Oregon ballot fiasco highlights the `invisible' election chiefs
OREGON CITY, ORE. >> Voters in an Oregon county where a ballot-printing error delayed primary results for nearly two weeks have elected the same county clerk five times in the past 20 years despite missteps that impacted two previous elections and cost taxpayers at least $100,000.
Opponents have repeatedly tried to unseat Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall, who was first elected in 2002, following elections errors in 2004, 2010 and 2011 and a state vote-tampering investigation in 2012.
Hall makes $112,600 a year in the nonpartisan position overseeing elections, recording property transactions, keeping public records and issuing marriage licenses. She is running for a sixth four-year term in November in the suburban county south of Portland, and is being challenged by a former librarian who works in the elections department of Oregon's largest county.
The latest scandal in Oregon comes against the backdrop of a polarized political landscape in which vote counts are increasingly scrutinized. Races for local elections clerks — who until recently toiled in obscurity and relative anonymity — are getting new attention, particularly from right-wing voters who deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Local elections chiefs are the first line of defense for elections integrity, but most voters don't know who their county clerk is, or even what they do, and are likely to skip over the nonpartisan race on Election Day, or simply pick the incumbent. Some county clerks are appointed, but in many counties in Oregon and elsewhere they are beholden to the whims of voters who may not be paying attention, said Christopher McKnight Nichols, an associate professor of history at Oregon State University.
There's a “myopia and invisibility about this sort of office in American public life,” he said.
The situation in Oregon's third-largest county underscores the importance of such contests.
In the current election, tens of thousands of ballots sent out with blurry barcodes were rejected by a vote-counting machine. The issue affected Democratic and nonpartisan ballots more than Republican ones, state officials have said. The fiasco forced the county to shift nearly 200 county employees to vote tabulation duties; county officials don't yet know the full cost of the cleanup job.
For days, workers have been transferring each voter's intent from spoiled ballots to fresh ones, by hand using purple markers, in a painstaking process that might not be complete for more than two more weeks. More than 81,000 ballots out of more than 116,000 had been counted by early Friday, and nearly 35,000 spoiled ballots remained to be duplicated, according to county tallies.
The outcome of the Democratic primary for Oregon's 5th Congressional District — a close race between a seven-term centrist incumbent and a progressive challenger — was delayed more than a week by the blunder. The AP called the race for challenger Jamie McLeodSkinner on Friday.