I’m Betsy Johnson: This is why I want Oregon’s vote in the midterm election to be counted
By The Oregonian/OregonLive
May 24, 2014; 10:00am
If a vote is truly an election, the results should stand despite errors and shenanigans
Oregon law doesn’t allow recounts unless the voter involved is deceased or is not a qualified elector. But in this election, a voter in Ashland, John Hinkley, voted in all three early, mail-in, provisional ballots, and then voted in the final election day mail-in ballot in the very spot where Hinkley’s ballot went down the drain.
Hinkley is not the only example.
A recent investigation by the Portland Tribune showed another Oregon voter in a suburban Portland college town was able to cast a mail-in ballot where the box’s tracking number had been replaced by a different tracking number, and then voted on that altered ballot.
In Ashland, the voters said they were in the Ashland City Hall lobby on Election Day, a group who claimed to have voted at other locations also.
And many voters in the state said in interviews that they believed that as many as 6,000 voted illegally in Washington in 2010.
The state didn’t find that many ballots. But there were reports of voters who cast as many as 7,000 ballots. And some said they had voted on the rolls for more than one candidate.
Despite that, the state decided to count all of those votes — by hand, by machine, via telephone or the Internet — to see where it put the state’s two Senate seats and five House seats, rather than allowing voters to use the state’s computerized vote-by-mail system, as Oregon law requires.
The state’s elections commission last week issued an order to the secretary of state’s office instructing that all ballots must be counted using the computer-based machine. The state,