Elected officials in two of Oregon’s 36 counties, which conduct local and state elections, confirmed details of a recent report that describes how deniers of the 2020 presidential election have helped force many elections workers to retire or resign.

Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess is at 19 years one of Oregon’s most experienced officials. Polk County Clerk Kim Williams, who took office on Oct. 1, is the newest, though she has been the county’s chief recording clerk since 2004.

“We represent different counties and we use different technologies,” Burgess said. “But we hold to the same principles.”

They spoke Friday, Nov. 17, at a Salem City Club lunch, just 10 days after a legislative committee heard a report commissioned by the state Elections Division and done by the Elections and Voting Information Center based at Reed College.

The report was based on interviews in 2022 and early 2023 with clerks and other officials in 34 of the 36 counties — Burgess among them — and said that about one-third of the top elections managers have left since 2020. Republican incumbent Donald Trump lost the presidency to Democrat Joe Biden — Biden won the Oregon vote, 56% to 40%, and the national popular and electoral votes — but Trump and many supporters continue to argue otherwise.

“Some of these false election claims have persisted for years,” Burgess said. “Forces are purposely misleading voters and undermining trust in institutions including elections. It has become a multimillion-dollar industry.”

Just earlier this month, facing a trial in Georgia next year over accusations of 2020 election interference in Fulton County (Atlanta), Trump denounced local and state elections officials in general. “Talk about putting a target on people’s backs,” Burgess said.

Burgess opened his slide presentation with a photo of the parking lot behind the Jackson County Courthouse in Medford, where two slogans were spray-painted after the 2020 election. One said “vote dont (sic) count” — and the other, “Next time bullets.”

More help needed

Burgess said later he agreed with the report’s key recommendations, including more financial support for election administration — which has relied primarily on county general funds — and technical assistance and a closer working relationship between the secretary of state and the Oregon Association of County Clerks.

Since election administration was designated as “critical infrastructure” in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Burgess said some assistance from federal law enforcement agencies is now available in specified instances.

Burgess said Marion County elections workers this month did receive an envelope that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service confirmed later contained traces of fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid that can cause death in small amounts. Unlike what happened in another Oregon county, he said, the incident drew less attention because workers turned over the envelope unopened to the federal agency. But Burgess said he has been advised to have on hand the drug naloxone, which reverses the effects of a fentanyl overdose.

Burgess also said that hackers have attempted almost daily to breach the county elections system, though so far without success. He said Marion County is large enough for a security officer for information technology — but not all counties have one.

In most of Oregon’s 36 counties — including Clackamas County — elected clerks and their staffs conduct elections, although the secretary of state is Oregon’s chief elections officer. County clerks are nonpartisan offices. The secretary of state is elected on a partisan basis, though the incumbent right now is an appointee.

In some larger counties, such as Multnomah, Washington and Lane, home-rule charters allow them to determine their own governmental organization — and elections there are run by appointed managers. Tim Scott has led Multnomah County elections since 2008 and is the immediate past president of the state clerks association. Dan Forester succeeded Mickie Kawai in mid-2022 as Washington County elections manager; Kawai had worked in elections 35 years. Catherine McMullen defeated five-term Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall in 2022 after a series of errors in Hall’s recent tenure.

Newest county clerk

Burgess quoted from Unger’s remarks in announcing her resignation: “The last year and a half has been brutal and nothing like I have ever experienced in over 30 years that I have been here. This year we have been inundated with public records requests and repeated calls and emails for forensic audits, a term we have never even heard of before.”

Burgess said he and Unger shared an unusual family tie: Their grandfathers joined the U.S. Army together for World War I service in France.

Of 16 to 18 full-time employees in his office, Burgess said six work directly on elections. In contrast, Polk County has just three people for the clerk’s entire office, including Williams, who succeeded Unger when she resigned after 20 years.

“She had a few more years in her. But the atmosphere of elections decided her retirement date more than anything,” Williams said. “What eventually led to her retirement were the questions people asked with ferocity … She just couldn’t take it anymore.

“Our state has had many clerks who have retired or quit because of the abuse and mistrust these positions have received,” Williams added. “This is very sad, because they had decades of experience behind them.”

Williams said she attempts to balance public transparency in the process with voter privacy and election security.

“We are facing difficult times and things we never had to deal with before,” she said. Though Polk County Elections has not received suspicious envelopes, she added, “we want to be prepared if they do.”

Burgess said afterward there are many safeguards, such as election boards evenly split between the political parties to oversee the opening of envelopes, removal of secrecy sleeves and inspection of ballots before they are fed into optical-character recognition machines that do the actual vote counts. These boards — usually four members per panel, but just two in Polk County — do their work under surveillance.

“We do not always agree among ourselves,” Burgess said of his colleagues in the counties. “But we try to carve out something that will protect democracy and election administration, so that we can retain not only its viability but its fairness and completeness.”