The County Auditor Asked to Check Our Vote-Counting Security. The Clerk Said No.

In 2025, Deschutes County's own internal auditor reviewed how our elections are run. One goal was to check the security of Clear Ballot, the software the Clerk's Office uses to count votes.

That part of the audit never happened. The report says the Clerk "refused to provide auditors with information about information security" for the vote-counting software. According to the report, the Clerk would not discuss or provide the election security plan required by state law, IT security procedures, staff security training records, or a review and demonstration of the system.

Because of that, the auditor could not reach a conclusion about the software's security, could not say whether the system is secure, and could not recommend improvements.

The Clerk's side

In a written response printed in the report, Clerk Steve Dennison's office says state law, a state rule and a Secretary of State directive require the election security plan to be kept confidential. The response says the decision came after consulting the Secretary of State's Elections Division, the county's legal department and other county clerks, and that clerks across Oregon agreed. It says the office was "fully transparent" with everything else the auditor asked for.

The auditor disagreed. The report says the state law keeps security plans out of public records requests, but an audit is not a public records request, and county code requires county employees to give the auditor unrestricted access to information and records.

What the audit did find

To be fair, the parts of the audit that went ahead were good news: voter rolls were maintained, signatures were verified, and staff correctly read what voters meant on their ballots. That's a credit to the people who work in that office.

Why it matters

Security plans should be kept away from the public and from bad actors. Nobody is arguing about that. But the auditor works for the county, and that job is to check, confidentially, that the system is sound. When that check can't happen, nobody outside the office can say whether the vote-counting system is secure, one way or the other.

My promise

Secure and transparent elections come first for me. If I'm elected, I will give the county auditor confidential access to review the security of our vote-counting system, so voters can get a real answer.

You can read the county's audit findings, with links to the full report, at jonathancurtis2026.netlify.app/audits.

Source: Deschutes County Office of the Internal Auditor, Clerk's Office elections audit (updated November 2025), pages 7–9 and 27–28.

— Jonathan Curtis, candidate for Deschutes County Clerk

Learn more: jonathancurtis2026.netlify.app

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