3 Oregon county clerks share perspectives and challenges ahead of general election

The November general election is just eight weeks away. In Oregon, the responsibility for overseeing local, state and federal races falls to the state’s 36 county clerks. But that job has gotten harder in recent years with budget cuts, staffing shortages, the spread of misinformation, physical threats and intimidation of election workers in Oregon and around the nation. A survey of Oregon county clerks released last autumn by researchers at Reed College revealed the increasing stress they’re under to fulfill their duties.

The county clerks are also overseeing elections at a time of deep political polarization, and often have to debunk false claims challenging the integrity of Oregon’s vote-by-mail system. Joining us to share their perspectives are Rochelle Long, Klamath County clerk and incoming president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks; Derrin “Dag” Robinson, Harney County clerk and incoming vice president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks; and Dena Dawson, the Lane County clerk.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The November general election is just eight weeks away. In Oregon, the responsibility for administering local, state and federal races falls to the state’s 36 county clerks. They’ve never had an easy job, but it certainly seems to have gotten harder in recent years. There are budget cuts and staffing shortages, frivolous public records requests are gumming up the works, politicized rhetoric is leading to threats of violence, misinformation is intentionally sewing doubts about an overwhelmingly secure vote tallying process, and all of this is leading to high levels of stress and burnout.

We’re going to get perspectives on this today from around the state. Rochelle Long is the Klamath County clerk, Derrin “Dag” Robinson is a Harney County clerk, and Dena Dawson is the clerk in Lane County. It’s great to have all three of you on Think Out Loud.

Dena Dawson: Thank you.

Derrin “Dag” Robinson: Thank you, Dave.

Rochelle Long: Thank you.

Miller: Rochelle, first – the Secretary of State’s office hired a vendor last year that uses artificial intelligence to track the spread of mis- and disinformation. Can you tell us about the reports that you’re now getting every couple of weeks?

Long: We receive an email, and also it’s discussed on our call with the Secretary of State’s office. It just gives us an idea of what information is being presented out there so we can kind of tell what calls that we’re gonna get coming in. For example, some of the things that we get is Oregon’s mail in ballot system enables voter and election fraud. One of our new ones is Oregon election officials will commit election fraud by calling the 2024 presidential election before all ballots are counted. These are the kind of things we receive feedback on, so we’re kind of prepared if phone calls start coming in so that we can be ready to answer those questions or those misconceptions.

Miller: Dag, have you found that it’s accurate? If some week you get a report saying “we’re seeing this on social media,” the Secretary of State’s office says is based on the software that they’re using, do you then end up getting those calls, or do people actually bring those exact things to your office?

Robinson: We do. We try to post on social media, especially out here in rural Oregon. It’s one of the best ways we have to get information out. When we put something out, that’s official information from my office regarding elections. What comes underneath or behind it becomes a target for more mis- and disinformation. That becomes a huge problem for us to try to manage. So we do see that out there.

Having this tool helps us prepare for what is going to be said and what the majority of that’s going to be. It just gives us the ability to answer that correctly, and spend time on it.

Miller: So let’s say that you want to counter this lie that you’re going to call the election in Harney County – announce the results before you’ve counted all the ballots. If you see that and you want to get ahead of it, so you post on Facebook, “no, this is what we’re going to do,” you’re saying that people will then respond with more misinformation to your post?

Robinson: Yes, that’s generally what happens unfortunately.

Miller: Does that strike you as effective, then?

Robinson: I find it not very effective. And it’s a personal belief that I have because I don’t have the time to spend working on that. The Secretary of State posted one yesterday that this morning had 12,000 messages underneath. And the majority of them were mis- and disinformation and accusations and arguments. That becomes not helpful for us. And so then we try to find another avenue to get the information out.

Miller: What other avenues are there in 2024 that will reach a lot of people in an effective way?

Robinson: Well, from rural Oregon it’s very difficult to find another avenue. We have a weekly newspaper, and that’s really it. So a lot of word of mouth, and unfortunately, social media is really the only avenue that we have beside our local paper.

Miller: Dena Dawson, in Lane County, are there groups there that you find are most actively challenging, say, Oregon’s vote by mail system, or election integrity more broadly?

Dawson: Yeah. I don’t think it’s specific to Lane County. I think that each county has its groups. They’re literally called election integrity groups, they recruit concerned citizens who are interested in making sure that the election system and the elections are conducted with integrity. I meet with them frequently, and have an open door policy to make sure that I’m able to answer any questions and really share any information to the contrary of what it is that they’re hearing. So I meet frequently with our local voter integrity group and try to make sure that they understand the constraint that we’re working with within Oregon election law, and the tools that we have to take action. I’ve even reached out to them and said that if they’re hearing anything or they read something that’s concerning, to pass it on to me so that I can make sure that I’m informed. I receive emails whenever they hear anything that’s concerning, so I find that it’s really helpful for me to be able to, in addition to the alerts that we’re getting from the Secretary of State’s office, just keep my finger on the pulse of what’s happening.

The group is not always happy with the information that I’m providing, they may not be hearing what they want to hear. But they are hearing about what our actual process is and what the law allows us to do in Oregon. So I’m finding that we’re reaching a little bit of a middle ground.

