Multnomah County elections director on ballot box fires, ranked choice voting and more

Even if you’re among the county’s most engaged and informed voters, there’s a lot to keep track of this election cycle. And that’s not even counting the recent fires at ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington. With Election Day less than a week out, we invited Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott on to give us the latest about ballot security, ranked-choice voting returns and updates, how to make sure you’re meeting the postmark deadline and to answer other frequently asked questions.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller. Even if you’re among the most engaged and informed voters, there’s a lot to keep track of, especially in Multnomah County this election cycle. And that’s not even counting the recent fires at ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington. With election day less than a week out now, we’ve invited county elections director Tim Scott in to give us the latest about ballot security, ranked choice voting, and how to make sure you are on track to meet the postmark deadline. Tim Scott, thanks for making time for us.

Tim Scott: Thank you for having me, Dave.

Miller: I want to start with the fire at the ballot box outside of the county election headquarters early Monday morning. What’s the latest on that?

Scott: Well, the latest is that we’re in full operation again. As of a few hours after that incident, we had the ballot box replaced, and voters welcome to drop ballots anywhere in the county that they would like. We have increased our security patrols at those drop sites, so we will have eyes on each ballot box in the county multiple times each day. And Portland Police has asked their officers to have awareness of those drop sites and to also periodically stop by.

Miller: I did note that the Clark County auditor said that elections office employees there are going to serve as ballot box observers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at each of the 22 drop boxes throughout that county. Do you have the same level of coverage in Multnomah County?

Scott: We are not going to put staff at every single drop site between now and election day. However, as we get closer to election day, our monitoring of those drop boxes will be more frequent. We will have security staff at all of the drive-up drop sites, about half of the drop sites, on Monday and Tuesday during the heaviest voting hours. And we are exploring other options with our workplace security partners who provide the security personnel for the monitoring, to see if there are other options for more.

Miller: For the few ballots that, according to reports, were damaged by the Multnomah County fire, was your office able to identify the voters so you could reach out to them?

Scott: Yes. There were 412 ballots in the drop site at the time of the attack. And only three of those ballots were damaged to the point where we felt we needed to contact the voter and issue a replacement ballot, which we did on Monday. The envelope was readable, we were able to reach out to those people, get that replacement ballot issued. And all of our security precautions worked as they were intended to. We had a security officer in the building who heard the attack and was able to jump into action quickly to address the fire outside the box. And the fire suppression system inside the box extinguished the flames immediately.

Miller: And for reasons that have not yet been publicly explained, the fire suppression device, which from what I understand should have been similar and should have worked similarly in Clark County, it didn’t. And that’s why there have been reports there of something like 400 or more ballots that were damaged.

The New York Times reported yesterday, based on anonymous law enforcement sources, that “Free Gaza” language was found on each of the incendiary devices, one earlier this month and the two early Monday morning. Can you confirm that just in Multnomah County?

Scott: I am not able to confirm that. That’s part of the police investigation. I read the same article you did. I did not have any access directly to the device that was placed on the ballot box. The explosive experts from PPB removed that carefully and safely before I was on site.

Miller: Let’s turn to other voting issues. How many ballots have been turned in at this point?

Scott: I looked earlier this morning and we are at about 25% turnout as of this morning, which is definitely behind where we were in 2020. But we are making up ground quickly. We received 30,000 ballots in the mail yesterday morning, which is a significant return on any given day. And we’re seeing heavy traffic at the drop sites as well. So we anticipate continuing to get lots of ballots between now and election day.

Miller: It’s below where you were in 2016 as well. You’re saying it seems like maybe things are catching up. But do you have your own theory for why it is? Yesterday, we were well behind those two other recent presidential elections. Why do you think that is?

Scott: I think there are a lot of factors. 2020 was an anomaly in terms of how early people voted. We have never really seen a turnout pattern like that. The 2022 elections saw a very similar low turnout early on, with big spikes at the end. And the primary was the same way, we got over 100,000 ballots back on election day in the primary this year. I anticipate that we will see that again.

As to why, there could be a lot of factors. People are more confident potentially in voting late with the postmarks that are in place now. There is two ballot pages in every city of Portland ballot – that is the first time that’s happened since the year 2000. And there’s a lot of content on the regular ballot as well as the ranked choice ballot, which voters have to make decisions on.

Miller: Let’s say that somebody wants to hold on to their ballot until Tuesday, and they want to get their ballot postmarked, as opposed to putting it into a dropbox. For that specific class of voter, how can they ensure that their ballot will be counted?

Scott: Well first, I would encourage them not to do that. It is very helpful for us to have the ballots before election day so we can release the results for as many ballots as possible at eight o’clock on election night. I think that is something that voters should know, is that if they return their ballot on election day, likely their ballot will not be included in that first round of results at eight o’clock, but will be reported the next day.

Second, as far as postmarks go, I think people need to be very aware that in order to get a postmark they have to very carefully examine how they are going to get that postmark. If their letter carrier comes to their door at 2 pm usually every day, and they wait till the last minute to put their ballot out on their mailbox, and the carrier maybe came earlier that day, they’re not gonna get that postmark. Same thing with blue USPS collection boxes. Those have a time written on them for when the USPS collects those. If they get the ballot in the box before that time, it will be collected on time by the USPS and will likely get a postmark. But the only way to guarantee that they get a postmark is if they take it into a USPS branch and walk it up to the counter and ask the clerk to put the postmark on while they’re standing there. That’s the guaranteed way to ensure that you get that postmark, is to walk it to a post office.

