Tabulation testing, election integrity in Wasco Co.

WASCO CO. — Thousands of ballots cast by Wasco County residents in yesterday’s primary election are in the process of being tabulated, and Clerk Chrissy Zaugg is confident that her office will get the numbers right.

On Wednesday, May 13, Zaugg and her team ran a public test of the two machines, produced by Clear Ballot, that tally up countywide ballots. Using an artificial batch with predetermined results, they compared vote totals line by line, finding no discrepancies among the just-counted figures. In fact, across her 12 years at the clerk’s office, Zaugg has never seen a test go awry.

The machines underwent another test right before official counting began last Friday, and the same process will be repeated before the results are certified on June 10. Those interested can also observe  the opening board process, where teams of two people from different political parties remove ballots from their envelopes and look for damage.

“We’re not hiding anything,” said Zaugg. “Just being able to see it is, I think, really good for the public to understand the whole process, and we hope that will encourage them to vote.”

Beyond testing, Zaugg touched on a variety of other measures designed to ensure election integrity. Ballots are never kept in an unsurveilled location, and besides Zaugg, only two other employees have a key to the tabulation room. Verifiers trained in forensic handwriting analysis match the signatures on envelopes to those on voter registration cards.

“We monitor voter registration daily,” said Zaugg. “We will scour obituaries to pull off those who have passed. We also get notifications from other states when somebody has been registered there, so then we cancel them here. That’s really where it starts: clean voter registration rules.”

Further, the tabulation machines aren’t connected to the internet, and like the opening board, each is operated by non-county personnel from opposite parties. The state also chooses three boxes of ballots at random and requires the clerk’s office to hand-count a select few races as a final precautionary measure, Zaugg said.

According to a report from the Oregon Legislative Fiscal Office, which examined nearly 61 million ballots cast in exclusively vote-by-mail elections from 2000 to 2019, there were only 38 criminal convictions of voter fraud during that time, amounting to a rate of 0.0006%.

For a collection of preliminary election results across both Wasco and Hood River counties, see the next edition of Columbia Gorge News.