Miller: Dag, my understanding is that one of the most pervasive new lines of election misinformation nationally is that undocumented people are going to be voting across the country in great numbers. How much are you hearing that in particular in Harney County?

Robinson: It gets attached to Facebook posts. It is mentioned a lot. And that one is a really difficult one for us to speak to nationally. For one, it’s against the law nationally to vote when you’re not a citizen. There’s literally no proof of that happening in a huge number. And Oregon is an attestation state, so you swear under oath and perjury that you are a citizen. And then folks that are registered through DMV, we’re getting the folks that have already provided their birth certificate at DMV for the most part. And I say for the most part because when you have human interaction, once in a while there have been times when we have gotten somebody who was registered that didn’t have their citizenship. It happens, and I have to be honest about that. It’s not an absolute perfect system. But it is very, very rare in how we register voters.

Miller: I can even hear in the carefulness with which you’re talking about this that it seems like you feel like it would be malpractice for you to say this never happens. So the alternative is for you to be honest and clear, and say yes in a very small number of cases this might happen, but this is not widespread and this is not a serious issue. But I can just imagine that if you answer the question like that, that could leave the door open to people who are already so prone to see conspiracies?

Robinson: It absolutely does, and that’s what’s unfortunate. There is not a perfect election ever. You have humans involved in it. And we have to do it as accurately as we possibly can, and we do it as transparently as we possibly can. So I never say that there’s a perfect election, because there truly is no such thing. But there certainly is no widespread fraud that has ever been found.

Miller: Rochelle, can you tell us about the people that went door to door in your county, Klamath County, in 2022 spreading misinformation at people’s doorsteps?

Long: We received one complaint, onesie-twosie, and you kind of just go “OK, maybe it was just somebody trying to get their narrative out.” And then we started receiving phone calls and people came to our counter. And so I was like “well, we gotta nip this in the bud now.” They were basically going door to door presenting as officials, not necessarily election officials – that’s why it kind of got confusing for people – and telling them that they voted or didn’t vote the last election, they had their list, their clipboards, telling them not necessarily how to vote, but they need to vote. And I don’t know that all the information that they were giving was accurate, because we had a couple of people come in and it wasn’t accurate. I don’t remember the exact details.

We did put out a press release for it, and just tell people “we don’t tell people to go to your door and tell you that you voted or not voted. It is public record, but we’re not gonna be showing up at your door giving you that information.”

Miller: Dena, you don’t just manage elections, you also do things like respond to public records requests, which have gone through the roof. Do you have the staffing to do everything you need right now?

Dawson: Oh, no. And in addition to the public records, it’s been interesting in Lane County. I started in July of 2022, and there are nine of us in full-time staff for elections. I shouldn’t even include myself as a full-time staff for elections because I’m also responsible for the reporting division. But seven of us are new to our roles or to elections, period. And in that time, in addition to having three unscheduled recall elections and multiple district formations, the public records requests were incredibly burdensome for a long period of time. We are struggling just to keep our head above water.

I dare use the word “survival” mode. That’s a term we use around the office when we are prioritizing. We’ve been in a bit of survival mode because a lot of us are new to our roles, and we’ve had retirements of folks that were here for 30 years before I got here, and a lot of the information and processes were in their head. So we’re rebuilding basically every procedure that we touch, and we’re looking at it through the lens of is this efficient? Is it compliant with law? How are we gonna get these things done? We’ve been a little bit in survival mode for the last couple of years, and so yeah, we’re struggling a bit.

Miller: Rochelle, my understanding is that Dena in Lane County is not alone. More than a third of Oregon counties, 15 out of 36, have new county clerks or other top elections officials since the last presidential election three-and-a-half years ago. What is that going to mean to have so many people in this top job for the first time?

Long: We do have a lot that have changed over, that have new clerks. We have a strong association, and we help each other. A lot of the new clerks have support staff that is amazing and have done elections for years. So, although we have new clerks, there are support staff that are able to help them. And we do help each other out constantly, we call each other constantly, we’ll read a directive and we’ll be “is this how you understand that directive?” And we try to make sure that we are in constant communication with each other, if something happens in our county, there’s a misprint, that everybody knows in case they get hit with the questions. We are very good as an association about trying to communicate with one another. And I think that has helped us a lot.

These clerks are new, yes, but they’ve also ran some elections already since this presidential one. The presidential ones are just interesting because you get hit with a lot more, and a lot of it has to do with the integrity groups and going with the national news of what’s happening. And so then the local jurisdictions get hit with those too. But we are just trying to help each other. And if we have questions come in that are kind of weird, we’re like “is your county getting hit with this question? This is how we answered this question. This is the material that we gave them.” And we do try to help each other. We are a good support system for each other.

And yeah, Dena is fairly new, but she’s not new to elections, and she’s amazing and smart, and she has done a lot with very little like we all are having to do right now, and we’re all just trying to help each other through it. We are like Dena, we’re in survival mode. We joke around a lot about “what fresh hell will today bring?” And we make a joke about something that comes in. You just kind of do that to get through it all, and we do all get through it. It’s just some days are harder than others.

