Oregon Elections Officials Find No Wrongdoing on Pre-Election Robocalls

For second consecutive cycle, elections officals raise alarm but find nothing.

Oregon Secretary of State Jeanne Atkins announced Tuesday her elections division found no deliberate voter manipulation in the round of robocalls that took place prior to the Nov. 8 elections.

The investigation, conducted with the Oregon Department of Justice and the FBI, came on the heels of a spate of automated calls that allegedly wrongly informed voters throughout Oregon that they were not registered to vote in the week leading up to the Nov. 8 election.

Atkins' office blamed the Oregon Republican Party for the calls on Nov. 5. The GOP was tied to a similar round of robocalls misinforming voters of their status in 2012. (At that time the group Our Oregon filed a  complaint with the Secretary of State, but the elections division investigation also yielded no results.)

Atkins declared the 2016 investigation closed in a statement this morning:

In an interview, Atkins' deputy, Robert Taylor, tells WW that because elections officials relied on the FBI's investigation, they still do not know which company made the calls, whom they called or whether the calls discouraged people from voting.

"We trust the FBI did a thorough job," Taylor says. "The FBI was looking for whether or not the nature of the statement in the calls were false, could they be construed as an effort to mislead, and did the call influence the decision of people not to vote?"

The Oregon GOP says the investigation was misguided from the start.

"For at least 20 years the party makes phone calls to remind people and this was the exact same thing. Robocalls are a quick reminder," says Tyler Smith, vice chairman of the Oregon Republican Party. "These were used in the same way. It was surprising that Secretary Atkins didn't know or understand that."

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