There are good questions that deserve good answers:
Was the Oregon election free and fair?
Was there fraudulent activity?
Were fraud reports investigated?
What did authorities find out?
The Secretary of State's office studiously evaded answering. Strange.
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| Shemia Fagan, Oregon Secretary of State |
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| Walker, interviewed on KOBI |
Thanks for your help. I would appreciate an “on the record” response. I will use your comments in my daily political blog, UpClose with Peter Sage Https://peterwsage.blogspot.com
I have a small readership of about 2,000 daily readers. Oregon-oriented articles are the most popular. Most of the readers are politically active Oregonians, primarily in the Democratic/older/donor demographic.
1. Have you had any reports of fraudulent voting in the 2020 general election?
2. If so, what was the disposition of those reports/referrals?
3. The Oregon Department of Justice said they prosecuted few cases (under 100) involving the 2018 election. Is it standard practice for the SOS to refer potential cases to them?
4. How does 2020 compare with 2018?
5. Is there a database you could refer me to of election fraud investigations and prosecutions or some other disposition?
6 Have you had “citizen referrals” i.e. reports by concerned citizens of election violations in 2020, and if so, what did the SOS office do in response.
With all the talk of massive voter fraud and the supposed riskiness of mail-in ballots, I wonder what the Oregon data show. I expect readers will wonder, too.
Peter Sage
I honestly thought the Secretary of State's office would be eager to be helpful. This was an opportunity to clear the record on Oregon's elections with real data. The elected Secretary of State could show herself to be hard at work, both addressing the question of whether there was, in fact, widespread fraud in he election, and also giving detail and color to the kinds and quantity of election misbehavior that does take place. She could show her competence in having an office that investigated and prosecuted fraud, thus assuring the public our elections are secure. I assumed this information would be prime press-release material.
Instead, I got evasion and resistance. Apparently it will take the Secretary of State's office some four hours to research if they got fraud reports, report how many, and to determine whether the office processed them. They requested $100, or about four hours' time at $25/hour. I doubt this is about the money, even though, of course, I am happy to pay it, and more. This is about information stonewalling. This is about putting up a bureaucratic wall against an outside inquiry about what her office learned about election fraud in Oregon. With all the accusations, speculations, and wild conspiracies circulating, the Secretary of State has the facts at hand to bring everyone back to reality--important work--but the response from her office is to reveal as little as possible.
When asking if the office got complaints, the answer was yes. When asked how many, the question was ignored. When asked for comparisons with prior elections, the response was "an increase." It was as unhelpful as a bureaucracy could make it.
Michael Trigoboff, a Portland-area reader of this blog, saw a copy of the letter from the Secretary of State's office, and commented: "She could have saved herself a lot of typing, and saved you a lot of time reading, by just replying, “Fuck you.'" That seems too harsh to me. It wasn't overtly hostile. It was a bureaucratic wall, but it was civil, even if oddly and persistently evasive and protective. The office sent the firm message that the Secretary of State's office was revealing as little information as possible about its work.
Is this simply the instinct of a government bureaucracy when a question comes from an unfamiliar direction? Is there some problem that needs to be hidden, e.g. are they way behind in their work? Can the Secretary of State's office be blind to the fact that overt stonewalling raises a red flag of suspicion in an arena where there is already speculation about hidden, nefarious behavior?
Here it is, verbatim. I will let readers decide what they think is going on. I put my questions in italics and the responses in bold, to make clear which words were whose:
Good morning, Mr. Sage:
I’m writing in response to the questions you sent over to us. We can provide a more thorough answer through additional research, which would cost you approximately $100 based on our fees for providing public records under OAR 165-002-0010. Please let me know if you would like to proceed with more in-depth answers and for which questions you would like those answers.
Please see below for the answers to the questions you provided:
1. Have you had any reports of fraudulent voting in the 2020 general election? Yes.
2. If so, what was the disposition of those reports/referrals? Reports of election fraud were assessed, and a determination made as to whether the reports rose to the level of a colorable complaint. Complaints must be from an individual registered to vote in Oregon and the complaint must be signed. Complaints are also referred to the Elections Division by filing officers, such as a county elections official. Disposition of complaints arising from the 2020 general election range from closed to open to currently being worked by the Oregon Department of Justice (DOJ).
