In another sign of the political times, Lincoln County clerk’s office counts thousands of general election ballots under unprecedented levels of outside scrutiny

 

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com

NEWPORT – By the time the first voting results are released at 8:05 p.m. Tuesday, your ballot will have been handled seven times by Lincoln County clerk’s office employees and “observed” at least twice by volunteers from the local Republican and Democrat parties.

For an expected 27,500 returned ballots.

Although the clerk’s office handles everything from marriage certificates, passports, and property deeds, elections are the very busiest, nerve-wracking – and now most scrutinized.

“Contrary to what some people think, we don’t care who wins,” says county clerk Dana Jenkins, who is leaving the nonpartisan office in December after 32 years. “We just want things to go smoothly.”

And by all accounts – even from once-skeptical observers – ballot handling is going smoothly this fall.

But it’s not simple.

Oregon started voting by mail in 1999 – the first state in the U.S. to exclusively do so. It has widespread acceptance, little to no evidence of fraud statewide, and no issues in Lincoln County.

But changing technology and election skepticism by followers of former president Donald Trump and other election deniers has put the county clerks across Oregon in the spotlight. Lincoln County is no exception.

“There’s so many checks and balances,” said Amy Southwell, the chief deputy county clerk running unopposed on the general election ballot to succeed Jenkins. “They don’t know that, but it’s good that they can now see that.”

Jenkins said there used to be election observers in the clerk’s office the last 2-3 days of voting.

But that changed in the May primary when the Lincoln County Republican Party asked to have observers watch signature verification and be present in a special room where ballots are processed 12 days before the election. Democrats had to find volunteers to sit in the room as well – now both are jammed just inside the doorway of the small processing room.

Because there are three other areas of the clerk’s office that handle ballots, the county also installed cameras in the ceilings and stationed a large monitor in a crowded hallway near the second-floor elevator. There sit two other party observers – overseen by a county volunteer – to watch the whole process on a big-screen television even though everyone quietly admits they can’t always tell what’s happening.

“It’s all fine,” Jenkins, 68, says matter-of-factly. “It makes everything a little crowded, but it works.”

The counting process

Here’s how ballot are handled in Lincoln County.

• Voters either put their ballots in the mail or drop them in special, secure containers located at seven city halls and in the county courthouse parking lot.
• Daily for larger cities and every 2-3 days for smaller communities, two county clerk office employees collect the ballots in padlocked boxes. Until this election just one employee collected ballots. But Jenkins added a second ballot collector when the Lincoln County Republican Party insisted he use two employees – one a registered Republican and the other a registered Democrat. “That’s fine,” Jenkins said. “It just takes two people to do what one use to … and costs taxpayers more money.”
• Once ballots reach the clerk’s office, Jenkins and another employee spread them on a table, sort them into piles of 20, record the total and put them in containers for the next step;
• The ballot envelope contains a unique bar code that identifies each voter. Two employees use a special wand to read the barcode, which loads the voter’s information into a secure, county computer. The employee – under the camera’s eye – then calls up each computer file to check the signature on the ballot with the voter’s registration card. If the employee spots issues – the signatures do not have to be a perfect match, just have 2-3 of the same characteristics – then it is returned to the box for processing. The employee also has access to signatures on previous voter registration cards or on their Oregon driver’s license.
• If there are still issues with a signature, the employee puts the ballot aside to be double-checked – and decided – by Jenkins. If Jenkins decides the signature does not match, the voter is sent a letter explaining the issue and asked to return a new registration card within 21 days. In a general election, that happens 50 to 75 times out of the 27,500 of 40,400 ballots expected to be returned.
• The county also gets an average of 75 envelopes each election where the voter has simply forgotten to sign it. Those people are contacted and asked to come to the clerk’s office to sign their ballot. Some don’t.
• The approved envelopes – with the ballot still inside – are then taken to a separate room where four temporary but experienced county election workers sort them by precincts. Then they are run through a machine that opens the envelope and put on a table where the workers take out the additional “secrecy” envelope inside and remove the ballot. The two observers sit nearby watching the whole process.
• The workers check each ballot for issues such as misplaced marks and then double-check any issues with a second worker. Once they agree, the ballots are put in another locked box to be taken to the counting room.
• The actual ballots – which have no identifying codes or marks connecting them to an individual voter – are then run through a scanner by Jenkins (and no one else) to record each vote. The tabulations are kept in the computer’s hard drive – which is not connected to the internet – and not released until after 8 p.m. Nov. 8.

