The former carrier told investigators he wanted to lighten his workload. The acting deputy attorney general told reporters that voting fraud is real.
WASHINGTON—Citing a former letter carrier accused of throwing about 300 Utah mail ballots into a church-parking-lot dumpster, the Justice Department on Tuesday made its case for a blocked Postal Service rule under which the Postal Service could decline to deliver mail ballots.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter announced the indictment at the department’s headquarters and then, according to Democracy Docket, turned to the rule, which grew out of the president’s March executive order on elections. “To address the chronically abused mail-in ballot system, the Postal Service recently issued a regulation that would have required mail-in ballots to have special tracking and design features,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, that regulation was blocked by a judge in Massachusetts. In fact, she blocked the rule before it was even issued.” A second federal judge, in Washington, has also halted it, and this month the Supreme Court declined to let the administration enforce it. McCotter did not mention the Supreme Court’s decision.
Three Minutes Beside a Church Dumpster
The former carrier, Damon Matai Seei, 34, of Payson, has pleaded not guilty to one count of secretion, destruction and delay of mail. On June 3 he was covering a colleague’s route in Eagle Mountain, according to the government’s detention memo. About an hour and a half into the route, he pulled his mail truck into a church parking lot and parked beside a dumpster for about three minutes. He later told investigators he threw the mail away to “lighten his workload,” prosecutors wrote. In a written statement, he said the load had been heavier than usual and that he had decided to “get rid of advertisement mail.” According to the memo, he said he had not meant to discard the ballots, described himself as not a “very political person” and attributed the episode to “frustration” and “laziness.”
What the Rule Would Have Done for the Utah Mail Ballots
McCotter argued that the rule’s tracking requirements could have helped officials discover the missing ballots faster. Many of the Eagle Mountain voters whose ballots never came held email confirmations from the Postal Service saying the ballots were scheduled for delivery on June 3, the detention memo says. The shortfall was found by the Utah County clerk, Aaron Davidson. After residents complained, he noticed remarkably low participation in state House District 50, emailed registered voters to ask whether their ballots had arrived and counted about 304 who had not received one.
Under the rule, the Postal Service would check each outbound ballot mailing against a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal before accepting it and return any that failed to comply to the sender for correction. The Utah mail ballots in this case were already inside the Postal Service system, Democracy Docket noted. Prosecutors say the carrier set them aside at the start of his shift, and U.S. Attorney Melissa Holyoak told reporters, “He did not deliver a single one.”
About 300 Ballots Right There
A reporter noted that the department’s illegal-voting prosecutions amount to a tiny share of the more than 150 million votes cast in 2024. McCotter pointed back to Utah. “There’s about 300 ballots right there,” he said, before adding that thousands of other cases had been referred for investigation. “Remember, folks, voting fraud is real.”
The detention memo identifies the case’s victims as the approximately 300 voters whose ballots were not delivered, and it says the government has not yet been able to notify them. Some were unable to vote in the primary, according to the memo. Holyoak said her office would reach out to the victims to learn whether the rest voted by other means, the Deseret News reported. Homeland Security Investigations, which worked the case with the Postal Service inspector general’s office, said in the department’s announcement that it investigates election crimes “including unlawful voting, fraudulent voter registration, false claims of U.S. citizenship, identity fraud, and document fraud.” The former carrier is charged with destruction and delay of mail.
Ballot Integrity Is Not a Partisan Issue
“Ballot integrity is not a partisan issue,” McCotter said in the same announcement. Eagle Mountain is a conservative suburb of Provo, the Associated Press reported. Earlier this month, at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas, the president promised a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to every adult citizen if Republicans hold the House and the Senate. Federal law prohibits paying someone to register or vote, according to Time.
Utah votes almost entirely by mail. More than 95 percent of its voters rely on mail ballots, Holyoak said. Deidre Henderson, the Republican lieutenant governor who oversees the state’s elections, praised the investigators in a statement to KSL. “I’m grateful that the department takes cases of denying lawful voting just as seriously as alleged illegal voting,” she said.
Prosecutors are not seeking to detain the former carrier before trial. They have asked the court to order, as a condition of his release, that he not interfere with any other delivery of mail, “including, especially, the delivery of mail-in ballots.” The rule that would let the Postal Service send noncompliant Utah mail ballots back undelivered will not take effect before the midterms, McCotter said.
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