They were found by highway workers, strewn along a quarter-mile stretch of Interstate 4 early Monday: scores of pages with the names, addresses, phone numbers and party affiliations of Hillsborough County voters.
The documents listed voters' registration numbers, precincts where they are registered and a check boxes next to each voter's name indicating their preference of Barack Obama or John McCain in the presidential election and whether they needed a ride on Election Day.
The discovery, made one day before voters headed to the polls in a historic presidential election, by midday had become the stuff of conspiracy theories in online chat rooms.
As it turned out, the documents were not absentee ballots or voter-registration forms, but presidential candidate survey forms that fell, or were tossed, from a passing vehicle.
"They're not our papers," said Mia McCormick, a spokeswoman for the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Office. "We really don't know where the information came from."
Candidate survey lists are typically used by the major political parties, third-party voter-registration groups and pollsters to gauge voter interest before a general election. McCormick said the documents contained no personal financial information or Social Security numbers.
Department of Transportation workers filled nine large plastic bags with the papers and held on to them until instructed by state elections officials to destroy them. By evening, the papers had been fed into shredders at the DOT Tampa office.
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