Rachel Rodriguez fills out a ballot at the Clackamas County Elections Office in Oregon City, Ore., Nov. 5, 2024. Rodriguez says it is a "privilege" to not vote or to feel confident of a certain election result, and feels "there's a lot on the line" in this election.
Anna Lueck for OPB
The general election is now over, wrapping up months of planning, assistance and coordination among Oregon’s 36 county clerks who are responsible for mailing off ballots, registering voters and overseeing elections in local, state and federal races in the state. More than a third of them this year also administered a presidential election in Oregon for the first time.
County clerks have had to do their jobs while facing budget cuts, the spread of misinformation and threats of physical violence and intimidation directed against them and election workers. Some have also had to reassure residents about the safety and security of Oregon’s vote-by-mail system after the recent arson attacks on ballot boxes in Portland and Vancouver, according to Rochelle Long, the Klamath County Clerk and president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks.
Long joins us to discuss the challenges Oregon county clerks prepared for and confronted during the general election.
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. The general election is now over, wrapping up months of planning and coordination among the state’s 36 county clerks. They’re responsible for registering voters, mailing off ballots and overseeing elections in local state and federal races in Oregon. County clerks have had to do all of that, while facing budget cuts, misinformation and threats of physical violence or intimidation. Some also had to reassure residents about the safety and security of Oregon’s vote-by-mail system after the recent arson attacks on ballot boxes in Oregon and in Washington.
Rochelle Long is a Klamath County Clerk and the president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks. We talked to her before the election and she joins us now for a retrospective. Rochelle, welcome back.
Rochelle Long: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Miller: So, from the voter’s perspective, the election is over. Obviously, there are still a few races out there that we’re waiting to hear from. We don’t know the balance of the U.S. House of Representatives, but basically from as far as voters are concerned, we’re done. What’s left to be done at your office and 35 others around the state?
Long: I wish we were done. We still have postmarks that are valid and they can be counted through the seventh day, which is next Tuesday. We still have those who didn’t sign their ballots or their signature was challenged, meaning we need a signature update and they have until the 26th of November to rectify that. And we can’t technically certify until after … well, we can’t certify until after that, but we need to be certified by December 2 to start our audit, our internal audit. So we do a hand count to make sure that the ballot machines counted accurately.
Miller: A hand count of everyone, or a representative one to see if statistically it’s working?
Long: It’s based off of a percentage of the voter turnout, and it is statistically.
Miller: What were some of the interesting trends that stood out to you this year? What did you notice?
Long: So I talked to some other county clerks to just kind of get a feel. But most counties had a record number of election day ballots after a slow start, but it still wasn’t higher than the presidential election in 2020. And almost every county I spoke to had lines out the door. There was some kind of misunderstanding – they got their ballot in the mail, but they really want to vote in person. So they threw their ballot away and came to the counter to get a ballot to vote right there, which they could have just taken their ballot, came in, voted and dropped it right there. But there is some kind of misconception with that.
Miller: Do you think those were new Oregonians?
Long: Yes.
Miller: I mean, vote-by-mail has been around in Oregon for decades now. The idea of throwing out your ballot and going to the ballot office, it’s a little bit confusing.
Long: Right. And I think it was a lot of new people that have moved here to Oregon. And also there’s just that whole national push and movement towards, we need to vote in person, we need to show ID. So I think that kind of had some of that in there. And that played into it a little bit.
Miller: But that meant, I imagine, a fair amount of extra work for county elections officials to verify that the person is indeed who they are and then to print a new ballot for them, and all needlessly.
Long: Correct. Yes. And I think that’s why we ended up with the lines out the doors. The Multnomah County election director said this was the first time the lines have been that long since 2012.
Miller: I passed by that office a number of times in the lead up to the election and the day of, and I can verify there were definitely some long lines there. I understand that you and other county clerks also received ballots from other states?
Long: Yes, more than usual, we noticed a huge uptick in that. And we’re doing our due diligence. We actually, as much as we could … We got some on election night, so obviously, we couldn’t take those to the post office because it was past five o’clock. But anything that we received before election day, we put a tracker on them and sent them to those counties in the other states because some states also honor postmarks. So that way it would be postmarked before election day. And we stamped them like we do, ours saying it was received by the deadline for the election and hoping that we can honor everybody’s votes.
