Some King County voters received mysterious mailings due to clerical error

King County Elections said a “clerical error” is to blame for problems with a recent mailing. The agency sent about 14,000 letters to addresses that did not match the names on the envelope. Some recipients said the mistake created confusion and could harm public trust in the agency.

Jack Walsh is a city councilmember in Federal Way, in South King County, currently seeking re-election. He told KUOW all the voters in his household recently received letters from King County Elections bearing their address, but with other people’s first and last names. Only their middle names or initials were correct.

When he heard similar reports from friends, he became alarmed. Walsh said he contacted King County Elections and was told there had been a mix-up. Walsh called the mistake “gross incompetence” and a waste of public money. He said he’s also worried that mistakes like this could harm public trust.

“One of the things it can do is make people doubt the election process,” he said. “Even if the election process itself is going perfectly, people may doubt it and say, ‘If there’s problems, I’m not even going to turn in my ballot.’”

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The mailing was not a ballot, as Walsh initially feared, but a letter informing people that they can request elections materials in languages other than English.

Halei Watkins, the communications manager for King County Elections, said the agency sent the letter around the same time that ballots went in the mail, “because folks are paying attention to elections at this time we were hoping it would hook them in that way.”

She said the letter went to 30,000 voters “who live in ZIP codes that have a higher likelihood of communities that speak Russian or Somali, based on 2020 census data,” to let them know that they can now request elections materials in those languages.

“Unfortunately, due to a clerical error, about half of the mailings that we sent out did feature the wrong names,” Watkins said. “Nothing in the envelope is tied to a specific voter, so we’ve been telling folks, ‘If it doesn’t apply to you, just go ahead and recycle it.’ But of course it can be a little confusing when you get something from us that doesn’t have the correct name on it.”

Watkins said King County Elections has heard from about 50 people who had questions about the mailing.

“Anytime that happens, of course our concern is going to be that it casts a greater shadow on elections," She said. "In every conversation we’ve had with voters so far they’ve been really understanding about the issue.“

In the future, Watkins said, “We won’t be doing that again.”

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She said this mailing came from the outreach team but in the future all elections mailings will be put to the same quality control standards used when sending ballots and voter registration cards.

“It’s just about incorporating those best practices we already do in other parts of the organization into every single mailing,” she said.

Meanwhile the mailings have become a campaign issue. The race for the director of King County Elections is on the Nov. 7 ballot. King County Elections Director Julie Wise, the incumbent, is seeking a third term.

Her challenger is Doug Basler, who has previously made multiple runs for Congress. Basler’s campaign produced a video highlighting the misaddressed mailing, declaring, “This is a huge problem.”

Basler runs a digital marketing company and was a plaintiff in an unsuccessful lawsuit accusing state elections officials including Wise of illegally switching and adding votes in the 2020 election. The lawsuit was thrown out this year for lack of evidence.