Oregon Election Integrity – Amended Complaint
By Terry Noonkester and Honorary Coauthor Marc Thielman
The Thielman v Fagan class-action lawsuit was filed by the law office of Stephen Joncus to reform election laws, not for money damages. It could be used by the Counties to help clean voter rolls, secure the ballot chain of custody and get rid of tally machines that can be hacked and maliciously programed. This case is unique, as it could greatly benefit the Defendants.
The suit was filed October 8, 2022 with the original deadline for the ‘Answer’ or ‘Motion to Dismiss’ from the Defendants set for December 15, 2022. The Defendants filed a motion to extend their response date to January 6, 2023. The extension of time allowed the Plaintiffs to amend their complaint until January 27th.
The Secretary of State’s ‘Motion to Dismiss’ was filed on January 6th, and then the 12 Counties were allowed to file ‘me-too’ motions. Douglas County Counsel Paul J. Meyer, who works under the direction of the three Douglas County Commissioners, Tim Freeman, Chris Boice, and Tom Kress, was the first to file the ‘me-too’ motion.
The complaint has now been amended with over 60 additional declarations and 120 other sources of information. The filing of the amended complaint made the original ‘Motions to Dismiss’ inoperable.
A few of the additional complaints filed are as follows:
1. “All students at the University of Oregon receive two ballots. One at the University and the other at their home address (many of whose homes were out of state). Karen Kaplan was a manager of the University of Oregon Recycling Department. She was known for her partisan nature and often displayed her American Communist Party Membership card to her student employees, friends, and co-workers on campus. Under her directive, beginning in 1998, she had separate recycling receptacles—specifically for ballots—placed in student mail areas and other high traffic places on campus. Students were encouraged to “recycle” their ballots.
“University recycling employees would go around daily prior to election day to collect the ballots. The piles of discarded ballots were then driven off campus and delivered to an SEIU office located (at the time) at the Ulano Credit Union Building in Eugene Oregon. The SEIU is a public employee union representing healthcare workers and other university employee groups.”
“With ballots in hand, the SEIU sent out emails from the field office to university employees soliciting help with 1) phone banking and/or 2) filling out ballots. Witnesses to this process attest that the ‘filling out of ballots’ was coercive and completely favored union-endorsed Democrat Candidates.”
“University of Oregon students are still receiving two ballots. There is no reason to assume the practice has stopped. The SEIU is a partisan and biased organization that wields real political power and pushes its own self-serving agenda. That this practice is tolerated and left uninvestigated is shocking to the conscience but clearly demonstrates that the government is compromised and no longer working for a fair and level playing field in support of all Oregonians.”
“The University of Oregon has over thirty thousand students, which clearly generate a high volume of discarded ballots that are wholly unsecured and available for nefarious and morally bankrupt agents to exploit. The recycling of ballots provides a source of official paper that can be submitted illegally. Every example and all the evidence implicated far Left-wing unions and non-profit groups and organizations. The Oregon state government has been dominated by far-left progressive Democrats since the inception of Vote by Mail. University students began receiving two ballots as early as 1986. If ten to fifteen thousand ballots are ‘recycled’ and filled out and unlawfully cast in conjunction with a partisan, corrupt, and union-backed county government, then massive voter disenfranchisement has occurred for many years.”
2. “Chris Dudley was a popular Republican gubernatorial candidate who was leading his Democratic opponent by 1% at midnight on Election Day in 2010. In the morning it was reported that approximately 44,000 Multnomah County Ballots were ‘discovered,’ and would need to be counted. At the end of the “counting” Dudley lost the race by approximately 1% or 22,000 votes. Such last-minute discoveries, in the context of rampant ballot ‘recycling,’ are not credible.”