But yeah, it was a huge uptick, I was really surprised. We actually had a voter come in with a California ballot and just wanted us to count their ballot there. We’re like, it doesn’t work that way, it has to be counted in the state that it’s issued from. So just some miscommunications or stuff that’s happening nationally. And then there’s just like this thing, “Oh, I can just go into any office and they’ll do that for me.”
Miller: It’s a presidential election.
Long: Correct, yeah.
Miller: I mean, I can sort of understand why someone would think that, even if it’s not at all the way it is. Wait, but did that mean that Klamath County or other counties that dealt with this, you had to spend local taxpayer money to mail a California voter’s ballot, say, to some county in California?
Long: Correct, yes.
Miller: Did you make changes after you heard about the fires, or incendiary devices, or maybe bombs? At this point it is actually a little bit confusing after the video that we saw from Vancouver. But after what happened in ballot boxes in Multnomah and Clark counties, in Klamath County, did you make changes about security or pickup schedule, anything having to do with your boxes?
Long: No, we didn’t because we already had those devices in our boxes. We already have a pickup schedule that we don’t advertise and we have cameras on virtually everything. So we didn’t change anything in our county.
Miller: What can you tell us about what happened in Coos County, where there were some problems with people just getting their ballots in the mail in the first place?
Long: Yeah, they had the same issue in the primary election. They worked really closely with USPS, issued a press release and posted on Facebook. They have an elections Facebook page. They also posted it, their sheriff posted it on their Facebook page just to [say], if you hadn’t received your ballot, please come in, we’ll issue you a replacement one. And the clerk, Clerk Brecke in Coos County, personally went above and beyond. And anyone who couldn’t make it in, like those in nursing homes who didn’t get their ballots, she literally went there and delivered them to them personally. So she was doing everything in her power to make sure those voters received their ballots.
Miller: When we talked before, and when we talked to some of your statewide colleagues before that, one of the big themes of those conversations was the enormous amount of mis- and dis-information that is circulating and the ways that it can sometimes turn even potentially to threats of violence. One of the things that I saw in national reporting was that on Tuesday evening – as Tuesday evening got later and later and as Donald Trump’s electoral chances seemed to be getting better and better – that complaints about voter fraud or the mishandling of ballots or elections, that they basically dropped down to zero, that it all evaporated when it seemed like Donald Trump was going to win. I’m curious if you saw something like that at the Oregon level.
Long: We haven’t, as county clerks. Not that this is happening in every county, but I’ve heard from a couple of counties now and they said the public record requests have begun again. So after the 2020 presidential election, we received so many public records requests. A lot of us were coming in on the weekends just to try to fulfill them, and it’s like stacks of them. I’ve talked to a few counties now and they said that they are starting to receive those public records requests, and it feels like it’s just to disrupt the process because we’re still in the middle of everything.
Miller: To disrupt the process, regardless of who the likely winner is. Just to gum up the works of American elections.
Long: That’s what it feels like, yeah.
Miller: Is there a point, at this point, in the election calendar when you and your colleagues can breathe a sigh of relief? I guess, when do elections officials take vacations now?
Long: That’s a good question. It all revolves around elections. So we all kind of take a sigh of relief after December 31, because December 31 is our deadline to get in all of the last of our reporting. So that’s like our final, we’re done with everything. I mean, we can get some of it in before then, but that’s our final like, yay, we’re done, from the November election – which people don’t know because we’re working behind the scenes trying to get all that done.
And I did talk to a lot of clerks this time just to make sure they’re doing OK and hanging in there. It’s been interesting, the hours being put in because we are short staffed, and budget cuts are happening, and we’re talking here at four in the morning, leaving at 10 at night just to try to get everything done to stay caught up. And that’s not counting election night. We’re talking a couple of weeks before and we’ll probably be doing this for a couple of weeks after.
Miller: Rochelle Long, thank you for your service again and thanks for taking some time to talk to us. I appreciate it.
Long: Thanks for having us on here. Have a great day.
Miller: You too. Rochelle Long is a Klamath County Clerk and the president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks.
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