadn’t seen Kimsey’s proposals, but that his focus was on low-hanging fruit during the limited time in this legislative session.
“I’m going to stick in anything I can, whether it’s a little bill or a big bill, to make the system safer and more secure,” Wilson said.
Another bill he proposed would establish an election security grant program from the secretary of state’s office. But that bill doesn’t have any funding attached to it.
"In order for that kind of grant program that he seems to envision to be effective, there needs to be a pretty significant amount of money attached to it, right?" Kimsey said. “If the only proposal is to create a grant program that doesn’t have any funding, that doesn’t do much.”
In fact, there already is a grant program. Since 2022, counties have been able to apply to the secretary of state’s office for up to $80,000 to upgrade their election security. Kimsey said he’s using it to install new ballot drop box cameras and improved fire suppression systems inside the boxes.
But Greg Tito, spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, said that funding stream — set up in response to concerns about foreign election interference in the wake of the 2020 election — is expiring. He said a request from the secretary of state’s office to continue to fund it was not included in then-Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed budget in December. (Brionna Aho, communications director for newly elected Gov. Bob Ferguson, emphasized that the new governor has not yet released his own proposed budget.)
“Unless the Legislature can act and put that back in, that is not in the budget,” Tito said. “It’s a step back, it feels like, from the security we enjoyed during the last election.”
The limits of security
Senate Majority Floor Leader Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane, said that the Legislature’s priorities for election security have been more focused on “making investments in safeguarding our elections to cyberattacks” than upgrading ballot drop boxes.
“Obviously, we’re in a tough fiscal crunch,” he said, adding that the Legislature is happy to examine whether ballot drop box security provisions need continued funding.
He’s opposed, however, to any proposals that might decrease access by cutting ballot boxes, and he would want to make sure ballot box observers don’t have the side-effect of intimidating would-be voters. He’s cautious that the price tag on cameras could be steep.
At a statewide level, costs can quickly become staggering: During the last week of the election, Kimsey hired 24/7 observers to guard the 22 ballot boxes in Clark County. It cost $125,000. Expand that to all 560 drop boxes in the state for all 30 days of the election, and it would cost more than $13 million. Even a more limited rollout could be expensive, Kimsey acknowledged. Upgrading the fire suppression systems is more affordable in comparison — he estimates it would cost only $5,000 per box.
Yet when facing a determined foe, it can be particularly difficult to guard against an attack.
Tim Scott, elections director of Portland’s Multnomah County, said his county had upgraded its ballot-box security long before this year’s election. During 2020, a central gathering site for the raucous Portland racial justice protests was just a few blocks away from the Multnomah County elections office, inspiring Multnomah County to ramp up security.
“We had patrols of the ballot boxes,” Scott said. “We had tons of security cameras.”
But a ballot drop box in Portland was hit by an arsonist the same night as Vancouver.
“We already had all of the best practices in place, and the attacks still happened,” Scott said.
In Portland’s case, only three ballots were damaged. Its drop box’s fire suppression system successfully triggered — Vancouver’s didn’t. But Scott said the two systems were nearly identical: He thinks the difference could have been anything from the shape of the drop boxes to the number of ballots in each box.
Kimsey approached a local company that produces fire suppression systems, Ceasefire, about installing upgraded devices that are customized to battle paper fires without damaging ballots.
Already, Clark County has installed the upgraded CeaseFire systems in all 22 ballot drop boxes, using secretary of state grant funding. But that’s just one county.
“You want similar treatment wherever you are in the state,” Kimsey said. “In order to create that security environment, there does need to be some funding made available.”
Votes preserved, votes destroyed
Law enforcement, meanwhile, still hasn’t identified the arsonist. The FBI has raised the reward money to $25,000 for information leading to an arrest. The motive remains a mystery.
While some media outlets have cited unnamed law enforcement sources claiming that the device that exploded in Vancouver had a “Free Gaza” or “Free Palestine” message on it, a spokesman for the FBI’s Seattle office declined to address those reports.
Kimsey said the only such message he’s aware of was on a slip of paper that was placed in a different Vancouver ballot box — not one that was attacked by the arsonist.
In his presentation before the Washington Legislature, Kimsey offered his own speculation as to the motive of the attacker.
“This is someone who doesn't like vote by mail. This is someone who wants to go back to polling places," Kimsey said. “Damaging ballot drop boxes is one of the best ways to undermine people's confidence in the vote-by-mail system.”
But there’s more than one way to have your vote destroyed.
In Clark County, over 1,875 ballots — nearly three times the number that were burned in front of Fisher's Landing — were rejected in the last election because county election officials concluded their signatures didn’t match. As InvestigateWest has previously reported, most ballots rejected for mismatched signatures are genuine, and the ballot rejection rates for mismatched signatures in Washington state tend to be higher for some minority groups. Washington’s signature ballot rejection rate is much higher than other states.
Comparatively, the damage done by the arsonist to the public’s right to vote was minimal. According to Kimsey, every single one of the 488 voters the auditor’s office reached out to about their destroyed ballots re-voted to ensure their vote counted.
Kernagis and his girlfriend, Clare Kachmar, were happy to have the chance to ensure their vote counted.
“If I had to do it three to four times, I would have done it three or four times,” Kachmar said.
InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. A Report for America corps member, Daniel Walters covers democracy and extremism across the region. He can be reached at daniel@investigatewest.org.
