Right-wing's viral 'ballots near a dumpster' claim walloped by expert

Once again, MAGA Republicans are spreading claims that ballots were found in a "dumpster" and that this is proof of widespread election fraud — but this isn't the case, Kate Starbird wrote for her Sensemaking Distortion Substack on Friday.

This time, the ballots in question were for an election in Washington State.

"At 3:44pm on Thursday April 16, Jim Walsh, GOP member of the WA State House of Representatives and Chair of the Washington Republican Party, posted a Facebook video from his office, where he was sitting at a table filled with stacks of mail-in ballots. In a stern tone, Walsh shared the 'breaking news' that a 'concerned citizen' had found a large box containing hundreds of ballots left 'next to a dumpster behind a strip mall in Renton (WA),'" wrote Starbird. Walsh garnered over 300,000 views on his post, and it was later picked up by KOMO, a local news outlet run by the far-right Sinclair Broadcast Group.

"Riveting, right? Except we’ve seen this one before," she wrote. "Not this exact one. But my team at the University of Washington has catalogued dozens of nearly identical rumors: mail-in ballots lost, found, stolen, discarded, destroyed, ditched, dumped, and/or delayed ... Standard tropes. Story elements that appear again and again in election rumors."

In reality, she continued, there are tons of security features around mail-in ballots and elections that would prevent bad actors from just tossing them in a dumpster with nobody noticing. "As King County election officials explain, there are multiple security measures that would ensure that 1) the people whose ballots had not arrived on time would have been able to get substitute ballots; 2) that two ballots would not have been counted for the same person; and 3) that signature verification would have prevented someone else from voting with another person’s ballots."

"We do not yet know why or how those mail-in ballots ended up being packed into a box and left near a dumpster," Starbird wrote. "We do not yet know whether the people who handled those discarded ballots were negligent or worse. But it is unlikely that the reasons or motives in this case had anything to do with elections. A good clue to that is that, according to another news report, the box they were found in was labelled 'ballots + jury duty.'"

Nonetheless, she wrote, these sorts of stories are worth paying attention to, because the "ballots near a dumpster" claim has popped up all over the country in different forms, with slightly different details, including another case in Sonoma County, California — but each time, it's misleading at best, omits key details, and doesn't indicate any fraud has taken place.

"As we head into the 2026 midterms, we can see that election deniers are content to replay some of their greatest hits from 2020 and that some Republicans are trying to use these rumors to justify attempts to tilt the playing field in their favor," Starbird concluded. "But now that we know the game, maybe we can prevent ourselves from getting played?"