Is this an example of a voter fraud scheme or something else?

I can’t answer for California, but in my state, they haven’t even been mailed out to the voters yet.They won’t be mailed until Sept. 15th.

^I tried finding when the ballots are/were sent out in CA, but couldn’t. All I could find is that they have to be sent by Oct 25th. But that appeared to be for requested ballots and not the blanket mailing CA was going to do per the governor’s EO.

I have no idea, but there are other possible explanations, such as this one, documented and reported only a couple of years ago.

We’ve also been seeing an increasing incidence of mail theft in our area in the last few years, with thieves getting more brazen about picking up parcels from porches and pinching envelopes out of home mailboxes. People are looking for checks and also goods that they can sell. That aim wouldn’t explain dumping unopened mail, but even if I can’t see a connection, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

That doesn’t rule out the possibility of voter mail fraud, but it does expand the range of options. It’s hard for me to imagine any serious mail fraudster going to the trouble of capturing a truckload of mail and then dumping it conspicuously in a parking lot in view of security cameras. Maybe we should ask if this is someone “testing” the system?

I live in California, ballots have not been mailed yet, they go out in October.

This has a video of the stuff. It is all in official US Mail bags…unopened. It is bizarre because I can’t see how they got it in the first place, nor why they wouldn’t open it and then just dumped it.

The idea is far fetched that this is an example of an effort to interfere with an election 2 months away. My guess is that someone stole the truck and disposed of the mail to obtain an empty truck. From the photos, it’s evident that most of the parcels are wrapped in identical plastic which would lead me to think that the truck had been rented to either deliver to or retrieve the packages from a postal concentration center. My bet is that the details will arrive quickly in this incident.

My guess is that someone’s aim was to steal the truck, not the mail. The mail was of no purpose to the perpetrators.

@Darth_Algar I thought about that, but what that means is that they stole the truck, moved all the mail over to a Budget Rent-a-truck, and then drove it off to dump it. Seems a really strange way to do things.

But voter fraud is the logical leap to make here?

Well, just to play with the thought, what if the purpose was to steal the mail truck—in order to perpetrate a voter fraud with it two months from now?

It does seem like it would be easier to paint a truck as a facsimile of a U.S. Mail vehicle than to steal one and empty it.

Possibly this was a dry run for some part of a future crime, or even a distraction of some sort. Was the mail found to be actual, genuine postal mail?

@Jeruba Yes, it was actual, genuine postal mail, still sealed in plastic mail bags. The second link I posted showed video footage of the truck and then the owner of the business who found it took a video of the piles of mail with her phone.

Ok, here’s a more plausible hypothesis.

We know the postal service has been struggling with its operations under the current Postmaster General, who has made some crippling decisions. One of the symptoms has been a backlog of undelivered mail, despite the heroic efforts of reduced staffs. Late delivery could make them look really bad, whereas nondelivery could be someone else’s fault.

Suppose an exasperated or desperate postmaster told his crew, “Just get that load out of here, but don’t use one of our vehicles to do it.”

So the shift lead goes out and rents a truck. They dump the mail in a visible place because they want the people to get their stuff in the end, but they need plausible deniability on who was responsible for it.

I just made this up. It’s a guess. I don’t have any actual information.

Very interesting story. Somebody is up to no good. But who is it and what criminal purpose?

@si3tech Exactly.