Oregon County Excludes Republicans From Key Election Oversight Positions

The Oregon Republican Party (ORP) sounded the alarm late Monday night about a Clatsop County elections clerk who stacked key oversight positions with non-Republicans. Rural Oregon likely won’t make a difference in the presidential race, but several key statewide races that are close in the polls going into Election Day could be affected.

The ORP released the following statement:

“It was brought to our attention in the past couple of days that Republican volunteers have been excluded as election workers from the Clatsop County Election Office Signature Verification and Drop Box Collection boards by County Elections Clerk Tracie Krevanko, even though Republican volunteers had been added to the ballot counting boards,” said Oregon Republican Party Communications Director Kevin Hoar. “We contacted Ms. Krevanko to request that Republican volunteers be added to these boards, but our request was denied.”

Sixty percent of the Signature Verification and Drop Box Collection Boards consist of Democrats and zero Republicans. Clatsop County is one of the counties that comprises the highly contested open seat House District 32 race between Republican/Independent Mayor of Tillamook Suzanne Weber and Democrat Debbie Boothe-Schmidt. Clatsop is also considered a swing county in the very competitive races for the statewide offices of Secretary of State and State Treasurer.

The ORP went on to say that emails show that Krevanko planned on having no citizen participation in poll-watching at all, contrary to requirements published by the Secretary of State’s office. “According to correspondence with the Clatsop County Clerk,” the ORP said, “Krevanko had initially planned to exclude all citizen participation in the election’s process as mandated by the Secretary of State’s Vote By Mail manual, until required to do by the Clatsop County Manager, Don Bohn, after statements of concern from Clatsop County constituents.”

The ORP says it is looking into legal remedies for this action by the county elections clerk. Correspondence between the ORP, its counsel, the clerk’s office, and the county’s legal counsel indicate the county may be sidestepping its responsibility to ensure that no bias exists in the assignments of temporary poll-watching employees.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/jeff-reynolds/2020/11/03/oregon-county-excludes-republicans-from-key-news-and-politics-oversight-positions-n1121829

US Cyber Command, NSA Undertook Ops Against Iran Prior to US Election - Report

The head of US Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) and the National Security Agency (NSA) told reporters Tuesday the US had carried out cyber ops against Iran to ensure it did not interfere with the US elections.

US Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, who heads both CYBERCOM and the NSA, told reporters Tuesday he was “very confident in actions” taken against Iran “over the past several weeks and the past several months to make sure that they’re not going to interfere in our elections,” the Washington Post reported.

However, the cyber chief gave no specific information about the operations.

Nakasone said that while they were watching for interference in the US election, “I just don’t see the levels that we had seen” in 2018. During that election, too, the wild claims about planned interference by Russia failed to materialize, leaving the media strangely silent during the November day of decision.

About two weeks before the 2020 election, US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed that Russia and Iran had “taken specific actions to influence public opinion relating to [US] elections."

Among those claims were that the two nations had independently obtained US voter registration information, and that Iran had emailed threatening messages to voters in several US states posing as the right-wing gang Proud Boys and warning would-be voters for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to support US President Donald Trump instead. Ratcliffe also claimed Iran was behind a video that "implies that individuals could cast fraudulent ballots, even from overseas,” which he said was an attempt to discredit the election.

However, Ratcliffe’s conclusions came from metadata that pointed to the use of servers in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Estonia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, but not Iran, according to the Washington Post.

Further, the Iranian government has repeatedly denied it has any interest in swaying the US election, but if it did, it’s unclear why it would wish to help Trump win, when his administration is responsible for torpedoing a delicate detente decades in the making and implementing a crushing new “maximum pressure” campaign that has wrecked Iran’s economy and caused many Iranians to die of COVID-19 and other diseases that sanctions prevent the buying of medicines for.

The day after Ratcliffe and Wray’s announcements, the US Treasury sanctioned five Iranian entities it accused of being "components of the Government of Iran, disguised as news organizations or media outlets" and attempting to interfere in the US elections.

https://sputniknews.com/military/202011031080978519-us-cyber-command-nsa-undertook-ops-against-iran-prior-to-us-election—report/