This is not how business is supposed to be done for shredders. That bin should have been locked instead of left unlocked, and the employee responsible for pickup should not have accepted it in that condition. Upon arrival at A1's facility it should have been unlocked and dumped directly into the shredder.

I don't necessarily think the company itself is to blame for any of this, except for (at a minimum) needing to set up better procedures and training to avoid this kind of thing. The employees themselves probably had no idea if those ballots were real or if they were just blank, unsent ballots—and honestly, neither do we. My instincts say that those were probably not blanks, and this was fraud all the way, but that doesn't mean the company was a party to the fraud.