You only have to look at one to understand that.

Last year, after seeing that box, I warned that they could be attacked.   (Some were skeptical about my warning.)

Now, one has been vandalized.

As the counting winds down in the Seattle mayoral race, controversy may heat up as officials deal with a vandalized ballot box and 5,700 ballots with signatures that don't match those on file.
. . .
The vandalized ballot lockbox could pose a more intractable problem.

The box, like all the others, was closed by election officials at 8 p.m. on Election Day.   But this box was vandalized.  Someone tore off the metal seals, which would allow late, illegal ballots to be dropped in.

(Removing the seal might also allow ballots to be removed.  You would have to know more than I do about their internals to be sure.  But it would be easy to destroy all the ballots inside one of these boxes, after that seal is removed.  And that lock on the side does not look formidable.)

The ballots in the vandalized box could matter in this election because the race for Seattle mayor is so close.  Probably, most of the 860 ballots in the box are legal.  But there is no easy way to tell which of those ballots, if any, are illegal.

King County election officials did not expect this attack.

Megan Copperfield of King County Elections said the lockbox was broken into sometime Tuesday night.  But there are no surveillance cameras that show exactly when orhow it happened.

"There are twenty two cameras around election headquarters.  No one thought drop boxes would be a target.  They were out of camera range," Copperfield said.

No one?

I'll repeat what I said a year ago:  Such drop boxes should be used only in secure locations.  And I will add that the boxes should be watched by an election official, whenever they are accessible to the public.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.