In the November 17 Oregonian, Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown and her Washington counterpart Sam Reed penned an editorial lauding the superiority of vote-by-mail over our former system of going to an actual polling place, where we showed our ID, cast our ballot, heard our name read from the roll, and watched our ballot deposited into a locked ballot box.Brown and Reed claim that, “Vote-by-mail is also transparent. Our systems provide a paper trail allowing recounts to verify any outcome, including a hand recount of every single ballot if a race is ultra-close.” The irony of reading that statement left me simultaneously angry and frustrated since as of November 17, the elections officials in Multnomah County claim they never received ballots from my wife or me.
DID YOUR VOTE GET COUNTED? CHECK HERE.
Our Multnomah County elections experience began on October 15, when the county mailed our ballots to our home, which happens to be in Oregon house district 47. The ballot I received from Multnomah County had the race for house district 42 instead. Our ballots also were missing several other candidates and entire races.
I called MultCo elections and told them about the defective ballots we received. They acknowledged the mistake and insisted new ballots would be sent out, along with a warning not to return the defective ballots because they would not be accepted. We later received new ballots which we completed, and signed. However, instead of mailing them, my wife dropped them off on Wednesday, October 27 at the 24-hour ballot box at the Midland Branch Library in East Portland. That was a mistake.Beginning the next day and continuing through election day, I checked the “My Vote” website to see if our ballots had been received. They had not. So I called MultCo elections officials and the answers were incompetent at best and frightful at worse. The first person I spoke to repeatedly asked me where we dropped off the ballots. Midland Branch Library was the answer each time. “Is that in Gresham?” came the reply. I hung up and redialed, hoping to get a county employee who knows Multnomah County geography.
The next person was very polite and reassuring. Her assurance came in the form of letting me know the ballots are quite secure, since they are locked inside the library at night. When I explained the Midland drop box is outside in the parking lot, she went silent and put me on hold. I hung up again.
The third person I spoke with again assured me that the reason my ballot had not been received is that they only pick up from that 24-hour box when it is full, usually on Friday. When I asked if that meant our ballots were sitting unattended in a parking lot drop box a few hundred feet from a Max stop and next door to an adult video store, he also put me on hold. I hung up.On Tuesday, November 2, I checked the SOS web site again, finding no good news. So I called MultCo one last time to ask if we needed to rush down to election headquarters and hand over yet a third ballot for this election. I was told not to do that, and all was OK at MultCo elections. If we dropped our ballots into the Midland box they would eventually be received and tallied.
I then asked the employee why our ballots were not already received and tallied under HB 3451 (discussed in another blog entry here). The employee had no idea what I was talking about, but asked me to wait while he put me on hold. I hung up.
It’s now been more than two weeks since the general election and three weeks to the day of watching our ballots disappear into the black hole of Multnomah County Elections. The incompetence of printing and sending out defective ballots was followed by an appalling lack of understanding about where the ballot drop boxes are located and their security.So when I finished reading Kate Brown’s self-congratulatory editorial about the virtues of vote-by-mail, I had to check her own website one more time. Sadly, the last entry is the October 15 mailing of the original defective ballot. So just in case the SOS may have missed something, I called MultCo elections one more time.
The nice lady who answered took my name and personal info and said our ballots were flagged as a “house error.” I asked her what that meant and she didn’t know. She asked a co-worker who said those were the defective ballots which were replaced. I replied I know all that, but I wanted to know what happened to the good ballots we dropped into the Midland drop box. She said their records show they never received our ballots.
I finally told her that I planned to write this story for a media blog and she might want to give county elections director Tim Scott ample warning. She put me on hold. I hung up.
Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com
