Letter to Readers: On election night, someone needs to call in those results

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##Clerk’s office employee Suzie Sutton dismantles one of three cardboard voting booths Tuesday around 9 p.m., in the lobby of the Evans Street building. Sutton lovingly refers to the “Votabooth” as resembling a pizza box and popcorn container. The booths are used extensively during election season by people who fill out their ballots on site, Clerk Keri Hinton said. The 1970s-era Votabooths still contain instructions from pre-vote-by-mail days: “You may not remove ballot from the polling place,” they reads. Voters would fill in the center part of an arrow next to each ballot choice, and hand the ballot to a ballot clerk who would tear off a ballot stub as proof of voting.

I’ve been spending election nights at the Yamhill County Clerk’s Office for most of my career, starting back in 1983 when the office was in the Yamhill County Courthouse, Charles Stern was the clerk and ballots were still being cast at polling places.

I’ve seen the process change, with the advent of mail-in balloting in the 1990s and the latest technology in tallying machines and the location change with the old post office being turned into a freestanding clerk’s office. Faces change, as well, with Jan Coleman, Brian Van Bergen (who followed Stern after his sudden death in 2003) and, now, Keri Hinton.

And my duties have evolved as well. These days, I’m a correspondent for the Associated Press on election night, one of the people who phone in results to the AP’s West Coast call center as they are released by Oregon’s 36 county clerks.

As soon as the clerk’s staff hands me a copy of the first set of returns, I call AP and read off the numbers, one digit at a time to make sure the figures were reported correctly. It’s not difficult, but it does require me to be careful, clear and quick.

(For example, a candidate does not have “three thousand, five hundred-sixty-two votes”; the correspondent must phone in “3-5-6-2.”)

Once those results are called in I wait for the next count, when I’ll make another call so Yamhill County’s latest figures can be added to returns from around the state and, in the case of the presidential race, the nation.

Sometimes it’s a long night. In 2016, I stayed up until dawn making numerous calls as Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. In 2022, when races for congressional seats were on the ballot, I slept at the office and awakened in time to swim laps at the McMinnville Aquatic Center at 6 a.m. – a great way to start the day.

This year, the clerk sent election workers home a little after 10 p.m., and that meant my night ended early, too. A gift.

As I waited for my friend Jan to pick me up for a ride home, I watched the workers drive away, waving goodbye to the deputy who had been stationed at the office all evening. The deputy, the workers, the clerk, and in a small way, myself, had spent a long day making sure the election was secure and reported accurately.

Starla Pointer
Reporter
503-687-1263