3. The Oregon Department of Justice said they prosecuted few cases (under 100) involving the 2018 election. Is it standard practice for the SOS to refer potential cases to them? The Elections Division refers colorable complaints of voter fraud to the DOJ.
4. How does 2020 compare with 2018? There was an increase in complaints alleging voter fraud during the 2020 general election. Please note that there was also an increase in voter turnout [67.8% in 2018 vs 78.5% in 2020].
5. Is there a database you could refer me to of election fraud investigations and prosecutions or some other disposition? The Elections Division does not have a public-facing voter fraud database containing this information. Complaints involving voter fraud are kept confidential pending final disposition.
6. Have you had “citizen referrals” i.e. reports by concerned citizens of election violations in 2020, and if so, what did the SOS office do in response? Referrals from citizens are processed in essentially the same manner as referrals received from county election officials. All colorable complaints are investigated.
Thank you,
Carla Axtman
Carla Axtman
Communications Director
Oregon Secretary of State
12 comments:
Curious, I wonder what you would have received if you paid for the four hours of staff time???
This response is how Conspiracy Theories get started, and once started, take on a life of their own. My gut response to the non answers you received is that they have something to hide, or there is something amiss in the Office they are embarrassed about.
Hmmm...my guess is that with "Stop the Steal" the office may be inundated with inquires from MAGA-hats and give the generalized answers and fee info to stem the tide. That might be the pertinent fact, and I would think that the SOS wouldn't want to give it any more juice by publicizing it.
If you are correct there may be 350 questionable votes, that's not even a rounding error, but a lot of man-hours for the DOJ to investigate.
I found this:
https://sos.oregon.gov/elections/Pages/security.aspx
"We will continue efforts to protect the integrity of our elections. We successfully blocked attempted cyber-attacks by the Russian Government in 2016 and our systems today are much more robust than those systems in place in 2016. We will continue our efforts to secure our election and other systems and implement best practices as we continue forward in this battle."
Voter fraud is a made-up issue pandering to conspiracy mongers and an excuse for losing. Just more Republican BS and utterly un-American.
"If you are correct there may be 350 questionable votes, that's not even a rounding error, but a lot of man-hours for the DOJ to investigate."
except when elections are close.
There are many anecdotes relating to voting anomalies in Oregon and elsewhere.
People don't always unregister when they move, so ballots may be sent out to people who no longer live there.
When people register online, they attest to being qualified, subject to prosecution if they lie. No audit process exists.
When I talked to Jeanne Atkins when she was appointed to fulfill Kate Brown's term when she assumed the governorship, we discussed how motor voter registration was being done, and how records were kept. She admitted that sometimes the DMV made mistakes when entering information. She also assured me that the DMV did there best to separate those who were qualified to be registered, from those who were not. No audit process exists.
We are all human, as are election officials, and their volunteers. There will be mistakes made. Intentional fraus, perhaps not, but when elections are close, and that fact is communicated widely, those who might try to commit fraud may actually give it a try.
In recent times, there is all that talk about counting ballots and considering them as valid if postmarked by a certain time.
Unfortunately, when free postage was provided by Oregon, there was failure to realize that franked free postage isn't usually postmarked. Widening the window for accepted ballots after election day also welcomes the opportunity to stuff the ballot box.
Hopefully the SoS and election officials have tightened things down to prevent fraud, but without any transparency, there will always be questions.
Questions for and answers from Secretary Fagan's office on this subject are conspicuously inadequate without reference to the firing of Oregon Elections Director Steve Trout by Fagan's predecessor just last November, after Trout blew the whistle on what he termed a disastrous lack of security and adequate technology to check and safeguard the integrity of Oregon elections.
For instance, Trout plus various county elections officials told the AP that "the Oregon Centralized Voter Registration System is so old that Microsoft no longer supports the Windows Server 2008 that it operates on". Signatures and unsigned ballots cannot be properly verified, and the system is easily vulnerable to being hacked. For her part, Fagan is simply marking time before a run for Governor.
I sent the Secretary of State's office notice that I would happily pay the $100 or more. Just tell me where to send the check. My assumption is that the data is readily at hand. How else could the SoS possibly manage the workflow of her office, logging in complaints, keeping track of investigations, keeping track of work completed??? It cannot all be a jumbled up fog.
