Controversy surrounding a ballot initiative that would divert funds from Portland’s Clean Energy Fund to hire more police officers continues to grow—and has now spawned a quarrel between Oregon’s Secretary of State and Portland’s Auditor Office.
The Enhanced Community Safety ballot initiative, also dubbed the “Safer Portland” measure first drew major attention in June, when the Mercury reported complaints filed against the initiative’s backers over the signature gathering process, including allegations that signature gatherers misled the public about the measure in order to garner signatures. Additional complaints continued to surface suggesting signature gatherers made illegal procedural missteps during the course of their work. Now, the initiative’s backers are alleging city elections officials are mishandling the process and applying political bias as thousands of the petition’s signatures have been deemed invalid during the verification process.
More than 63,000 signatures were submitted in an effort to get the measure on the November ballot and are now undergoing a standard verification process. The Multnomah County Elections Office, which handles signature verification for the city, reported Tuesday that its first statistical sampling indicated petitioners had only submitted 32,880 valid signatures–a result that falls short of the 40,437 signatures needed to qualify the petition to the ballot. A second sampling is currently underway.
The initiative’s backers allege the city’s elections office, which is housed in the Auditor’s Office, has made errors and been less than transparent about the verification process. The Safer Portland group appealed to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office to step in and take over the verification duties.
Secretary of State Tobias Read stopped short of doing that, but the group’s allegations triggered a heavy-handed response from the state’s top elections official. Read’s letter was first reported by Willamette Week.
“What I have seen in recent days regarding the 1PDX2026 initiative signature verification process reflects poorly on our state’s entire election system,” Read wrote to the Portland Auditor’s Office, which oversees the city’s elections. “Rarely has there been such contention in the application of our standard signature verification process, which is laid out in rule and replicated often in cities across Oregon. I have seen complaints about a lack of transparency with stakeholders and the public, which especially concerns me. It is clear there has been a breakdown somewhere in this process.”
The Portland Auditor’s Office says suggestions of hiccups in the city’s elections processes are bogus.
“Secretary Read rightfully reinforces our role in administering the signature verification process, and puts the unfounded claims made by the Chief Petitioners in the context of a nationwide assault on Oregon’s safe, fair, and accurate elections,” the Auditor’s Office wrote in a statement provided to the Mercury Tuesday on behalf of its Elections Division, noting staff at the Auditor’s Office have been in contact with the SoS office over the last few weeks.
“We’ve informed them about our work, requested their guidance, and have not received any direction to depart from our usual process,” the Office stated. “We are surprised to receive this letter given our communication, and we are awaiting a call from the Secretary. We look forward to informing him of the facts that dispel Chief Petitioners’ false and politically motivated claims.”
Read’s letter came the day after Safer Portland’s legal counsel sent a letter asking the Secretary of State to take over the verification process, and for the city to halt its signature validation, which the Auditor’s Office has declined to do.
For months, the Safer Portland initiative has faced complaints of its own. The Secretary of State’s Office confirmed to the Mercury Wednesday that it had received 97 formal complaints regarding the signature gathering process for the initiative.
The Auditor’s Office, on behalf of the Elections Office, says neither the initiative’s backers, nor Secretary Read have any evidence of impropriety in their work to validate signatures.
Local elections officials are still working to verify signatures for the initiative petition. So far, that process has led to thousands of signatures being tossed. Sample sheets processed by the Multnomah County Elections Office show more than 1,500 signature lines were signed by people who weren’t registered to vote in Multnomah County, or whose voter registration had lapsed. Some signatures were from residents who were too young to vote and thus ineligible to sign petitions.
The invalidated signatures, combined with a clerical error toward the beginning of the process that was caught and corrected, have led to petitioners accusing city elections officials of mishandling the process.
Elise Haas, Safer Portland spokesperson, said in a statement Wednesday that an independent review is the only way to restore voters’ confidence, saying “the entire process thus far is compromised and needs to restart from the beginning.”
“The request is not to certify the petition,” Haas wrote. “It’s to pause the process until the petition totals are reconciled and have the Oregon Secretary of State provide independent oversight so voters can trust the outcome.”
