SAN DIEGO, California — The San Diego County Registrar of Voters office in Kearny Mesa was evacuated for hours on Monday afternoon, November 2 — the day before the midterm elections — after a suspicious suitcase was found in the building's front lobby, county officials and San Diego police said. The building reopened at about 4:45 p.m., early voting resumed, and no arrests have been reported.
Source: NBC 7 San Diego
San Diego County Sheriff's deputies found the suspicious suitcase in the lobby of the Kearny Mesa building at around 1:45 p.m., according to the San Diego Police Department, as reported by NBC 7 San Diego. At about 3:10 p.m., San Diego police officers evacuated the building. Times Now World, reporting the same incident, said authorities set up a perimeter around the site on Overland Avenue, closed nearby streets and deployed a sheriff's bomb squad to evaluate the item.
What the county said
A county spokesperson, Aiyana Moya, said the facility had been evacuated out of “an abundance of caution after an item left onsite required further evaluation,” NBC 7 reported. Authorities have not disclosed what was inside the suitcase, and they have not said who left it in the lobby. No arrests have been made in connection with the incident, and officials have not said whether the discovery is being treated as a deliberate attempt to interfere with election operations.
The Registrar of Voters is the county office that runs the election in San Diego County: it registers voters, mails and processes mail ballots, staffs the vote centers and certifies the results. An evacuation there on the eve of Election Day therefore lands differently from the same incident at an ordinary office building — it temporarily halted work at the headquarters of the county's vote count, one day before polls open for the November 3 midterms that will decide control of the U.S. Congress.
Voting continued across the county
County officials stressed that the evacuation did not close voting in San Diego County. Voters could still cast a ballot at any of the county's 221 vote centers or return a completed mail ballot at an official ballot drop box, the county spokesperson said. On Election Day itself, Tuesday, November 3, all vote centers and official ballot drop boxes are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
San Diego County's vote-center model matters here: unlike an old-style assigned precinct, a county voter can walk into any of the 221 vote centers and vote, so the closure of one building — even the Registrar's own headquarters — does not remove anyone's place to vote. For the county's large immigrant communities, including Punjabi families in the San Diego area and truckers passing through on Interstates 5, 8 and 15, the practical position on Tuesday is unchanged: any vote center, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., or any official drop box until 8 p.m.
Why election offices train for exactly this
Election officials across the United States have spent the last two cycles preparing for threats and hoax scares aimed at voting sites. On Election Day 2024, the Brennan Center for Justice documented at least 227 bomb threats against polling locations, election offices and tabulation centers; the FBI said many of the 2024 threats appeared to originate from Russian email domains and none had been determined credible at the time. In November 2025, emailed threats temporarily closed polling locations in seven New Jersey counties. Officials in neighbouring California counties described the same preparation this cycle: in Contra Costa County, election staff and law enforcement held a half-day exercise in September rehearsing bomb threats, swatting calls and other disruptions, and the FBI's election crimes coordinator took part.
San Diego's Registrar has also been at the centre of this election's legal fights. In late October the county told the U.S. Justice Department it would not comply with a demand to hand over private voter information or set aside ballots from 1,709 San Diego voters — a demand the county called a “thinly veiled voter purge” — and on Monday, November 2, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the Justice Department's emergency request to force California to segregate mail ballots linked to a federal list of more than 20,000 voters. None of that is connected, on anything officials have said, to the suitcase in the lobby; it is the tense backdrop against which a suspicious item at an election headquarters is treated, as the county put it, with an abundance of caution.
Officials have not disclosed the contents of the suitcase, who left it, or whether it was left deliberately. No arrests have been reported. Those unknowns are stated plainly here because they are the centre of the investigation that is now under way.
What happens next
The investigation into the item continues, led locally after the bomb squad's evaluation, and the county has given no timeline for disclosing what was found. For voters, the next step is simply Election Day: polls and vote centers across San Diego County open at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, November 3 and close at 8 p.m., with results work — the Registrar's core job — resuming from the same Kearny Mesa headquarters that was emptied on Monday afternoon.