Marion County Elections has been getting a lot of phone calls in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 5 election. Many have been unpleasant. It’s one of several symptoms of a contentious election cycle that has local clerks on edge – and making heightened security plans – ahead of election day to keep ballots, staff and voters safe.  Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess said the unpleasant calls often focus on the absence of presidential candidate Donald Trump from the voters’ pamphlet, due to Trump’s campaign declining to submit an optional statement. He still appears on all Oregon ballots.This was clear in early September, weeks before the pamphlets went out. Still, the Oregon Secretary of State’s elections division had to close down its phone lines on Oct. 17 after receiving a flood of out-of-state calls on the topic spurred by false claims on social media. Some callers chose to contact Marion and Polk counties’ elections offices directly. “We’ve been receiving calls today, some people being irate and telling us that we’re a liar. One said that she talked to Eric Trump and he said that we are just liars,” Burgess said in an interview last week. “They’re saying ‘Why did you keep him off the ballot?’ Well, he’s on the ballot, it’s just his team determined not to issue a voter’s pamphlet statement.” Burgess said some of the calls have been potentially threatening, and that law enforcement, including the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI’s election crimes team are keeping tabs on the situation.“It’s hard on my full-time and part-time staff that are answering phones right now, trying to deal with these irate phone calls,” Burgess said.  There have been some “belligerent” calls about the voter’s pamphlet to Polk County, too, according to Clerk Kim Williams. It’s made for an uneasy runway to Election Day.“We’re all on edge, not knowing what to expect,” Williams said.She said there’s always a hot-button topic people fixate on, and that preparation for the election has basically been the same as any other year. “The difference is, we just know there’s going to be a lot more eyes on us this time,” she said. There’s also expected to be high voter turnout, with more people typically voting during presidential elections than primaries.This year, Polk County ordered new ballot boxes to create 24-hour drop sites, which are bolted to the ground. Williams said they’ve added security tags to the totes filled with ballots when they arrive. During the 2020 presidential election, former President Donald Trump for weeks spread doubt whether the vote results in the presidential race would be legitimate. Election workers reported violence and threatening behavior at polling sites across the country.  Williams said that luckily, that hasn’t reached Polk County and it’s not a major concern for her.As she did during the May primary, Williams plans to reach out to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office to request a patrol deputy near the ballot boxes on election night.“Just making him aware, basically, there’s an election going on, we could expect a little bit of action up here,” she said. She said the elections office, being in the same building as the sheriff and equipped with panic buttons, feels pretty safe.Marion County will have a uniformed deputy sheriff in the clerk’s office from late October through election week. Burgess said that’s in response to talk nationwide about threats to election facilities.Burgess said that he’s concerned about voter intimidation, but that it takes many forms. More commonly here, he’s met people who have been convinced that voting is too complicated, or who falsely believe their decision on who to vote for will be public. “That’s a problem whether it’s in a household, in a family, by any group of people,” he said. “You still have your right to a secret ballot, and to vote without intimidation.” How ballots are counted Burgess’ office has been busy training new workers ahead of the election, which is projected to have a high voter turnout. He’s done multiple rounds of hiring, with a goal of having over 120 workers ready to come in and count in teams.Polk County’s smaller office plans to have about 10 people come in at a time.Election workers inspect, scan and review ballots in teams of two to four from mixed political parties. Burgess said he’s had a harder time finding enough Republicans to work in the office this year, but they’ve secured plenty of independents, nonaffiliated voters and Democrats. If someone crosses out their first option and draws an arrow at a second, the team must agree on the voters’ intent. Burgess is expecting about a third of ballots to come in on Election Day, and most of those to come in during the evening. More mail-in ballots, which can be counted if postmarked by Election Day, will also come in throughout the week. Each ballot is scanned, and the signature will be verified against what’s on file. When signatures cannot be verified, officials will inform the voter and provide a registration card for them to update their ballots.Any signature issues must be solved by Nov. 26, and the last day to certify the election is Dec. 2, according to