The Elections Division has declined to stop the signature counting process or turn things over to the state, noting any pause would jeopardize the legal deadline petitioners still need to meet in order to qualify for the November ballot.
A letter sent to petitioners on July 27 from the Elections Division outlines the legal steps required during the signature verification process, which the Auditors Office says elections officials have followed and explained to petitioners.
“Our Office, Chief Petitioners’ staff, and their respective counsel met at length on July 2, before signature submission to discuss the process and clarify any questions about it,” P.K. Runkles-Pearson, an attorney for the Auditor’s Office, wrote to Tracey Wigglesworth of The Political Law Group, which represents the Enhanced Community Safety Initiative petitioners. “I was present, as were some of your colleagues. On Friday, July 24, the same groups met again. You and I were both present. Your staff confirmed you had already received documents identifying every signature line and page that were disqualified in preprocessing, together with the reasons for disqualification.” The letter states that elections staff “worked extra hours” to provide specific information and charts requested by the petitioners.
The letter acknowledged a data entry error during the statistical sampling phase, which artificially inflated the number of signatures available for sampling by about 5,500.
“Our Office notified you of the problem the same day we learned of it. We immediately stopped verifying the inaccurate sample and began again with a new sample,” Runkles-Pearson, the attorney for the Auditor’s Office, wrote in the letter. “We consulted with the Secretary of State’s Elections Division, and neither you nor the Secretary’s office raised any concerns about our corrective action.”
Secretary of State Read wrote in his letter to the Auditor’s Office that it is the responsibility of the election administrator to manage a fair, transparent, and accountable signature verification process, adding that the public should be able to understand the decisions and have faith in the outcomes.
“You have all the tools and experience needed to manage these responsibilities, make decisions, and ensure your process is documented and transparent,” Read wrote. “Accountability is a responsibility, not a burden. It is your job to lead this process. …This is a tenuous moment for our democracy. It is essential that our election processes are transparent and accountable to Oregon voters.”
Read’s letter was sanctimonious, but light on specifics or evidence. The Portland Auditor’s Office says the Elections Division follows a process prescribed by local and state elections laws.
“We remain unaware of any uncorrected errors in the process. The Secretary’s letter does not provide any specific direction or identify any credible errors,” the Auditor’s Office stated. “We will continue to manage this impartial process to meet legally required deadlines, using the applicable standards and laws, and continue to go above and beyond what is required of us to ensure timely and transparent information to all interested parties.”
The process for verifying thousands of signatures collected by petitioners before a measure can qualify to be placed on a ballot is handled by the Multnomah County Elections Office. Tim Scott, Multnomah County’s elections director, said the county is committed to transparency, and to following state law to process the petition. He added that the county has shared reports of its daily work with the petitioners.
“As part of rigorous review and quality control procedures, the Elections Division conducts multiple reviews of data entry and signature verification work to ensure the accuracy of petition data in the petition module of the state’s centralized voter registration system,” Scott said in a statement. “These multiple rounds of review are standard and built into every verification process — to help ensure the integrity of the process, catch errors and take steps to remediate them.”
As the Mercury reported in early July, the city’s Auditor’s Office is responsible for making sure petitioners have gathered enough signatures to meet the 40,437 threshold to make the ballot. But the city relies on the Multnomah County Elections Office because that office can legally access state voter rolls to validate signatures.
So, the city first reviews petition sheets to ensure they are in the correct form, and rejects sheets that do not conform to those standards. Then the city submits the remaining signatures to the county, and the Elections Office cross references with state voter rolls to ensure the signees met the requirements for a valid signature. Signees must be registered in the district where the petition applies, their registration must be active, and the signer information must be legible.
As with every petition, the county does not do a line-by-line accounting of every signature. Instead, as outlined in state law, it uses a sampling of the total signatures submitted to the county. The state voter registration system automates the randomized sample, which is then used to verify each signature included in the sample.
In this case, the City Auditor submitted 55,837 total signatures. As of Tuesday evening, one sample yielded 3,896 valid signatures, while 2,184 signatures were rejected. Elections officials are still processing signatures. The percentage of verified signatures in the sample will be applied back to the total 55,837—in this case, over 72 percent—and that calculation must yield 40,437 signatures to reach the November ballot.
