Thursday afternoon, October 15, an employee at the State Election Commissioner's office on South Governors Avenue in Dover opened the mail — and found white powder inside the envelope.
What happened next moved fast. The envelope was isolated. The staff were decontaminated and evacuated. The building's HVAC system was shut down so nothing could circulate through the vents. And it wasn't just Dover: election offices across Delaware sent their non-essential employees home for the day.
Nobody was hurt. The Department of Elections said it plainly in its first statement: the employees are safe.
The Delaware Division of Public Health ran the first round of tests and finished them Friday, October 16: no hazardous substances detected. But "no hazard found" on the first pass isn't the final word — a second, confirmatory round of testing has been running ever since, and the final results are expected today, Wednesday, October 21. Public Health says it has a high degree of confidence those results will come back negative too.
Until then, the building at 905 South Governors Avenue stays closed until further notice, on DNREC's order. If you need the Election Commissioner's office in person, don't go there — public services have moved to the Department of Elections Kent County Office at 100 Enterprise Place, Suite 5, in Dover. Every other elections office in the state went back to normal operations on October 16.
The FBI has taken over the Delaware investigation, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is testing the envelope and what was in it. Because Dover wasn't the only envelope.
Election offices in at least 32 states received letters like this one. Postal inspectors intercepted most of them before anyone opened them. But in five states — Arizona, Delaware, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Louisiana — a letter got all the way through and was opened by a staffer, and an office had to be evacuated. Delaware is on that list.
It reached Delaware's congressional offices, too. Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester's Dover office was sent a similar letter the same day — Capitol Police intercepted that one before it was ever opened, and her office says neither the Senator nor her staff are in any danger. Senator Chris Coons's office was sent one as well.
"We are committed to protecting our nation's election officials from threatening and dangerous mail," said Brendan Donahue, a deputy chief inspector with the Postal Inspection Service. "Any threat or attack on an election official is unacceptable."
Here is the part that matters most if you're a Delaware voter: none of it stopped the election. The Department of Elections says preparations are proceeding on plan — absentee processing, public meetings, machine testing, all of it. Early voting opens tomorrow, Thursday, October 22, exactly as scheduled, and Election Day is November 3.
Somebody mailed powder to the people who run Delaware's elections, six days before early voting, in a year when the whole country is watching the mail. The powder tested clean. The election opens on time anyway.
If you have information about the mailings, the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service are running a joint national investigation, and Delaware's case is part of it.
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