County Clerk's office sends old ballots off to be destroyed

By Charlene Sims, info@linncountyjournal.com

MOUND CITY – On Tuesday, July 22, Linn County Clerk Danielle Souza, Elections Clerk Cheyenne Kern and two people appointed to witness the destroying of election ballots checked the documents to verify they were correct before the shredding company, Proshred, loaded them in boxes. Proshred will take them and shred them at their facilities.

In a phone interview, Mari Krupco, one of the witnesses, said that they were there less than an hour but would probably have been there another hour or so but Proshred had not brought enough boxes to pick up everything. Krupco said her job was to verify that the documents that the company was taking were the correct ones. 

Emily Thies, the other witness, said via a phone interview that the records were in the courthouse basement and it was hot down there. But she thought it was a good experience knowing how the records were destroyed. She said that the company just picked them up after they had been verified. 

Instead of shredding them at the courthouse, they loaded the documents to be shredded later. She said she wasn’t aware if the company was a certified company. She reported that Proshred will be back next Wednesday to pick up the rest of the documents. 

Proshred Security, Kansas City, website says that it “holds ISO 9001 Certified by NSF-ISR, NAID AAA, and SOC 2 Type 1 certifications. These achievements signify a high standard of quality management, customer satisfaction, and excellence in performance and information security.”

In an email, Souza said that the documents that were being sent to be destroyed were from 2022 and older. She said that she believed that the oldest document was from 2004.

Souza explained that it took about 45 minutes to fill the two bins that Proshred had brought and that only cleared out maybe one third of all the things that the county has to shred. She said that they have scheduled another day for them to return and asked them to bring five bins with them. 

Souza cited Kansas Statute 25-2708 when she asked the commissioners at the June 23 commission meeting to appoint two people, Alicia Whitcraft and Krupco that she had selected to witness the destruction of ballots on July 10. The date of the destruction had to be changed to July 22 and due to a conflict Whitcraft was replaced by Thies.

The statute outlines the preservation and destruction of elections ballots. It states that county election officer shall preserve all elections ballot for county, city, school districts and townships for six months and all state and national ballots for 22 months before destroying them. It requires that two electors, one from each political party, witness the documents being destroyed.