Loretta Smith, the former Multnomah County commissioner who recently lost an election to opponent Dan Ryan for a seat on the Portland City Council, said Thursday she wants an audit of the special election results.
In a letter to the director of the Multnomah County Elections Division and the Oregon secretary of state, Smith’s campaign points to two discrepancies they noticed in voting data from the secretary of state’s office.
The campaign wrote that the data shows a deceased person voted in the August election. Smith’s team also claimed nearly 14,000 voters cast a vote this year for the first time in at least five years, and that more than 11,000 of them were born on Jan. 1. The campaign said they had a statistician look into it, who told them that outcome is statistically very unlikely.
Smith’s campaign said they want to confirm that the election results, which had Ryan winning by about 5,300 votes.
“Due to the nature of statistical improbability that these voters are free from error or fraud, coupled with the quantity of voters being enough to change the outcome of the election, we are requesting that Multnomah County, in conjunction with the Oregon Secretary of State, immediately initiate a Risk-Limiting audit of the August 2020 Special election,” the letter reads.
The campaign is also calling for an in-person review of the 11,000 ballot envelopes, a breakdown of the candidates for whom these ballots were cast, and a “comprehensive review” of the county’s elections security plan — all before the election is certified. The city expects this to happen on Sept. 9.
After receiving the letter Thursday afternoon, Multnomah County Election Division director Tim Scott said he did an initial investigation. He said while he understands the campaign’s concern, the findings might not be as alarming as they appear.
The person singled out in the letter by Smith as having died in December 2013 did not have their vote counted, according to Scott. He said someone in the person’s household had mailed in an envelope, with the word “deceased” written on it and the office canceled the vote after finding an obituary. He added it’s not unusual for deceased voters to sit on their lists for a while if elections officials are not notified of a death.
As for the 11,000 people with Jan. 1 birthdays who seem to have cast votes, Scott said that’s not what their records show. Smith’s campaign, he said, seems to be basing its claim on “inaccurate data.”
“The list they have doesn’t match the voter registration record,” Scott said. “The first two people I looked up on that list, their birthday is not Jan. 1.”
In a statement, Smith’s campaign emphasized they’d pulled their data directly from official sources and were waiting for a more thorough explanation.
“Any data we have originated from the voting system the county uses or from the state voter file maintained by the state party, which is why we brought our concerns to the county and the state,” Smith’s campaign said.
Scott said he’d only been notified of the letter briefly before OPB called. He said he’d keep looking into it and get back to the campaign.
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