WASHINGTON — An overwhelmed U.S. postal worker in Utah threw 300 mail-in ballots into a parking lot trash shortly before the state’s June 23 primary election in which both Democrats and Republicans were on the ballot, Justice Department officials said Tuesday. The 34-year-old mailman told investigators he had no political agenda and also dropped other mail when he abandoned the ballots, said Melissa Holyoak, the district’s federal prosecutor. of Utah. He said about 95% of voters do so by mail in the state, and it was still unclear whether they were ultimately able to cast their ballot. According to a government memo, Damon Matai Seei told investigators he wanted to pull ads to “lighten his workload” after feeling overwhelmed. “He claims he simply made a ‘bad decision’ out of ‘frustration’ and ‘laziness,'” the memo said. They said they had no intention of discarding any ballots. Seei no longer works for the U.S. Postal Service. He pleaded not guilty Tuesday to one count of destroying and delaying mail. The Trump administration has made investigating rare voter fraud a priority as President Donald Trump insists without evidence that noncitizens are voting in droves and has sought to limit mail-in voting. Last week, the Supreme Court refused to allow the president’s restrictions on mailing to be enforced. Trump has repeatedly made false claims that he won the 2020 election and also falsely claimed that he won the popular vote in 2016, yet the Trump administration has struggled throughout both terms to bring cases showing evidence of significant voter fraud. This despite a massive effort during Trump’s second term to obtain voter registration records from states in an attempt to determine whether there were any registered non-citizens. So far during the president’s second term, the Justice Department has charged 70 cases involving voter fraud. At least 174 million people are registered to vote in the United States. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said more cases were in process, but did not provide further details or a timeline. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Attorney General Blanche, this department is committed to protecting the vote of American citizens,” he said. Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is ramping up a long-running election monitoring program, but placing new emphasis on “ballot security” and staffing the effort with newly hired conservative staff who have replaced long-standing career employees, hundreds of whom have left en masse since Trump returned to office. The Civil Rights Division’s efforts to seize voter rolls have resulted in a series of court losses: 25 courts ruled against the federal government. Voting rights experts say isolated cases of fraud occur, as do problems with voting machines, but not on a scale that could have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden. But the materials the Justice Department releases could help fuel Trump’s broader narrative about the election. And with most voters disapproving of Trump’s presidency and saying his policies have hurt the economy, Republicans face a difficult outlook in the midterm elections. Earlier this month, the Justice Department filed five cases related to voting, four of which were brought against noncitizens. Last week, the Justice Department announced that 16 people had been charged in cases related to the election, and a press release mentioned that at least ten of them were legal permanent residents of the United States. The defendants were originally from Mexico, Nigeria, India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Antigua and Barbuda, Venezuela and Colombia. There was also a Russian defendant: Victoria Viktorivna Aquilina, a 42-year-old Russian citizen who entered the United States as an au pair in her early 20s, was accused of casting a vote in the 2024 election. Trump, who until he won the 2024 election faced federal criminal charges for his efforts to overturn his 2020 loss in the run-up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, said earlier this year that Republicans should “nationalize voting.” Meanwhile, Democrats have launched an “unprecedented” effort to combat a potential disruption to the 2026 election. Seei’s next court date is Nov. 30. His federal public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