3. “Mark Cosby is a Lane County resident who surveilled the Lane County Election Office parking lot on election night. Mr. Cosby witnessed a crowd of people leaving the building late at night carrying various bags, duffle bags, and backpacks that were heavy and bulky, consistent with carrying paper. Mr. Cosby visited the Lane County Elections Office and asked if tabulation officials were allowed to take backpacks and bags into the tabulation room and if so, were they searched or otherwise secured to ensure election security. The Lane County Elections Office told Mr. Cosby that such bags were not inspected.”
4. “During the 2022 primary in Douglas County, about 166 people ran as write-in candidates to be Precinct Committee Persons (“PCPs”) for the Douglas County Republican Party, each only requiring three votes to be elected. PCP candidates commonly rely on write-in voting to be elected. Out of the 166 candidates, only 39 were elected. This is strange. People who run to be a write-in for PCP and needing only three votes, make sure to line up their votes ahead of time and their friends who write them in on their ballot are dedicated to the task. The people of Douglas County asked, why did such a high percentage of these elections fail? Douglas County refused to answer all of the questions. They refused to respond to public records requests and stonewalled attempts to identify the problem. Maybe what happened is that many Republican ballots were swapped out for phantom ballots filled out by a criminal and inserted into the system by criminals. Without transparency, a range of possibilities come to mind and the citizens have been robbed of knowing that the results of the election accurately reflects who they voted for.”
5. “Oregon’s election office has become so arrogant that they demand that citizens stop talking about election integrity concerns. Deborah Scroggin, Oregon Elections Director, called Janice Dysinger, a long-time advocate for fair elections, and ordered her not to speak about elections in public anymore. A government official is far out-of-bounds when she believes that she has the authority to tell a citizen that she has lost her free speech rights. Mrs. Dysinger refused to obey.”
6. “The act of observing elections is also a sham. The observers are neutered such that they cannot follow what is going on, document problems, or make any input. For example, each of the signature verification observers of Multnomah County’s ballot processing disagreed with decisions that were being made on signature validation. These concerns were raised, but they were ignored by the election officials. Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is used in the signature verification process, but no one was allowed to observe the work being done by the AI.”
7. “Vote counting in Douglas County lasted for 35 days.… The cameras were only on for portions of 7 days of the 35 days. The images are so small that an observers can not identify with any certainty whether the papers being fed into the tally machines are in fact ballots. In the envelope opening area, there is no access to see any of the signature verification process. The election observation process in Douglas County is a sham, designed to check a box, but not designed to give the people confidence that their votes are being properly counted.”
8. “In Washington County, the observation room is equipped with video screens displaying the output of cameras in the room. The cameras are 20-30 feet from the action, preventing the observers from seeing any detail of the work. The cameras are wide angle security cameras not suitable for observation of any detail. There are 10 cameras and only 4 screens set up to rotate every 45 seconds, so that no task being performed by the election workers can be followed by the observers… The election observation process in Washington County is a sham.”
9. “Washington County workers receive about 2,200 votes from overseas service members (“UOCAVA”). The workers need to transcribe the ballots from regular office paper onto blank ballots. Washington County did not provide any opportunity for observers to watch the process of transcribing these UOCAVA ballots.”
10. On election day, Washington County rejected the signature on many ballots— signatures that to the observer looked just fine—while others that did not resemble the master signature. The observers on that day sought to challenge about 230 signatures, but the vast majority were accepted by the workers despite the challenge. There is no mechanism for effectively challenging the signatures because once it is accepted, it is fait accompli, the ballot goes into the counter. There is no avenue for appeal and there no way to undo the process.”
11. “On Election Day 2022, John and Elaine Woods dropped off their ballots at the Washington County Elections Office. Parked in the parking lot was a paper shredding truck. The driver was in the Elections Office doing some sort of business.”
The new deadline for the Secretary of State and the Defendant Counties to ‘Answer’ or file a ‘Motion to Dismiss’ is February 17th. All County Commissioners and their councils in the 36 Oregon Counties are now named as Defendants to the lawsuit and they all have the opportunity to file an ‘Answer’ to the lawsuit to allow the case to go forward.
