SEATTLE (AP) — Authorities were investigating Monday after early morning fires were set in ballot boxes in Portland, Oregon, and nearby Vancouver, Washington, destroying hundreds of ballots.

The Portland Police Bureau reported that officers and firefighters responded to a fire at a ballot box around 3:30 a.m. and discovered an incendiary device had been planted inside. Tim Scott, Multnomah County elections director, said a fire extinguisher in the mailbox protected nearly all of the ballots; only three were damaged, and his office planned to contact those voters to help them obtain replacement ballots.

A few hours later, television crews across the Columbia River in Vancouver captured footage of smoke pouring from a ballot box at a transit center. Vancouver is the largest city in Washington's 3rd Congressional District and the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent.

Greg Kimsey, auditor of Clark County in Vancouver, told The Associated Press that the ballot box at Fisher's Landing Transit Center also had a fire suppression system, but for some reason it was not effective. Emergency responders removed a burning stack of ballots from the box, and Kimsey said hundreds were lost.

“Heartbreaking,” Kimsey said. “It is a direct attack on democracy.”

There are surveillance cameras covering the mailbox and surrounding area, he said.

The last ballot pickup at the transit center drop box was at 11 a.m. Saturday, Kimsey said. Anyone who subsequently cast their ballot there was asked to contact the auditor's office to receive a new ballot paper.

The office will increase the frequency of ballot collection, Kimsey said, and move collection times into the evening to prevent ballot boxes from remaining full of ballots overnight, when similar crimes are considered more likely.

An incendiary device was also found on or near a ballot box in downtown Vancouver early on October 8th. He did not damage the box or destroy any ballots, police said. The FBI and other authorities had launched investigations.

Washington and Oregon are both states that vote by mail. Registered voters receive their ballots in the mail a few weeks before the election and then return them by mail or drop them in ballot boxes.

Officials said in Phoenix last week that about five ballots were destroyed and others were damaged when a fire was set in a mailbox at a U.S. postal station there.

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Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta contributed.