The Oregon Department of Justice is confirming today that it is investigating a case of ballot tampering by an elections official in Clackamas County, OR after it was discovered that she was allegedly filling in unvoted ballots for Republican candidates.
According to Willamette Week today…
The underlying allegation is that the woman, whose name has not been released, filled in blanks on ballots turned into the county for the Nov. 6 general election.
Sources familiar with the incident say their understanding is that the woman filled in a straight Republican ticket on the ballots where preferences had been left blank by voters.
Elections law makes marking another person’s ballot a class C felony.
The Oregonian reports, that the state Department of Justice spokesperson Jeff Manning says: “We can confirm we are currently investigating criminal felony violations of Oregon’s elections laws, which allegedly took place in Clackamas County and allegedly involved a temporary county elections employee tampering with cast ballots.”
Manning says it is currently unknown how many ballots may have been affected. “One of the primary goals of the investigation is to determine that,” he said.
Oregon uses a state-wide Vote-by-Mail system which, as we hear every time we write about it, its voters seem to love a great deal. We don’t, and, back in 2008, described just some of our reasons for that here: “Why ‘Vote-by-Mail’ Elections are a Terrible Idea for Democracy”.
This case points to one of the reasons why we’ve long argued that voting by mail, either via Absentee ballot, or a full Vote-by-Mail system like Oregon’s, is a bad idea. There are simply too many people in the chain of custody between your casting of the ballot (usually by dropping it into the ultimate “black box”: a mail box) and the time that it is hopefully tabulated, usually on oft-failed, easily-manipulated, unoverseeable optical-scan computer systems which either count it accurately or inaccurately, there is no way to know.
When a hand-marked paper ballot is cast at the precinct — at least where there are precinct-based optical-scanners or, better yet, public hand-counting — the odds of someone being able to tamper with your ballot before it’s actually tabulated, as has allegedly occurred in Clackamas County, OR, are greatly decreased.
UPDATE 11/29/12: The election official in question, Deanna Swenson, has now been indicted by a grand jury with six felony and two misdemeanor counts related to her alleged tampering with Vote-by-Mail ballots in Clackamas County. According to the Portland Tribune, “The first four charges are Class C felonies, punishable by up to five years imprisonment (as determined by applicable state felony sentencing guidelines,) and a $125,000 fine. The official misconduct charges are Class A misdemeanors, punishable by up to one year in jail and a $6,250 fine.”
Oregon Public Broadcasting adds that “Investigators believe the ballots were marked in favor of Republican candidates.”
Early voting numbers can be found here.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/02/october-jobs-report-election-live
Democrats ahead in all states except Colorada .
Thanks, vote by mail very bad idea
Um this is like the third thing I read today concerning fraud connected to Republican activity. Do you think that any of it will make a difference in the vote?
Here’s another one here in the PNW.. GOP is going door to door trying to collect ballots to “help” with the election process! King Co PD is putting out the word to NOT give them your ballot!
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/11/02/king-county-warns-that-gop-is-trying-to-collect-ballots
Ballot tampering by an election worker is a headline grabber, but it is a distraction from how the election will be stolen. Ohio’s Free Press has two excellent articles, Will “experimental” software patches affect the Ohio vote? and The Free Press confirms installation, secret justification of uncertified last minute election tabulation reporting software in Ohio, on last minute untested and verified software patches applied to Ohio voting machines.
The “patch” sends voting machine results, already uploaded to the county, to a statewide election reporting system. This breaks the “chain of custody” required for election integrity by bypassing normal and, more importantly, approved election night reporting. The statewide election reporting system has not been verified, approved or shown to conform to voting standards.
I don’t want Karl Rove counting votes.
I live in Oregon and my vote by mail ballot had instructions on how to correct a mistake on the ballot. To correct a mistake just draw a line through the mis-marked vote, including the candidate’s name and vote for your intended candidate.
This makes it very easy for a voter’s ballot to be “corrected” by election workers.
Since the sender’s zip code is on the outside of the absentee ballot, the ballot can be challenged based on the likelihood of it belonging to a Democrat!
Here is an especially bad idea: mailing an absentee ballot when you yourself have your OWN ZIP CODE.
Michelle Obama’s zip code = The White House!
Oregon definitely has the best voting system currently used in the USA. Very high participation rates are a big plus, and scrupulous election monitoring make instances such as the one reported rare, and note that it was quickly caught! Our county clerk runs many tests before, during, and after the counting to ensurethat the machines are giving honest results. We would be wise to adopt similar systems in every state, which would instantly eliminate much our present election problems, and do until Brad’s “ideal” voting method comes to be in some distant future :·)
Oregon’s GOP really wants to get rid of our totally Vote-By-Mail system because it obviates all of their supression and intimidation tactics used elsewhere. Because of it, we have no long lines, inconvienient polling places or operating times, bullying voter challengers, caging, robo-calls giving false poll information, in short nothing their goons can use to keep Democrats from voting. It would not surprise me a bit that Repub-ops deliberately tried to mark-up a few ballots just to get the kind of coverage this news piece gives to tarnish what is undisputably the BEST voting method currently available to US citizens!
