BREAKING: Ballot tampering suspect identified - and she's a right-wing activist

Kari Chisholm

Deanna Swenson

Late this afternoon, Clackamas County identified the suspect in the felony ballot-tampering investigation as Deanna Swenson of Oregon City, a 55-year-old registered Republican. Clackamas County has fired her.

Swenson confirmed her role to Willamette Week:

When WW reporters came to her home Monday afternoon, Swenson wasn’t in a mood to talk. WW asked her how many ballots were involved, and Swenson replied tearfully, “Only the two.” Swenson declined to answer other questions. She said she has not yet hired an attorney to represent her.

Whether her claim that it was just two ballots is unknown:

County officials are especially concerned about the number of quarantined ballots, those processed by the worker and separated from ballots ready to be counted. Was it just a few, dozens, hundreds? No one would say.

According to the Oregonian's Yuxing Zheng, she is not a full-time county employee, but rather a temporary employee who has worked during elections since 2010. By contrast, according to Willamette Week's Nigel Jaquiss, she's worked "in various elections since 2000."

As a guy who does a lot of social media work in politics, my first move is to the voterfile and to Facebook. Here's what I've learned:

• There is only one Deanna Swenson registered to vote in Oregon City. She's a very regular voter with a conservative score described to me by one field organizer as "through the roof". She's got either a hunting or a fishing license. She returned her ballot this year in-person at Clackamas County Elections on October 31st - the day the ballot-tampering incident occurred.

• This is her Facebook page. On October 27th at 12:25 a.m., she clicked LIKE on the Republican National Committee. On October 12th, The Tea Party. On October 8th, Paul Ryan VP (the official Paul Ryan page.) And there are many, many more just like that. With exactly one exception (Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, ironically), her political fan profile is exclusively hard-core right-wing stuff - and very nearly half of everything she's LIKE'd is political. The rest is hunting-related, shopping-related, or generic stuff like "music" and "photography". (I've posted the complete list below.)

Of course, the spin coming out of the County Clerk's office right now is that this was a one-time incident and it was contained to just two ballots. But here's what I want to know:

• Why was a right-wing activist hired as a vote-counter in the elections office? Everybody's entitled to their opinions, but ballot-processing isn't a job for activists. (I wouldn't hire me to be an election worker, either.)

• Who hired Deanna Swenson? And based on what qualifications? What was the screening process used to ensure that the vote-counting process wasn't being polluted with political activists?

• And why did Swenson feel comfortable enough in that room to start filling in bubbles on a ballot? In an environment that is, presumably, all about protecting the integrity of the process, how and why would someone feel that they could whip out a pencil and start marking ballots with impunity?

• Who else has been doing election work in Clackamas County? And are they also right-wing activists?

• Update: One more -- Other than her activities on Facebook, has Swenson been involved as an activist with any right-wing organizations locally or nationally?

If this was a one-time freak incident that was caught immediately, then that's a wonderful thing. But that seems too tidy. We need a comprehensive investigation that goes back a decade or more to understand what's been happening. There have been way too many razor-thin elections in Clackamas County to be sanguine about all this.

Here's the full fan profile for Deanna Swenson. She's a fan of just 90 pages, but 39 of them are political - and all but one of those are right-wing activist pages:

By Kari Chisholm Nov. 05, 2012