Oregon's Comedy of Errors by Thomas Hargrove

Reproduced under the Fair Use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial, nonprofit, and educational use.

Note: The problems outlined below are coincident with the initiation of mail in elections in Oregon.

April 16, 2004 — In an attempt to avoid any Florida-like embarrassments four years ago, Oregon Deputy Secretary of State Paddy McGuire launched a review of the Beaver State's results from the 2000 presidential election.

That's when McGuire noticed that only 93 percent of those who cast ballots in rural Grant County actually had their votes counted in the presidential race. In Oregon's statewide ballot-by-mail system, Grant County reported 4,136 ballots cast, but only 3,846 presidential votes counted.

What became of 290 votes?

"We were looking at our undercount, county by county. And when you do that, Grant County sort of leaps off the page at you," McGuire said.

So McGuire telephoned Grant County.

"The answer I got was that there was a very hot local race, a sheriff's race. People were voting for that and not for president," McGuire said. "Grant County is the kind of place where all politics is really, really, really local."

The only problem was the sheriff's race between three-term incumbent Fred Reusser and challenger Glenn Palmer, then a municipal police officer, wasn't hot at all. Reusser had died of a heart attack a week before Election Day, so Palmer won.

In fact, county records showed that no race in Grant County got more than 93 percent of the ballots.

"I just don't know how this could have happened. Honestly, our optical scan machines are tested and retested," said Grant County Clerk Kathy McKinnon. "It didn't show a red flag to me because everything balanced."

Grant County has had a chronic undervote over the years, though state officials failed to notice, according to a Scripps Howard News Service study of official election returns. Only 94 percent of the voters seemed to have a preference in the 1996 presidential election, even though the race for the White House again was the county's top vote getter, according to official election returns.

Grant County reported that the two candidates for state treasurer in the 2000 Democratic primary received 704 votes when counted by optical scan. The primary was so close that state law required a statewide hand recount. That's when Grant County amended its count, resulting in the candidates getting an additional 18 votes each — an undercount of 5 percent.

McKinnon said she remembers the hand recount. "I have no clue what to tell you. The ballots were checked. There's always going to be a difference (when ballots are counted by hand). The Secretary of State's office was satisfied."

There seemed to be other Oregon counties that might be having problems with their optical scanners. Baker and Curry counties both amended their tallies in the 2000 Democratic primary, increasing the candidate votes by 6 percent over the first count. And Grant County may have had the worst undervote in the 2000 presidential election, but Klamath County reported only 89.6 percent of the voters expressed an opinion for president in 1996.

John Lindback, Oregon state elections director, reviewed the election results and talked with Klamath County Clerk Linda Smith who "went down into the basement to dig out stuff from the '96 election." She reported only 197 undervotes for president, Lindback said. But that accounted for only a fraction of the miscount.

Smith again confirmed that 24,955 votes were cast during the 1996 presidential election. The presidential candidates received a total of 22,360 votes with only 197 undervotes.

What about the rest?

"I'm showing here that there were 2,398 overvotes. People voted for more than one presidential candidate," Smith said, reading the vote transcript. "I don't know what to tell you."

The report seemed to deflate Lindback.

"Frankly, until 2000, undervotes and overvotes weren't an issue in this country," he said. "But this is something to watch, no question about it. It should be raising eyebrows of people like me."

Reach Thomas Hargrove at hargrovet@shns.com

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Last updated 6/14/09