Hundreds of Ballots Found Dumped In Skid Row

People counting ballots at a table — Photo: Alexander Kalina / Shutterstock

Hundreds of mail ballots sat stacked in an open hallway at a Skid Row homeless shelter, with no visible lock or guard in sight, just over a week before Election Day.

Quick Take

An investigation found hundreds of ballots piled in an open hallway at The Midnight Mission in downtown Los Angeles.
Reporters confirmed the scene during an October 13 visit and authenticated a photo of the pile.
The shelter says its policy is to lock ballots up, and blames the mess on a cramped mailroom.
Federal and county officials are now looking into how the ballots ended up unsecured.

What Investigators Found Inside the Shelter Hallway

The scene played out at 601 South San Pedro Street, home to The Midnight Mission. Reporters visited on October 13 and found hundreds of live ballots sitting in plain view in an open hallway, not locked away or watched. They confirmed the photo was real and matched what they saw with their own eyes days before the report went public on October 26.

This was not a grainy photo passed around online with no context. It was a physical walkthrough by reporters who saw the pile themselves. That distinction matters. A single unverified image can be dismissed. A documented visit to a specific address, on a specific date, is much harder to wave away.

The Shelter’s Explanation Doesn’t Match the Scene

Georgia Hawley, chief communications officer for The Midnight Mission, said the shelter’s standard practice is to keep election ballots behind locked doors until they go out to voters. She said she personally checked that ballots were being stored safely during a visit to the mail center.

Hawley later gave a different explanation for what reporters actually saw. She blamed limited mailroom space, saying deliveries have to be received, sorted, and handed out all day long, which can leave items sitting out temporarily. A locked-door policy and an open hallway full of ballots are two very different pictures, and the shelter has now described both.

Why Chain of Custody Matters More Than It Sounds

Election security experts do not treat this as a simple yes-or-no fraud question. The federal Election Assistance Commission says a strict chain of custody, documented every time ballots change hands or locations, is a basic safeguard for any election. An open hallway, by definition, breaks that chain, whether or not anyone actually touched a ballot.

That is the honest, unglamorous core of this story. Nobody has proven a ballot was stolen, altered, or cast fraudulently. But election security does not wait for proof of harm before it demands secure storage. A pile of live ballots sitting in a public hallway is a failure of process on its own, regardless of what happens next.

Federal Scrutiny and the Broader Skid Row Pattern

This is not the first voter-related controversy tied to that stretch of Skid Row. A woman was separately charged with paying homeless people to register to vote, and Los Angeles County says it has extra safeguards in place specifically because unlawful registration activity has occurred there before.

County officials push back hard on one part of the broader narrative, though. A spokesman for the county recorder’s office said voter registration records do not show whether someone actually lives at or receives services from a shelter, meaning a high voter count tied to an address does not by itself prove fraud. The Los Angeles Times reported the state allows unhoused residents to register using wherever they spend most of their time.

Ballots are precious, y'all. They deserve to be handled that way. 🗳️🙏
According to the California Post (the New York Post's California outlet), hundreds of mail ballots were found piled in an open hallway at The Midnight Mission, a homeless shelter on Skid Row in downtown Los… pic.twitter.com/J85hB4wROt

— NancyH (@NancyH_60) October 28, 2026

Both things can be true at once. Homeless voters have a legal right to register and vote using a shelter address, and a pile of unsecured ballots in that same shelter’s hallway is still a legitimate problem that deserves a real answer. Treating one fact as an excuse for the other does a disservice to voters on both sides of this story. Federal confirmation of an active investigation means someone in Washington agrees this needs more than a shrug.