@veryconcerned: Exactly my point. I live in Washington state. We also have Absentee or paper ballots and since it is so easy to “correct” mistakes on ballots (all that is needed is a #2 pencil) is exactly the reason I was alerting people to the possibility of ballot tampering. I also assume that is the very reason King County PD was alerting voters to this. The fewer hands on your ballot, the better! Only give your ballot to someone you trust! It may be a headline grabber in OH, but it’s important here. Not that this will be the implement to steal an election, but rather another method of fraud in the guise of “helping”.
BTW, your 2nd link is hosed. The first link to OH Free Press works, but the 2nd one doesn’t work.
I’ve been following Bradblog and posting articles to my FB account often enough that some of my Republican friends have said to me “Thou doust protest too much”… it seems they would rather listen to all the BS put out by the Romney campaign.
My friends who happen to be Democrat and critical thinkers have told me they think this site is “very impressive”.. so there you go!
This election has cost me a lot in terms of family, as well. Since I spent untold time debunking 2 brother’s anti-Obama rants, one’s unfriended me on FB and refuses to speak to me via other methods! They reside in IL and are deathly afraid Obama is going to take away their guns! They are Fox News viewers and believe everything they here on there! I’ve tried to show them http://foxnewslies.net but of course it’s propaganda and they refuse to even check it out! So for being a critical thinker, to them I’m an “idiot”… sigh…
This is pure hogwash. I’m an observer in WA and the people who handle ballots voted by mail are required to use green pens at every stage of handling so they can’t do the very thing this person is alleged to have done. Easy fix.
Very Concerned says:
The actual instructions are as follows:
Nothing there about drawing lines through the wrong name and making another choice. If you used a pencil, you can erase your first mark and make another. If you used a pen, you ask for a replacement ballot.
Final point re Oregon & Washington voting systems: WE THE PEOPLE LOVE MAIL-IN VOTING! Some GOPer trolls are posting garbage here to undermine it, but you will get scant support to repeal Vote-by-mail in any State that wisely adopts it, especially once the people experience how good it is compared to anything else available to Americans today. I have complete trust in the Oregon election results, which can not be said about many States nowadays.
David Donnell, I think it depends on what county you are in. In Marion County the instructions did say to cross it out and make your correction.
As far as mail in balloting I know Brad doesn’t like it much but at least it requires a paper ballot. No electronic voting machines here although the ballots are still machine counted.
I not only live in Oregon, I live in Clackamas county (aka Clackistan or Clacktucky, due to the Tea Party backed shenanigans happening in the county).
The fact of the matter is that this was caught and reported because of safeguards and procedures put in place. (Also, the poll worker was stupid enough to fill in the R on races left blank with a pencil she brought from home when the voter used a pen.) Additional safeguards were established after the incident in limiting the pens used by poll workers to neon yellow or green and the pen needed to fill in re-worked ballots (those that were damaged and not able to be read by the scanners) was limited to one and kept track of.
While she may have handled this incident correctly, Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall has bungled during previous elections requiring such things as complete reprint of the ballots costing the county taxpayers $120K a pop. And in 2011, County Clerk Hall directed her staffers to allow back in signatures that they had originally rejected, and thereby putting a Tea Party (and NV millionaire Loren Parks) backed initiative on the ballot.
There was also a single issue, non-emergency special election this last September that could have waited less than 6 weeks to be put on the November ballot and save the taxpayers $120K that one cost. I suspect they didn’t want that initiative (a badly written conservative-backed anti-public transportation initiative) to face the turnout a presidential election would have considering that progressive issues tend to prevail when turnout is high. Oregon’s VBM system had over 85% turnout in 2008 versus that particular election turnout of only 29%.
The problem in this incident was the voter voted for only one candidate on the ticket and left the other candidates blank, which were then filled in as Rs during the ballot tampering. This could be alleviated if each ticket line item had a “none” selection to show the voters actual choice (and serve dual duty as a voter-satisfaction litmus).
Brad’s opposition to VBM assumes that problems with election workers could not happen in in-person polling places which is far from the truth. (How’s your chad hanging, FL?) But VBM has consistently higher turnout. The only way we could get higher turnout in a non-VBM system is to implement compulsory voting like those socialists in Australia (that has had a 90% or greater turnout in every election in every election since 1946, save one; 1955 and it was 87%) Australians who fail to vote for good reason face a $20 fine.
I live in the now notorious but lovely Clackamas County, where County Clerk Sherry Hall seems to be using Katherine Harris as her role model.
I also love vote by mail. As previous posters have said, it eliminates many of the voter suppression measures Republicans have used in other states; and the Oregon Republican Party has the elimination of vote by mail in its platform.
They’re running a full scale attack against our Sec. of State, Kate Brown, who is actively expanding voter opportunities. Her Republican opponent is running as a reasonable guy, but talking about voter I.D.
RIVERAT (#14) — You’re right; the instructions are entirely different for Multnomah and Marion counties. I wonder how many other sets of rules there are? The Multnomah County system, if “careful erasure” is employed, would presumably allow the ballot to be counted automatically by the scanner, while the Marion County system should cause the ballot to be kicked out to a human being for counting, which might be an advantage!