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	The Oregonian November 18, 2000 Jeff Mapes VOTE-FRAUD SUSPICIONS ARE ROOTED IN RUMORS Summary: Hard evidence is lacking that Oregon's vote-by-mail election involved cheating or illegalities, but the system is under scrutiny. Although there is no hard evidence of significant scams involving mail balloting in Oregon, the entire system iscoming under increasing scrutiny after its debut in a presidential election this month. Campaign officials for Republican George W. Bush are amassing individual voter records that they say could show evidence of people voting more than once. And officials from both parties say they'll present a flurry of ideas to the 2001 Legislature aimed at making it harder to cheat the system. So far, county clerks say they didn't see any signs of large-scale fraud that could challenge the election's integrity. But hard-to-pin-down stories continue to circulate suggesting that some voters could have cast multiple ballots. Others are of people collecting ballots and then trying to alter them or not turn them. Two of those anecdotes found their way Friday into a Page One article in The Wall Street Journal. One said Multnomah County officials confronted four people taking ballots from voters who arrived to drop them off at the elections department on Election Day. Another talked of Republican fears that voters who took their completed ballots to a Bush rally at Memorial Coliseum might have given them to people circulating through the crowd who weren't connected to the Bush campaign. Neither story pointed clearly to fraud. Vicki Ervin, the Multnomah County elections director, and her chief deputy, Michael Cox, on separate occasions confronted people who were collecting ballots from drivers dropping off their completed ballots outside the elections office before the 8 p.m. voting deadline on Nov. 7. In both cases, Ervin and Cox said, it appeared the people were trying to help ensure that the ballots made it inside the elections office on Southeast Morrison Street. But they said they didn't think anybody but county workers should collect ballots in front of the elections office. "It's nothing illegal," Cox explained, "but it doesn't look good." Cox said he did hear one third-hand report of somebody collecting ballots and then disappearing with them, but he was never able to pin down the rumor. Parties stay away Dick Springer, a former state legislator who was the political director of the Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign in Oregon, said he was at the Multnomah elections office through much of the evening and saw no evidence of anyone trying to make off with completed ballots. He said the party did not send anyone to the elections office to help collect ballots from passers-by, although the Democrats wanted to get every vote they could out of Multnomah County. Voters in the county gave Vice President Al Gore a margin of more than 100,000 votes against Bush that proved crucial in Gore's narrow win. Republican officials said that they didn't send anyone to the Multnomah County office either and that they certainly would not condone anyone collecting ballots and then not turning them in. To do so would be a felony in Oregon, said state Elections Director Lynn Rosik. The Journal story quoted Dan Estes, the state GOP's political director, as saying that a group circulated through the crowd at Bush's Oct. 31 rally collecting ballots and that nobody knows "what happened to them." Estes could not be reached for comment Friday, but Molly Bordonaro, who headed the GOP's vote-turnout campaign in Oregon, said she didn't hear of any such problem at the Memorial Coliseum event that featured a speech by Bush. Neither did Dan Lavey, a political consultant who helped organize the rally. Bordonaro said about 200 people dropped off ballots in a locked box set up at the entrance; those ballots then were delivered to the county. Still, the closeness of the presidential election in Oregon -- at last count, Gore was winning by about 6,800 votes -- and the televised scenes of last-minute voters jamming elections offices has heightened the scrutiny of vote-by-mail. A possible challenge The first challenge could come from the Bush campaign, which this week threatened legal action if it wasn't quickly given data on voters who updated their addresses after the Oct. 17 deadline for new voter registration. Leslie Goodman, a Bush spokeswoman, said the campaign is concerned that many of those voters could have cast multiple ballots. On Friday, Goodman said that 13 of the 36 counties had turned over the data and that more were expected to follow. She said campaign workers, who have set up an election-monitoring campaign post in a downtown Portland hotel, will crunch the data looking for any pattern of significant voter fraud. Rosik, the state elections director, said she doesn't see any evidence of that. Some people do get caught trying to vote twice. Her office already has referred three cases, although it's not at all clear the actions were deliberate. One case, for example, involved a Gilliam County woman who received ballots under her married and birth names and sent them both in. But both Rosik and her boss, Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, said the state could do more to cut down the chance of voter fraud by electronically linking the voter files of all 36 counties. Now, county clerks have to telephone other counties to ensure that voters who move across county lines shortly before an election don't vote twice, a process that slows the count. A centralized data file also would make it easier to catch people who deliberately register in different counties. The Legislature rejected the idea in 1999 because of the cost -- estimated then to be about $6 million -- but Bradbury said he'll bring it up again next year. Double voting "is a potential problem, and I think it's one that needs to be addressed," he said. Collecting the ballots The other issue is whether the state needs to put limits on who can collect ballots. Now anybody could set up a drop site. It's not uncommon for campaigns to send volunteers door to door offering to return ballots, although elections officials have long warned voters not to give their ballot to anyone they can't trust. Republican Bordonaro said she'd like to prohibit everything but official drop sites, and she'd go so far to say that individuals have to mail or drop off their own ballot. Ervin, the Multnomah County elections director, said she doesn't think the Legislature would want to issue a flat prohibition on giving a ballot to anyone else. But she said the Legislature might want to require people who set up drop boxes to post signs making it clear their site is not official. "One thing for sure, out of this election, elections will be different in the future," said Lavey, the Republican political consultant. "Whether vote-by-mail or polling place, this election has underscored and raised a lot of issues." Harry Esteve of The Oregonian staff contributed to this report. Jeff Mapes at jeffmapes@news.oregonian.com
			Tom Elia Paul Geary David Rogers