The Hall Monitor (because election integrity depends on it) 2
The November election is less than three months away. So now is a good time to think about why you are a Democrat.
A Cascade of Errors
While it is always easy to criticize an elected official for their on-the-job failings, one would hope thorough analysis can reveal ways to avoid future problems and solutions if it identifies clear lapses of judgment and leadership. And if so, then the voting public should know.
After all, isn’t competent leadership what we should expect from our elected leaders?
The ballot is the single most critical piece of printed material in a democracy, perhaps even more so than our own Constitution. We’ve learned the Constitution can be interpreted in numerous ways well outside the scope of what was envisioned by our founders. At times this provides us a flexibility to adapt; other times it leads to abuse of power by a majority of unelected judges.
The ballot on the other hand is our way to send a clear message to those in power. If the ballot is flawed, then so is all that comes from it. In the case of the recent ballot debacle in Clackamas County, the good news is that not one single vote was lost as a result of the printing errors. Each of us voted as we intended; no hanging chads here. At issue now is whether every vote will be actually counted.
Many of us can remember when every ballot in the entire U.S. was counted by hand, usually within 24 hours. An army of League of Women Voters and others, mostly volunteers, manually counted ballots. Then came electronic scanners. We experimented with punch ballots and got hanging chads.
Now we have moved the risk from a manual counting error to a machine counting error and, of course, an entire bogus conspiracy theory centered on criminally manipulated voting machines. Not in this case. The problem is not in the machine.
For the scanners to work properly the ballots must meet a set of conditions making them machine-readable. Step one in this process demands printing a ballot the machine can read; this includes a barcode with the information for the scanner to recognize what is supposed to be scanned on each ballot.
In our own Clackamas case, five print lines were used by the printer to print the 447 or so different Clackamas ballots required for this election. One of those lines produced defective ballots with barcodes that could not be read by the scanners because they were “blurred”. For some of the ballots the blurring can be seen by the naked eye.
This was error number one in a long list, prompting a number of vital questions:
Was it possible to recognize this problem prior to mailing the ballots?
What quality checks were in place or need to be put in place to monitor the ballots either as they are being printed or prior to being folded and mailed?
Why did the Clerk use an actual ballot from the printer to test their own scanners rather than a test ballot they printed in the Clerk's office?
Would the toner error have been discovered with a test ballot from that line?
Did Sherry Hall not demand such quality checks?
Did she use a printer with a 3rd party print certification system to have reasonable assurance that print quality would be up to standard?
Did she use an out-of county printer to cut costs and avoid labor standards provided by a union print shop?
Did she pick this printer for social reasons to support a particular type of business?
She has recently said she will not go back to that printer. She must think the printer is the problem and that going to another printer will automatically resolve all such issues. Really?
Harry Truman had a phrase about heat and kitchens, which may apply here. Passing the buck to the printer seems just a tad too easy.
It is the Clerk’s legal responsibility to connect a free and fair election in a timely manner. This means not taking outcomes for granted, and it means not attempting to dodge her responsibility.
Accidents happen, of course. But what about a back up plan? What about showing absolutely no sense of urgency 20 days after you learned of the problem? That’s called due diligence, or lack thereof.
From the outside looking in it looks like a cascade of errors. A big mistake occurred, and its gravity wasn’t recognized.
Once the mistake was recognized, action was not taken proportional to the scale of the mistake. Why did Sherry Hall turn down help from the Secretary of State? Other counties offered help but just got a “thanks but no thanks” from our county clerk.
Unfortunately for the voters and the candidates and anyone else interested in accurate and timely election results, Sherry Hall was asleep at the switch. She didn’t get it. One error was compounded by others and then still others. Talk of actually not being able to certify the total vote by the June 13 statutory deadline was serious.
Thankfully, the County Board of Commissioners stepped in. Sherry Hall was all but sent home in frustration as County Administrator Gary Schmidt took charge, moving 200 county workers from their usual non-Elections positions into the breach. They worked through the weekend and may have to do it again. (Hall had offered her own staff the choice on the first weekend and half stayed home.)
Counting votes to assure that every vote is counted by the state deadline (almost an entire month after the election) should not be optional. If this were a baseball game, the County Clerk would be batting zero while racking up too many errors to count.
Clackamas County citizens expect an election process that works. When mistakes occur, and they will, we have the expectation that once they are recognized, a solution will be offered in timely fashion.
Six days after the election, as of Monday, May 23, and less than half of the vote had been counted. To use the term from Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, “this is unacceptable.”