I voted for Fagan in 2020. Her GOP opponent refused to contradict Trump who was saying that vote by mail of the kind we had in Oregon was totally corrupt and unreliable. Worse, she later supported the effort to overthrow the votes in a half dozen states. At least Fagan publicly supported our election system--an important and good start.
Possibly her Communications Director is a a non-fireable holdover from the Republican Secretary of State who preceded Fagan, and the responses she sends out are acts of quiet sabotage that Fagan cannot control. I would think an elected official has control over her own public outreach, but perhaps not. There can be weird work rules in place. Or perhaps, in a COVID environment, staff is far harder to supervise and as Rick Millward suggests, they are inundated by questions and it is policy to blow off everyone at first and then only deal with the people who persist.
Fagan has a huge opportunity here to be known and appreciated as someone who got to the bottom of all the questions and conspiracies and doubts about Oregon's election and mail-in balloting generally. Possibly she use this opportunity, but the letter from her office is a very disappointing signal.
Peter Sage
Of course the reply you got was not overtly hostile. I have no doubt that Axtman is smart enough not to put something hostile in writing. She just very nicely and politely told you to fuck off. I don’t think it’s “harsh” to see through the actual wording and understand the underlying message.
There’s a strange symmetry in the two sides’ approach to election issues:
The Republicans make accusations of voter fraud in the absence of any concrete evidence of significant fraud.
The Democrats, by opposing sensible things like voter id requirements, act like they have something to hide.
And so, each side fuels the paranoia on the other side.
I used to work in the government. Her letter read to me like this - they have a specific procedure in place for responding to requests for information. She followed it to the letter. I have found that when one has the choice to interpret another’s behavior as either incompetent or offensive, 9 times out of 10 it’s incompetent. Me. Axtman had the opportunity to respond with full transparency but rather chose full bureaucracy. This belies to me a lack of political acumen, rather than any intent to be dishonest or evasive.
Peter, you actually got a lot more cooperation by email than I got as the official Democratic Party Election Monitor a number of years ago. To get cogent answers on most ANY of my requests for information, or clarification, I’d have needed a dentist and a pair of vice grips.
It was my firm opinion, at that time, that there were several serious weaknesses in voting security, some of which could be easily eliminated, others not. The County Clerk du jour was either unwilling or unable to answer my questions, or in so much denial of potential problems that she could only repeat simplistic comments.
It’s been so many years I doubt I could cite all the issues, and, frankly, I’m sick of writing/calling about them to various legislators, Secretaries of State, etc that I don’t want to spend the time.
I’ll cite but two doozies. Since we Vite by Mail, there is a period of weeks during which completed (and, obviously, anonymous) ballots are under the control of the County Clerk. These ballots are kept in a locked room off the side of the Clerk's office. When I pointed out that the clerk could easily switch as many ballots that SHE filled out for an equal number of legitimate ballots, by doing so after hours, when she was frequently there after everyone else had gone home, she old me, “Impossible! There are two locks on the door, requiring two different keys!” Really? And there’s no way the clerk could possibly have gotten a second key? Child's play!
Interestingly, another person monitoring her office windows, late every night, reported that he noticed the lights come on in the room holding the completed ballots, and stay on for several minutes.
He confronted the county clerk, who said, “That was probably just the janitor”. “JUST THE JANITOR??” How secure is that?
I will also mention the way the clerk insisted that, on election night, only one person on our monitoring team could actually enter the room where the ballots were being “prepared” (whiting out extraneous marks, filling in the ovals where it appeared that the voter WANTED to vote for something/someone, but didn’t fill in the oval sufficiently). If the person needed to leave-even to take a pee-They could not return to the room. Nor could anyone replace a monitor who could not, or didn’t want to stay in the room until midnight when the clerk generally ended the counting for the night.
The reason? The clerk said, “even from across the rom, some monitor could conceivably get a pretty good count of votes, leave early, and call the newspaper.
First, that would require miraculous eyes and memory. Second, so what? A monitor could “call the paper” with no idea whatsoever the votes were, if they wanted to. That doesn’t mean the paper would necessarily report it.
Forgot to mention: I am certainly not accusing JOCO’s former county clerk, or anyone else, of voting fraud. I am simply pointing out that the system is not really as secure as some people tell us.
Also, unfortunately, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Several ways, in the case of VBM.
Locks are not that hard to pick. So even if someone didn’t have a key…
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