Three sets of tests

Election officials in Oregon’s 36 counties are required by the Secretary of State to run “logic and accuracy” tests twice before they begin processing ballots and once again Nov. 30 before results are officially certified.

Lincoln County did its tests Oct. 21 – with party observers present — using test ballots from four precincts, Jenkins said, “and there were no problems.”

“We’ve always done the tests and have people come in to observe them,” he said. “But it’s just expanded. It’s now a fact of life.”

The tests came as the state launched a public information campaign to build trust in Oregon’s vote-by-mail electoral system.

The “Voting in Oregon Feels Good” campaign features 1970s’ style video animations with graphics that are being displayed on social media, podcast platforms and TV stations through Tuesday. The first ad explains Oregon’s vote-by mail system and the second urges voters to cast ballots. The second ad is trying to reach people who often don’t vote by running on stations or sites that they are most likely to see.

The third ad explains Oregon’s new postmark rule which went into effect this election cycle and lets voters cast ballots until the last minute. Ballots are counted if they’re deposited by 8 p.m. in a county election’s box or at a county office or if they’re postmarked by Nov. 8 at the latest.

The campaign aims to dispel questions about Oregon’s voting system.

“Research shows that once a person forms a belief about elections it’s very hard to change their mind,” Secretary of State Shemia Fagan said in a statement to Oregon Capital Chronicle. “That’s why it’s critical for elections officials to get ahead of false information by sharing the fact that Oregon has had free and fair elections through vote-by-mail for over 20 years. When Oregonians know all the steps elections workers take to protect the integrity of our elections, it completely undercuts the conspiracy theories from proponents of the Big Lie.”

Ben Morris, spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office, said elections officials see a few dozen social media posts a week that cast doubts about the safety of the system. They’re mostly on Twitter but they have turned up on far right social media sites like GAB and Truth Social, which is backed by Trump.

“Most are from small accounts but there are some larger accounts in Oregon that post misinformation,” Morris said. “The topics vary. Common themes are the Big Lie, general distrust in vote-by-mail or accusations of fraud.”

Republicans push changes

Joan Crall is chair of the Lincoln County Republican Party. She moved to Waldport from Montana four years ago and wants Oregon to return to in-person voting because — despite what the Secretary of State says — the party believes mail voting “lends itself to fraud.”

“There are a lot of checks and balances in the system and we’re comfortable with that,” Crall said. “But county clerks in Oregon have way too much leeway in their processes. We feel Dana Jenkins is doing a good job in Lincoln County, but we just want to tighten up the process for everyone.”

That has led to some tension and back-and-forth with the clerk’s office.

During the May primary, GOP observers stood over the office cubicles of Southwell and senior deputy clerk Rhonda Davidson as they checked signatures. That led to setting up a table and computers away from their desks this election that observers down the hall can see via one of four ceiling cameras.

Crall said she also had to negotiate observer access to the processing room and argues there’s too much employee involvement in determining problems with ballots. Let the voting machine reject them if there are problems, she said.

Crall is also the one who insisted to Jenkins that two employees — not one — pick up ballot boxes.

“The optics of this were horrible,” she told YachatsNews. “There’s nothing to stop this one person from pulling off the road, opening the box and putting other ballots in there. We want every person’s ballot to be counted regardless of party … but what we don’t want is ballots that are not legitimate to be counted.”

The Lincoln County Democrats have had to respond in kind with observers.

Party chair Cherie Harbour of Lincoln City said they have 40 volunteers signed up as ballot observers and are comfortable with the process that Lincoln County has worked out.

“I think in light of what’s happened in other states this seems proactive, not reactive,” Harbour said. “For us, it’s been a really positive experience. Are there reasons to be concerned? No. But politics has moved in this direction. It’s unfortunate.”

Observers during a visit by YachatsNews on Tuesday complimented the ballot counting operation and openness by Jenkins, Southwell and others.

“We saw some things we didn’t understand and Dana (Jenkins) has answered them just fine,” said GOP observer Jane Wyman of Newport.

Ken Sand, a Democrat observer from Otis, said his two days of four-hour shifts gave him “a high level of confidence that this county is conducting its election extremely well.”

Ray Marshall, a Republican volunteer from Yachats, spent Tuesday morning in the hallway watching the ballot counting on the TV monitor. The Texas transplant said mail voting was new to him when he moved here in 2017.

“This process here, I’m comfortable with it,” Marshall said. “It has a lot of rigor in the process.”

• Quinton Smith is the founder and editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com

Other reading on election security:

Federal lawsuit challenges Oregon counties on election security; go here

Washington Post analysis: The truth about election fraud; go here