Left: Rep. Tracy Cramer, R-District 22, on the House floor in Salem, Ore., in this Feb. 5, 2024, file photo. Right: Lesly Munoz in an undated photo provided by the campaign.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff/OPB / Courtesy of Future PAC
A crucial election deadline came and went on Tuesday and brought what appeared, at last, to be a firm conclusion: Oregon Democrats will have supermajorities in both the state House and Senate next year.
As of 5 p.m. Tuesday, voters whose ballots for the Nov. 5 election were rejected because of errors could no longer “cure” them with election officials, correcting problems and ensuring they would be tallied.
That didn’t matter in any race but one.
In the closely watched contest for House District 22, both parties had been feverishly chasing outstanding ballots in the run up to the deadline. That meant reaching out to voters who had an error in their ballot and were ripe for curing.
When the Marion County Clerk’s Office published results Tuesday evening, the outcome seemed settled: Democrat Lesly Munoz had beaten Republican state Rep. Tracy Cramer by 161 votes.
With the result, Democrats will flip the Woodburn district and secure 36 seats in the House — a three-fifths supermajority that would allow the party to pass any bill, including new taxes, on a party-line vote. Senate Democrats will also hold that margin, after wresting a Bend district from Republicans this year.
Munoz works as a consultant with the Oregon Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. But in a release Tuesday evening, she highlighted her partnership with the state farmworkers union, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), which helped her reach Spanish-speaking voters in the district.
“Farmworkers need a seat at the table in our state legislature,” Munoz, a Woodburn resident, said in a statement. “Recently farmworkers won the same overtime protections all other Oregon workers enjoy, and now we have a voice in Salem to fight for equal rights in other areas.”
In HD 22, late votes proved decisive. Returns on election night showed Cramer with a lead of roughly 5 percentage points, leading some news outlets to call the contest.
But as Marion County election officials slowly tallied ballots received on Election Day — and those that came later, but were postmarked by Nov. 5 — the tide shifted strongly toward Munoz.
Ten days after the election, Munoz had clawed back to a one-vote lead. It grew from there.
Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess said in an email Tuesday night the county had finished tallying nearly all ballots, with just a few left countywide.
Reyna Lopez, president of PCUN, said Wednesday that the farmworkers union knocked on more than 30,000 doors in support of Munoz, with a focus on Latino voters.
“There were a lot of late, late votes,” Lopez told OPB. “We were knocking doors until the very end, and there were still people telling us that they hadn’t filled out the ballot.”
Representatives from Cramer’s campaign did not immediately return requests for comment on Wednesday, but Cramer has suggested that a legal challenge could be in the works.
“Our campaign has retained legal counsel to ensure the integrity of this election, all laws are followed, and every legal ballot is counted,” she said in a statement on Nov. 15. “We know Oregon’s election system registered illegal voters, and we will fight to ensure that it does not affect the outcome of this race.”
Cramer’s campaign has repeatedly nodded to recent revelations that the state’s Driver and Motor Vehicles Division mistakenly registered more than 1,600 possible noncitizens to vote in recent years.
The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office says just a tiny fraction of those — fewer than 20 — might ultimately have voted as noncitizens, and none were permitted to vote this year without proving citizenship.