County clerks in Oregon inundated with calls for audit of 2020 presidential election

Eleven months after the 2020 election, county clerks in Oregon are getting a new round of calls and emails disputing the results.

Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess said the requests for audits and canvasses of election results in the county have been coming since June. But he said they’ve picked up in the past few weeks following an audit of a county’s election results in Arizona.

“People, they’ll come and they’ll start asking the question and then they won’t wait for an answer,” Burgess said. “They’ll start railing away and sometimes with a lot of obscenity and all, too.”

In the 2020 presidential election, voters in Marion County swung to Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump by 49.2% to 48%, a margin of 1,870 votes out of 164,308. That was a reversal from the 2016 election when Trump carried the county.

Burgess said the calls and emails have also become threatening, including some he’s forwarded to the FBI in the past few weeks. He said some of his election staff don’t want their photo taken for fear of being tracked.

“It seems to go in waves,” he said. “Sometimes you can’t tell if these are direct threats or not.”

Oregon’s recount process

A person who identified themselves as Jason Yordy sent an email to Burgess claiming there are inconsistencies in political, registration and population trends in Marion County in the 2020 election compared to the prior four elections.

“We the people demand a canvas, and a full forensic audit should follow! We have hired you to be a gatekeeper for honesty and fairness! That was your oath taken as a hired election official,” Yordy wrote in his email, which didn’t mention Marion County by name.

County clerks received a directive from Secretary of State elections division director Deborah Scroggin last week clarifying that post-election audits in Oregon can only happen within Oregon’s authorized processes. 

Election: Oregon Secretary of State certifies 2020 election results 

Oregon law requires random sampling hand counts or risk-limiting audits in all counties following primary, general and special elections. All of Oregon’s 36 county elections officials conducted these reviews, which require hand recounts of ballots, for the 2020 General Election. All reviews confirmed the certified results.

The state requires counties to retain ballots and return envelopes for two years and retain chain of custody of them, including not releasing them to third parties.

Under Oregon law, automatic recounts happen when the defeated candidate loses by less than .2% of votes. People can request recounts within 35 days of the election, and the requester must pay for it, though that may be refunded if the outcome is changed to their favor. 

Burgess pointed to an audit performed in December on Measure 110 in the 2020 General Election at the request of and paid for by a Republican precinct committee person who told the county there was voter fraud in the election. The audit confirmed the results. 

Arizona recount spurs more concern

A hand recount of the election in Maricopa County, Arizona last week by a partisan group found Biden won the county against Trump by more votes than initially were reported.

Since that, the calls and emails have spiked in many counties in Oregon.

“The Maricopa results were that they found that the election was still valid, that they didn’t need to disqualify those ballots,” Douglas County Clerk Daniel Loomis said. “There’s folks that will walk away from that saying, ‘I feel better’ and there’s folks that will walk away from that saying, ‘I still think something’s hidden.’”

One of the common refrains from those complaining is a concern about ballot machines being tampered with online.

Loomis pointed out some of those claims came from Trump supporter and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, whose claims of voter fraud by electronic vote tampering have been debunked and who is facing lawsuits for defamation over his election conspiracy theories.

Oregon’s elections are all by mail.

County clerks said the connectivity of the ballot-counting machines in Oregon has been disabled and they are kept in a room with no outside computer lines. They said they produce hard and electronic copies that are uploaded to the state.

Union County has also seen an increase in demands for recounts of presidential election results. County Clerk Robin Church partially blamed the pandemic.

“People have too much time on their hands,” Church said. “They’ve been locked up for almost two years. “They’re terrified and they’re sitting at home, just surfing the internet, believing everything they read, on both sides.”

Election:Oregon Rep. Bill Post announces he will not seek re-election in 2022

Church said the calls started coming in to Union County in July and her answer to all of them is the same: Come watch an election.

But those who are complaining never come, she said.

“Tell your readers, anybody who wants to, come to Union County and see an election,” Church said. “And you should go see what Marion County does. Just know every county virtually does the same thing.”

Bill Poehler covers Marion County for the Statesman Journal. Contact him at bpoehler@statesmanjournal.com or Twitter.com/bpoehler 

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