Feds Deny Losing Any Teamster Ballots

The federal official overseeing the Teamsters election denied allegations Friday that she lost thousands of mail-in ballots in a process that unofficially re-elected union President Ron Carey last month.

After a month-long investigation, Barbara Zack Quindel denied a protest filed by challenger James P. Hoffa, who pointed out a discrepancy between a postal estimate of ballots returned and the number of votes counted.

Quindel’s office consulted with U.S. postal officials, who agreed they had overestimated the number of ballots returned and refunded $6,384. The office was charged 42 cents a ballot.

“There are no ballots missing, and … the claims of such missing ballots are without any foundation,” Quindel wrote.

The guarantee that all ballots received from the United States Postal Service were “properly stored and counted does not come from a postal receipt or a postal count of envelopes, but from the physical security and the right of observers to view and accompany the ballots,” she wrote.

After Carey declared victory on Dec. 14, Hoffa alleged ballots had vanished and called on the Justice Department to seize control of the election process, which was underwritten by the federal government.

Jere Nash, Carey’s campaign manager, said Quindel’s investigation should put to rest any questions Hoffa had raised about the ballot count.