And at that point, I might suggest that ballot drop boxes are a better way to go. There are 30 ballot drop sites throughout the county, and almost all Multnomah County libraries are official ballot drop sites. And those drop sites are collected by election staff and delivered to the elections office that night.

Miller: What are you doing right now with the ballots that are coming in?

Scott: Based on a change to the law in 2021, we are able to take all processing steps with all ballots that we have received starting as soon as we received our first ballot. So that means we can signature verify them. Once the signature has been verified, we can take them out of the envelopes, we can scan them into the tabulation system, we can adjudicate those ballots that are in the tabulation system. The only thing we cannot do by law is release the results. And that is why we have so many protections in place with technology, as well as we swear in our election workers to make sure that those results don’t get released early.

Miller: I want to turn to some ranked choice voting questions that have come in. Yesterday, the Portland elections division sent out a release reminding Portland voters that they cannot choose more than one candidate as ranked number one on their ballot, and if they do rank more than one person, say, mayoral candidate, as their number one choice, none of those rankings will count. Has that been happening in significant numbers?

Scott: Well, at this point we have been adjudicating some of the ballots and we have seen some errors. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge that this specific situation has been significant. I have seen a lot of instances where people have marked two first ranked candidates, but then crossed out one of them, showing intent that they prefer the other candidate. And that is by design, we’ve asked voters if they change their mind to cross out the oval that they are not interested in so that we can count the ballot for the one they are interested in.

Miller: In that case, is it flagged by a computer and then looked at by a human being? How would that come to someone’s attention at your office?

Scott: Absolutely, we have a very smart tabulation system that will flag any contest where there are say two ovals in one rank, or in a first past the post contest, if it’s a vote for one where someone has only has voted for two, it will flag those. And two human beings will take a look at those, and those two human beings are of different political parties by law. They will look at those and look for voter intent, and adjudicate the ballot based on what they determined to be voter intent.

However, if somebody has not made an attempt to correct that error and crossed out one or two of those marks, it will get skipped in rank choice voting. So if someone has marked two candidates in the first rank, the tabulation software will skip that, and it will effectively promote their second rank to rank one and that will be counted.

Miller: So the “news you can use” version of this is if you realize you’ve made a mistake and ranked two candidates as number one in ranked choice, or two candidates in a kind of first-past-the-post winner-take-all race, cross out the candidate who is the mistake. And that way a human can help fix your ballot.

I want to move on to timing for the release of actual results. On your website right now it says that for these ranked choice voting races, like for Portland Mayor or Portland City Council, there will be the big initial drop of results at 8 p.m. on Tuesday night, and then the next one isn’t scheduled until 6 p.m. the next day. Do you really plan to go 22 hours between releases of results?

Scott: For the ranked choice voting contests, yes. And that is because the production of the reports for the ranked choice voting contest is significantly more complicated. We are producing those reports in-house because the Secretary of State’s election night reporting website is not yet capable of showing round-by-round tabulation for ranked choice voting results. So we will be conducting the results reporting for ranked choice voting once per day.

For all of the first-past-the-post contests, everything else on the other ballot card in city of Portland envelopes, will be reported multiple times on election night. We are typically releasing results reports for anywhere between 50% to 80% of the total ballots cast in that eight o’clock results report. And then typically by the Thursday after election day, we are between 90% and 97% of total ballots cast.

Miller: So to understand what you’re saying, it’s your assumption right now that Thursday at 6 p.m. is when you think it’s likely there will be a very clear picture of who won the Portland Mayoral race and the Portland City Council races?

Scott: That is true, as long as something is not very, very close. And this is all based on historical data. I should mention this is exactly what we do every election. Sometimes the media is able to call a contest based on that first results report at eight o’clock, if there is someone that has a significant lead. If the results are showing a contest is closer at that point, the media may wait to call a contest. But all of these results are preliminary that we are releasing, until we release our final results report on December 2, when the results will be final. And that is the way it has been for every election I’ve been involved in.

Miller: To go back to the reason you stated for only giving results in the ranked choice voting races once a day – it’s my understanding that the public will be able to see all of the data for the successive rounds, so for the last place candidate being dropped in this round, and then the voters who had them number one, those second place votes adding to the first place vote total. We’ll be able to see that for each of those rounds? That’ll be on your website?

Scott: That is 100% true. We are wanting to be as transparent as possible. So we are producing and reporting the full round-by-round tabulation. Voters can see samples of that on our ranked choice voting website right now, we have a sample results reporting site. They can explore that, look at what the results will look like. We will have two different styles of tabular reports, and one clickable bar chart that will be able to give people a clear sense of how that round-by-round tabulation worked; which candidate was eliminated first in that tabulation; who has the highest vote total percentage after the full tabulation was complete; who is leading. All of that data will be available on our website.

Miller: Finally, what should somebody do if they are registered to vote, or thought they were registered to vote, maybe they moved, but for whatever reason they did not get a ballot? What options do they have right now?

Scott: They can contact us now, immediately, so that we can help them sort through that. We also have an order ahead replacement ballot web page where a voter can request their own replacement ballot. And if they choose to pick it up in person, we would have it ready for them within a couple of hours. If they would like it mailed, we can still do that, as of today. But tomorrow we will be cutting off that mailing option, knowing that it will take a few days for that ballot to get to the voter.

Miller: Tim Scott, thank you very much. Here is to a smooth next week-and-a-half.

Scott: Thank you very much, Dave.

Miller: Tim Scott is the director of Elections for Multnomah County.

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