Miller: How much it is joking and how much it is sort of terrified commiserating? I mean that as a serious question. Nationwide, there have been death threats against people in your jobs.

Long: Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve read that survey that Paul Gronke did for the Secretary of State’s office.

Miller: We had Dena on last year, as well as somebody from PSU to talk about that survey, which showed very dramatic stories. And it showed, in some ways, very scared county clerks, very burned out county clerks, people who were sometimes so emotional in the course of the interviews with PSU researchers that they had to take some pauses. That was I think in November of last year. Please go ahead.

Long: That’s just what I was gonna say. There are some days that I think we just do cry, because we’re out of time, we’re out of people, we’re out of money. We’re trying to get this all done and make sure it looks smooth to the voters. And it should look smooth to the voters, that’s what our job is. But there are days where it’s like I just want to go into a room and scream and then maybe I’ll feel better. So there really is that emotional side of it too that a lot of people don’t know.

Miller: Dag, I’m curious, when you boil some of what we were talking about earlier down, it’s that people in your community, people who I assume you’ve known for decades, given that you’ve worked at the county clerk’s office yourself there in Harney County for almost 30 years, they’re saying they don’t trust you to fairly administer this sacred piece of your job, to fairly administer an election. What’s it like to hear that essentially from your friends and neighbors?

Robinson: Well, it’s kind of hard. I have built a rapport here with the community here. Of course, Harney County is a small place – big in area but small in people. And I have worked really hard to get those folks into my office, to show them how this system works, how the processes work. And it matters. Unfortunately, I can’t speak for everybody at the same time.

What I do say is we all work in one sandbox together, the 36 of us, and we have to do the same thing the same way depending upon volume, but the processes are exactly the same. And so having them come in, go through the processes, and show the transparency and yet the security at the same time, a lot of them get a lot of comfort from that. When you actually see these processes in work and see what we go through to ensure each vote is counted properly, accurately, transparently and securely, they leave feeling really, really good. And I’ve had that happen before, they’ll say “I really like what I see here.” And I say “well, we all do it this way, it’s this way in every county.” What some of them do say is “well, I trust you, but I don’t trust them.”

Miller: Is that Multnomah County?

Robinson: Whoever it might be, it’s the same “I don’t trust them, I think they’re still messing with them.” Or something like that. Well, we’re all doing this the same way, and here’s the rules that say why we have to do it the same way. There’s a little give and take, but there are some wins with that. So making sure they come in to see the process.

Miller: Do you think that that goodwill and that trust in the process is robust enough to last to the next day when those people see the next Facebook comment spreading lies?

Robinson: I can only hope so. I’ve had folks come in and say this is a great system, but then I can read that they’re insistent that the election was stolen. So all you can do is just shake your head and say “well, it certainly wasn’t stolen on my watch.”

Miller: Dena, the last time that we talked, about 10 months ago or so, your office had recently been sent what was described as a suspicious piece of mail, prompting you to contact the FBI and other law enforcement. Can you just remind us briefly what happened and the status of that investigation?

Dawson: Yeah, absolutely. It was during a November special election in 2023 that we did receive a suspicious piece of mail. It was during an active election, but it was not a ballot. We’ve received some training on what to keep an eye out when it comes to suspicious mail pieces. We had a staff member that opened a piece of mail that did contain a white suspicious powdery substance. So as soon as that letter was opened, we implemented our suspicious mail procedure, which we hadn’t dusted off or tested for quite a while. We’d gotten a little I guess comfortable that things might be going back to normal.

We did follow our incident response plan. So we notified the Secretary of State’s office, all of our partners here, all the other 36 county clerks to let them know to keep an eye out for it. HAZMAT and the FBI got involved, and it turned out to be that it was not only Lane County, there were a couple of other pieces of mail that were intercepted in other Oregon counties, and then in Nevada, Washington, several other states as well. So it was a targeted attack on election officials. And it’s still an ongoing investigation, so we’re unable to talk about the contents of the package. But we’re really hoping that they’re able to catch this person.

Definitely going into this election, it feels like those of us who received that package are definitely on someone’s radar. I’m a little more terrified about things than I normally would be because of that occurrence. But what it did for us though, it really highlighted the fact that we needed to tighten up our security and make sure that all of our security features, physical barriers, surveillance cameras, alarm system, panic buttons, that everything is tested and ready to go. We’re holding our own tabletop training exercise in a couple of weeks with federal, state, and local public safety partners to test a couple of our internal processes to make sure that in the event that something does happen, we are prepared, or as prepared as we can be.

Election officials plan for the worst and hope for the best. And we are doing everything that we can to make sure that we’re prepared to protect ourselves and voters in our offices.

Miller: Dena, Dag and Rochelle, thank you very much to all three of you for joining us and for your jobs. I appreciate it.

Dawson: Thank you.

Robinson: Thank you, Dave. Pleasure to be on with you.

Long: Thank you.

Miller: Dena Dawson is the county clerk for Lane County. Derrin “Dag” Robinson is the county clerk in Harney County. He’s the incoming vice president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks. And Rochelle Long is the county clerk in Klamath County. She is the incoming president of that association.

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