Oregon voter offices flooded with records requests from 2020 election deniers

As Oregon election officials are busy preparing for a November election with pivotal races for Congress and the Legislature, they’ve found themselves buried in a wave of records requests and letters threatening lawsuits.

The flurry of paperwork is part of a national campaign by right-wing election deniers to complicate or undermine their work, they say.

The Oregon Secretary of State’s office received more than 200 records requests in July and August, more than triple the usual amount, said Ben Morris, a spokesperson for the office. Some county election clerks report they also have been hit with a barrage of records requests.

Most of the requests to the state elections office sought information about ballot-counting machines used in local elections, Morris said.

Those machines are in the crosshairs of activists nationwide after last month’s call to action by prominent election denier and pillow company executive Mike Lindell. Lindell has baselessly said that hackers helped rig the November 2020 election for President Joe Biden by infiltrating election machines.

In a typical records request Oregon’s elections office received this month, a man asked for any emails, texts or other communications between election officials that reference Lindell or voting data he has demanded. Some requests appeared to originate from email chains with instructions for submitters.

County clerks told The Oregonian/OregonLive they are struggling to keep up with the influx of records requests that they say waste valuable time and resources. Under state transparency law, public officials must quickly evaluate and respond to records requests, which can be complex and lengthy. Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott said his office received nine records requests in a single day last week. To cope, he’s adding a new staff member to keep up with the demands for information, which he said are often vague and time-intensive.

Scott, who is also president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks, said the records campaign appears coordinated. Many recent requests were sent to all 36 Oregon counties.

Activists are also sending identical letters demanding clerks keep records from past elections or face litigation. Deschutes County Clerk Steve Dennison said his office received an “unprecedented” 30 demands from different people since late August. Dennison said he may need to ask for help from other county departments to respond to the letters and records requests.

Many of the letters reference an Oregon woman’s lawsuit against Oregon’s secretary of state, Shemia Fagan, that alleges foreign interference in elections and flaws in cybersecurity, echoing election denier talking points. Election officials are holding onto their records of the November 2020 election until the lawsuit concludes, Scott said.

Some officials speculated that the flurry of emails and letters could be intended to distract clerks from preparing for the upcoming general election, which includes at least two tight races for Congress. Key dates for election preparation are nearing, such as a deadline to print and mail ballots to overseas voters and military personnel by Sept. 24.

“It appears to be a very small group of people, who are very loud, who are seemingly attempting to gum up the works,” Yamhill County Commissioner Casey Kulla said. He also received the letters along with other commissioners who do not steward voting records.

Jennifer Gunter, who filed the lawsuit against Fagan, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Tina Milcarek, a prolific records requester named in the lawsuit also did not respond to several emailed requests for comment.

Election officials from North Carolina to Colorado and Georgia have reported receiving a wave of communications after Lindell asked supporters for help acquiring records of how each voter, without personally identifying information attached, voted in 2020, which insiders call “cast vote” records.

Those records are created by ballot tabulation machines used in Oregon and other states. Officials hold the machines in high regard, but election deniers have attacked them as untrustworthy. The U.S. government’s Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which is made up of election and cybersecurity experts, has said there is no evidence that voting systems were “in any way compromised” in 2020.

“Cast vote” records take different forms depending on the vendor type. Often, they’re “massive spreadsheets,” said Jackson County Clerk Chris Walker. She said the records requests have become “a source of anxiety” in her Medford office.

So far, her employees haven’t created a single electronic file of all cast vote records because no requester has been willing to pay the high cost, Walker said. Her county tallied more than 128,000 ballots in the November 2020 election. In Multnomah County, the state’s largest jurisdiction, Scott said it’s also common for requesters to back out when they see the cost of a records request.

Cast vote records are typically used by political scientists or auditors. It’s unclear how the requesters might use the records. The Oregon Secretary of State’s office provided The Oregonian/OregonLive with dozens of requests for the records and other asks related to ballot-counting machines.

Morris, the office’s spokesperson, said election officials publicly test vote-counting machines before and after elections. Election staff also compare paper ballots received through the state’s vote-by-mail system to the machine-generated tallies, rendering widespread manipulation of the machines “impossible.”

“In their minds, they’re doing a public service,” Morris said of election deniers. “But the effect of what they’re doing is, they’re bogging down a system that was designed to make government more transparent.”

In interviews, the county clerks emphasized they’ll comply with public records laws one way or another. But they said the influx is bad timing.

“We are 100% in the thick of this election and these constant records requests are really pulling us away from the duties that we are charged with,” Walker said.

The left has real problems with records.
Which is why they have a long history of destroying such things.

Eerily familiar...

Party ownership of the print media
made it easy to manipulate public opinion,
and the film and radio carried the process further.

16. Ministry Of Truth

.......

The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.

The Ministry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.

The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.

When his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. He dialed 'back numbers' on the telescreen and called for the appropriate issues of The Times, which slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes' delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to rectify.

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and on the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of The Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms. As soon as all the corrections which happened to be necessary in any particular number of The Times had been assembled and collated, that number would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead.

In the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one-sub-section, a single cell, as it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in an unimaginable multitude of jobs.

There were huge printing-shops and their sub editors, their typography experts, and their elaborately equipped studios for the faking of photographs. There was the tele-programmes section with its engineers, its producers and its teams of actors specially chosen for their skill in imitating voices; clerks whose job was simply to draw up lists of books and periodicals which were due for recall; vast repositories where the corrected documents were stored; and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who co-ordinated the whole effort and laid down the lines of policy which made it necessary that this fragment of the past should be preserved, that one falsified, and the other rubbed out of existence.

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