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Officials from Multnomah County and the Oregon Secretary of State's Elections Division today provided answers to questions Loretta Smith's campaign raised after the Aug. 11 City Council special election runoff, which Smith lost to Dan Ryan 51% to 48%.
The short answer: "Irregularities" Smith's campaign cited had reasonable explanations.
As Oregon Public Broadcasting first reported Thursday, Smith's campaign questioned two puzzling aspects of the electorate in the special election: An unlikely high number of voters—more than 11,000 of the 175,000 who cast votes—appeared to have the same birthday, Jan. 1, and at least one appeared to be dead.
It was a close, hard-fought election with, in some ways, a surprising result: A longtime politician, a Black woman seeking office in the midst of ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in left-leaning Portland, lost to a relative newcomer.
The questions Smith, a Democrat, then raised about the accuracy of the vote-by-mail election were potentially explosive, coming as they did as President Trump peddled misinformation about vote by mail. Trump has claimed without evidence that the system is subject to manipulation and fraud because anybody can fill in a ballot. (Trump, meanwhile, has himself requested an absentee ballot to vote by mail in Florida.)
In their response today, elections officials made clear that the Committee to Elect Loretta Smith did not have its facts straight.
Smith's campaign raised issues about the birthdates and dead voter in an Aug. 20 letter to elections officials seeking an audit of the Aug. 11 results before the outcome is certified next month.
Officials from both Multnomah County and the state Elections Division provided explanations to Smith's campaign in a joint email.
State elections director Steve Trout said the assertion that 11,000 voters had the same birthday was incorrect.
In 2018, Trout explained, lawmakers passed a bill that removed voters' dates of birth from the publicly available voter file that contains other personal information, such as home address, party affiliation and voting history.
That was done to protect individuals' privacy, but what also happened, according to political consultants who regularly use a commercial version of the state's voter database in campaigns, was that voters who registered after the law went into effect were simply assigned the birthdate of Jan. 1 in the year they were born.
When elections officials examined the spreadsheet of voters with Jan. 1 birthdates that Smith campaign manager Jerome Brooks provided, they checked the actual birthdays of the voters on the spreadsheet. (Elections officials still have access to that information, although the public does not.) They determined the information in the commercial database was misleading—and, in fact, wrong.
"Under Oregon law, we do not disclose birthdates as part of the voter file due to voter privacy concerns," Trout wrote to Smith's campaign. "Only the year of birth is disclosed.
"In analyzing your spreadsheet, the year of birth is correct for the voters, but the month and date of birth are not accurate. We do not know where you obtained the birth month and day data, but it is inaccurate and there are not 11,000 voters with a Jan. 1 birthdate."
The second issue elections officials addressed was the Smith campaign's concern that at least one dead voter's ballot might have been cast and counted.
Like the question about seemingly common birthdays, the campaign's concern stemmed from a document, this one called the "voted/not voted" list. That's a document that campaigns can get from the state Elections Division after ballots have been mailed to households. Campaigns use it to encourage potential supporters to vote who have not yet returned their ballots.
The Smith campaign determined that a voter who appeared on the "voted/not voted" list as having turned in a ballot was actually deceased.
But Multnomah Count elections director Tim Scott investigated the ballot in question and determined that it had been sent back by the dead voter's family—but only to notify elections officials the voter was dead.
"We received the ballot envelope in question with the word 'Deceased!' written on the envelope," Scott wrote to Brooks.
"All ballot envelopes that are received by our office go through our high-speed mail sorters as a first step and, based on the scanning of a valid barcode for the election, are marked as received in the state database."
Although the envelope was marked "received," Scott said, the ballot wasn't counted.
"During signature review, we noticed that there was no signature on the envelope, instead someone had written 'Deceased!' on the ballot envelope in question, and we pulled that ballot envelope aside," Scott wrote.
"The ballot envelope was then inactivated, along with the deceased individual's record, and was set aside without opening it. At that time, the ballot envelope would have been removed from the 'voted/not voted list.'
"Because the ballot envelope was inactivated, if there is a ballot inside, it was never counted and therefore the ballot was never voted."
Campaign manager Brooks referred WW's request for comment to Smith, who did not immediately respond.