The Ballot-Cycle

How Linn County Processes Election Ballots

Ming Wong, Editor-in-Chief

November 7, 2022

As a child, Linn County clerk Steve Druckenmiller recalls going with his dad to canvas for president Dwight D. Eisenhower. With his father’s knock on the door and the brochures in his hand, his dad would take them from him and give them to the voter. Looking back on it now, he sees it as a smart way to inform people about a candidate.
“It was pretty clever because people see a little kid, they didn’t want to not take it,” Druckenmiller said.
Through canvassing and going with his parents to the polling place, Druckenmiller says he got a deep sense of the obligation of a citizen to a democratic republic. That love continued into college where he says he got a degree in government, and is still present today as he currently holds the elected position of county clerk for Linn County: a position that he has held for the last 36 years.
“I had worked three years as the election supervisor for [then Linn county clerk] Del Riley who’s the one that brought vote-by-mail here to Oregon,” said Druckenmiller. “For the first time I was really happy with the job I was doing. I thought I was doing something important. It was the right thing for me.”
Druckenmiller says that the experience of going to the polling place as a child made it difficult to accept voting-by-mail He expressed his dislike for this voting process in his interview for election supervisor with Riley. However, as time went on he says his opinions changed and he began to accept the validity of the process.
According to Druckenmiller, Riley believed that everyone who is eligible to vote should have the ability to without any roadblocks and plenty of time to consider who they should vote for.
So on November 8, 2022, Oregonians will participate in the midterm elections with a system that originated right here in Linn county. This is how the ballot process works.

Step 1: Once ballots are received at the courthouse, they’re run through a verification scanner that logs the voters’ ballot envelope. A number of envelopes are grouped together into a batch and are set into a processing tray, with the number of ballots also being logged on a paper audit log. Afterwards, signatures are verified to the voters registration, and if they’re a match, they move along in the process. However, if two staff members and the county clerk declare the signature unmatched, the voter will be notified that their vote won’t be counted and will have the ability to fix the error.

Step 2: The ballot extractor opens the envelopes so that the ballots contained in the security sleeve can be pulled out. From this, the number of ballot envelopes reported by the extractor are reported on the audit log.

Step 3: Three election board workers that aren’t of the same party remove the ballots’ secrecy sleeve and check the ballots for damage. Afterwards, each member counts the number of ballots and checks it to the number of envelopes delivered. This number is reported on a paper audit log and is placed into a ballot container box.

Step 4: Each ballot is scanned, counted, and imaged to compare to the original ballot. These machines are tested with pre-election and post-election ballot test stacks through the use of sample ballots to ensure accuracy.

Step 5: Ballots where the voter’s choice is unclear are reviewed and adjusted based on their correct choice. This process is known as ballot adjudication and the changes to the ballot are noted. After this, the results of that batch are posted to the county and state website.

Step 6: The ballot container boxes are stored in the securest room in the courthouse that’s equipped with multiple safeguards including a motion detector and door alarm. All records related to the election are required to be kept for at least 90 days, and at most two years, depending on the election.

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About the Contributor

Ming Wong, Editor-in-Chief

Ming is a fourth-year staff member and current editor-in-chief. To him, journalism is a way to use his inner curiosity in a way that impacts the student body of WAHS, believing that democracy depends on journalists of all levels in society. However, in his free time, he enjoys spending time with family and his pets.