‘She should not be in this role’: Oregon elections chief again calls on top federal election official to resign after comments on Dems

Chicago — Oregon’s elections chief again called on a top federal election official to resign over her inflammatory comments against Democrats last year.

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read (D) told Democracy Docket that Christy McCormick, the Republican vice-chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), was unfit to serve on the bipartisan body for falsely claiming that Democrats promote and rely on votes from “illegal citizens” to win elections.

“This is supposed to be bipartisan,” Read said of the EAC. “This is supposed to be about how we do the technical work of making sure that every eligible person’s vote is counted and reflected.”

“If that’s how she really feels, she should not be in this role,” he said.

On Wednesday, McCormick told Democracy Docket that her comments, which she made in her official capacity during a panel discussion with the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, were “under some sort of investigation.”

Last year, Read and several Senate Democrats called for her resignation.

Read is a member of the EAC’s Standards Board, a key advisory body for the commission that’s holding its annual meeting here this week. He sat for an interview with Democracy Docket between sessions Thursday.

Just before the interview, he and other state and local officials held a panel discussion with officials from the FBI, the United States Postal Service (USPS) and the United States Postal Inspection Service.

During the discussion, an official asked Adrienne Marshall, a USPS representative, about the status of the agency’s compliance with President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order attacking mail voting,

The order directed USPS to only send mail ballots to voters who are on what would essentially be a national voter registration roll created by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration. 

Marshall said USPS was aware of the order and its May deadline for the service to propose a rule laying out how it will carry out Trump’s directives.

“When and if we move forward with that, we will have a public comment period,” Marshall said about a potential proposal.

Asked if he was satisfied with Marshall’s answer, Read said he sympathized with the difficult position Trump has put USPS in.

“To have someone like the president just pop off with what I would characterize as totally unserious stuff without thinking about the implications has to be tough on them,” he said.

Oregon, a pioneer of mail voting that established it as its standard voting mechanism in the late 1990s, is one of 22 states and D.C. currently challenging Trump’s executive order. Read said he’s confident the states will succeed.

“We beat the president twice in court,” Read said, referring to the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) attempt to gain access to Oregon’s voter registration roll and the Oregon and Washington’s challenge to Trump’s first election order, issued last year.

Beyond Trump’s order, Read said his office is preparing for a potential adverse ruling by the Supreme Court on grace periods for late-arriving mail ballots. Oregon is among the 14 states and D.C. that will count mail ballots if they are postmarked by the Postal Service on election day but received a handful of days afterwards. 

But during oral arguments last month in the Republican National Committee’s challenge to Mississippi’s grace period law, several conservative justices appeared ready to strike down those state laws.

In addition to preparing ways to quickly inform voters about the effects of the court’s ruling, Read said his office is also working with county election officials to expand access to mail ballot drop boxes across the state.

“We have some advantage, I think, in Oregon, in that we were relatively more recent in having the grace period,” he said. “Prior to that, the rule was that ballots had to be received in the election office by 8 p.m. So a decent chunk of electors and voters in Oregon are used to that.”

Before attending the Standards Board meeting, Read said he was in Washington, D.C. While there, he said he got the sense that the SAVE America Act, the GOP’s massive voter suppression bill that’s stalled in the Senate, was “mostly dead.”

“You remember the ‘Princess Bride,’ yeah? Mostly dead. Mostly,” Read said, adding that he’s never going to write it off completely.

“I mean, I say that because it’s such a bad idea. It’s so unnecessary. It’s expensive. It’s impractical. It’s all that sort of stuff. So, I’m gonna watch it and be vigilant,” he said.