state deadlines. “The election’s not over for us until early December,” Burgess said. Each ballot return envelope in Oregon is given a unique number and barcode to ensure that no one can vote twice by requesting a replacement ballot. The centralized system will also catch if someone has already voted in another county. Both Marion and Polk county offices plan to have seats available for outside election observers, who must follow rules such as not speaking to workers and writing down any questions they may have to be reviewed at the end of the day.Williams said it’s the first time that she can recall the office allowing observers in the two decades she’s worked there, after the previous clerk decided against them due to ongoing behavior issues. Polk County has instead run a livestream for several years that allows people to watch the counting online.“Because we have that live streaming, we don’t get a lot of requests for the in-person. But because this election will be very scrutinized, they’re asking for it this time. And so I said, ‘Look, I’ll give it a shot,’” she said.An extra headache came for clerks this year when the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services division of the Oregon Department of Transportation announced that it had erroneously registered over 1,200 noncitizens to vote since 2021 due to a clerical issue, out of 3 million total registered voters. The total was announced a few weeks after state officials confirmed on Sept. 13 that hundreds of noncitizens had registered. Williams said all the people identified were deactivated before any ballots went out for the November election, and none had voted before. She said they were anticipating angry calls to the office about the topic but none came. Burgess said that in the first DMV announcement, 186 people out of Marion County’s 229,000 active voters were identified as noncitizens. He said none had ever tried to vote. The clerk’s office inactivated them as voters, and sent them letters asking them to get in touch to register if they become citizens later.Burgess said the DMV informed them of 137 names in the second announcement, after the review. Of those he said, two had become citizens in the time since the DMV registration, and had voted as citizens.Some of the voters were already identified and inactivated, leaving 121 voters to deactivate and ballots to recover before they could be sent. Though they were deactivated in the system, pulling the ballots eliminates the possibility of the noncitizen person returning one by mistake, which could get them in legal trouble.Unfortunately, they were already shuffled into thousands of ballots that were ready to be mailed.  “So we had 121 that we needed to find out of this almost a quarter million envelopes. So this is 20 pallets, 1,200 mail trays,” he said. Burgess’ staff had to take those pallets up to Washington County’s election facility to borrow their mail sorter, which sought out the unique numbers on the ballot envelopes. It took three Marion County staff six days to sort through them.Burgess likened it to searching for needles in haystacks. They found all but one before Washington County needed the machines back. The final ballot, plus another 25 that the DMV informed them about when it was too late, were all inactivated. They sent a letter to those people informing them that their ballots were inactivated, and that if they attempt to vote there will be consequences.“If any of those ballots come back to us, we will set them aside and investigate them,” he said.Burgess said there’s usually a couple of dozen ballots that his office investigates per major election. Some people move, receive a second ballot, and attempt to turn both in.  Typically, they can be resolved over a phone call with Burgess after a letter informing them that voting twice is a crime. “They usually get on the horn to me and they can explain why they did it, or what their misinterpretation was,” he said.In some cases, it’s egregious enough that Burgess will pass it on to the Secretary of State’s office, who will decide whether to send it on to the Attorney General to prosecute. Burgess said he typically forwards about half a dozen per major election, and the rest have reasonable explanations.Both Burgess and Williams said they’ve been kept busy this month with a surge of voter registrations, and updates to registrations. The deadline to register or update voter registrations was Oct. 15.As always, they recommend voting early to help out their staff. Voters can track the progress of their ballot on the secretary of state’s website.“Vote early. Don’t wait until the last minute,” Williams said. Last year, CC:Media posted a segment on how ballots are counted in Marion County. Watch it here: Contact reporter Abbey McDonald: [email protected] or 503-575-1251. A MOMENT MORE, PLEASE– If you found this story useful, consider subscribing to Salem Reporter if you don’t already. Work such as this, done by local professionals, depends on community support from subscribers. Please take a moment and sign up now – easy and secure: SUBSCRIBE. The post Local election workers “on edge” as threats, misinformation ramp up ahead of Election Day appeared first on Salem Reporter.