Postal Worker Accused of Tossing 300 Mail-In Ballots in Parking Lot Dumpster

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced an indictment to seek charges against a Utah postal service letter carrier who is accused of throwing 300 mail-in ballots he was supposed to deliver to residents for the June primary into a garbage bin in a church parking lot.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a news conference in Washington on Sept. 22 that the letter carrier knew that the mail he was throwing away was mail-in ballots.

“Election integrity—which includes ballot integrity, by the way—should be a nonpartisan issue,” McCotter said. “The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election. But the actions of even one malicious actor on the ground can fatally undercut that security.”

The mail carrier was identified in the indictment as Damon Matai Seei.

He was charged with unlawful secretion, destruction, and delay of mail.

The DOJ’s detention memo states that Seei admitted to throwing away mail on June 3, 2026, because he wanted to “lighten his workload.” The DOJ presumed that the motive was to go home earlier.

Seei was covering another carrier’s route for that day.

Several residents in the area complained to the Utah County clerk that they hadn’t received their mail-in ballots.

Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson investigated and found that the rate of voter participation was “remarkably low” in the area where residents complained about not getting ballots. Davidson emailed registered voters in the district and was told by those residents that they hadn’t gotten their ballots. Many of them told Davidson that they had email confirmations from the post office indicating that the mail-in ballots were scheduled to be delivered.

Davidson estimated that 304 residents never received their ballots. Postal records confirmed that Seei was the letter carrier for that route.

The post office tracked Seei’s mail truck and discovered that he had parked it next to a dumpster in a local church’s parking lot. This was not a stop on his route.

In a written statement, Seei said he felt “overwhelmed” by the amount of mail he had to deliver and decided to “get rid of the advertisement mail.”

He claimed that he didn’t intend to throw away the ballots. Seei said he was not a “very political person” and did not have a “political agenda.” He said it was just a poor decision resulting from “frustration” and “laziness.”

However, when interviewed by law enforcement, Seei said that he had set the mail-in ballots aside in the beginning of his shift. There is no record of those ballots being delivered.

He threw the mail-in ballots away about 1 1/2 hours after starting his route.

The detention memo states that it does not seem plausible that Seei wouldn’t have noticed the mail-in ballots even if they were mixed in with the advertisements.