At 12:20 pm last Tuesday, an official in the Louisiana secretary of state’s office opened a mailed letter and white powder fell out. The office was immediately evacuated and the employee was rushed to the emergency room. The employee was not injured and subsequent tests showed that the substance was not harmful. By Wednesday, the office was back open.

“Tuesday’s event did not impact any election operations in preparation for the upcoming election,” Trey Williams, a spokesperson for Louisiana’s secretary of state, tells WIRED.

But the incident was not isolated. A WIRED investigation has found that over the course of the following days, election offices in at least 31 other states were targeted with similar letters as they prepared for the midterms that are now just two weeks away. Many of the states have made public statements acknowledging the receipt of these letters, but WIRED’s accounting of all the incidents shows the full scale of this campaign for the first time.

The vast majority of letters were intercepted by the United States Postal Service before they reached their intended targets, state officials tell WIRED, but in Arizona, Delaware, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Louisiana the letters were not intercepted, leading to election offices being evacuated when white powder was discovered.

The states that confirmed receipt of a letter are: Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

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