Oregon Sec. Of State Blames Voters For Growing Ballot Scandal, Staffer Mocks Affected GOP Voters – Calls Them Drunks

What do you suppose is more likely: A computer glitch or nefarious state employee changing thousands of voters’ party affiliation? 

Or did 2000+ Oregon voters chang their voter registration while drunk and then they all forgot they had switched parties?

This is all part of the ballot scandal brewing in Oregon that we’ve been reporting on.

According to Oregon Secretary Of State Bev Clarno’s office, the latter is what happened. Rather than address the concerns of the 2,182 (as of this writing) people in the My Party Was Changed Oregon group on Facebook, Clarno’s office continue to blame the voters.

Check out Clarno’s “elections compliance specialist” Molly Swenson’s Facebook post, mocking the affected voters by alleging they are all just drunks (click to enlarge):

Note Swenson’s previous jobs. She went from working in fast food to being an “elections compliance specialist.” Swenson is also a devout leftist:

Clarno has referenced the now-debunked fake “fact check” story from paparazzi hack Alexis Tereszcuk, which took Clarno’s office’s direct quotes but failed to contact any of the Oregon voters who have been affected by this scandal.

Claims that our office changed the party of voters to nonpartisan without consent are misinformation and flat out false. We work to protect the integrity and fairness of every election. #TrustedInfo2020 https://t.co/b3jcfKSevC

— Secretary of State Bev Clarno (@OregonSOS) May 21, 2020

They investigated themselves and found no wrong doing.

I wonder if A.G. Barr would reach that same conclusion.

In the Lead Stories article, Clarno’s spokeswoman Andrea Chiapella shifts the blame to the voters by claiming people were either never registered with the party they are claiming to have been registered as or didn’t fill out paperwork at the DMV the right way. We’ve already debunked the initial claim of blaming voters for not properly filling out a card that is supposed to be sent by the DMV, because a great many of these people hadn’t been to the DMV in years and don’t recall ever seeing a postcard for a follow up or having a DMV clerk ask them about voting.

But it gets worse for Clarno’s office.

Looking over the actual paperwork from the DMV, it appears as though prospective voters are told to ask a DMV clerk about filling out voter registration forms.

(Click to enlarge photo)

THEN, according to the Secretary Of State’s own manual on how to implement the Motor Voter law, the section titled “Registration updates through Oregon Motor Voter” states

“This section only applies to individuals who apply for an original, renewal or replacement license, permit or ID card, auto registration, or who submit a change of address to DMV, after January 1, 2016… “When an individual has a qualifying interaction with DMV (original, renewal, or replacement license, permit, auto registration or ID card), the information from that interaction will be compared to the information in OCVR to see if the individual has an existing voter record. If the individual is an active registered voter, and the DMV record has more current information than the voter record (e.g. new residence or mailing address), the Elections Division will securely transfer the record to the appropriate county elections office. The county elections office will determine whether to use the information in the DMV record to update the individual’s voter registration record to ensure that the information in the record is current and accurate.

If a change is made to a voter registration record, the individual will receive a voter notification card alerting them of the change.”

(Click any of these images to enlarge)

That’s right, according to their own manual, if the person is an active registered voter, the only thing they’re supposed to update is an address change. But then it contradicts itself by letting the county elections decide if they should use info from the DMV or info that they already have on file for the voters.

But again, many of these people say they haven’t visited the DMV in quite some time, and those who did say they never got any sort of voter form to fill out to confirm party affiliation, and never got anything in the mail.

Then it goes on to say that a change of address is not a “qualifying interaction” that rises to the level of voter re-re-re-registration.

So which is it?

Looking through the manual, it certainly appears as though it is skewed toward registered people as non affiliated by default. But still, they are supposed to check these DMV Motor Voter entries against any already existing voter registration record for a person.

Just imagine the outrage if it were, say, 40 black seniors who forced off a bus while on their way to vote, like what happened in 2018.

But instead, this is 2000 mostly white, mostly Republicans (a few Democrats and other party members as well) in Oregon, so not only is there no outrage from the groups who cry VOTER SUPPRESSION at the mere mention of having to show ID to vote, these people are outright being mocked for simply wanting to vote in the right party.

But it also begs two more questions:

If it’s so easy for people to get this confused en masse on their voter registration, why has this not been a widespread concern in past elections? Wouldn’t this be happening every 2 years if that were the case? Why is only this year that we have thousands of allegations of someone’s party being changed fraudulently?

Secondly, being a Presidential election year, you’d think if people were intentionally changing their registration and just forgetting that it would be from non-affiliated to a major party so they could have a say in that party’s nominee for not just President, but all of the major offices up for election this year. Instead it’s the other way around, with most being Republicans who were switched to non-affiliated. In Oregon, the hot ticket on the Democrat side was, not-so-coincidentally, the Secretary Of State primary, where 3 notable candidates squared off. On the Republican side, the race to replace the retiring Congressman Greg Walden garnered national attention, as four candidates ran highly visible campaigns, with state Senator Cliff Bentz knocking off moderate and pro-Trump/anti-Trump flip flopper Knute Buehler. So there were definitely some big races that people wanted to vote in.

It would behoove Bev Clarno to take these concerns more seriously and work with the voters to get to the bottom of the problems.

The post Oregon Sec. Of State Blames Voters For Growing Ballot Scandal, Staffer Mocks Affected GOP Voters – Calls Them Drunks appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.