Trump and Vance missing from Oregon’s online candidate list, voter pamphlets

Oregon’s Democrat secretary of state does not list former President Donald Trump or his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, as candidates on the office’s website, and county voter pamphlets exclude them from the biographies of presidential candidates.

Under candidates for president, Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade’s website lists candidates Kamala Harris, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Jill Stein, but Trump is nowhere to be found. Under candidates for vice president, the website simply lists Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

County voter pamphlets, issued by Griffin-Valade’s office, also omit Trump and Vance from the presidential candidates’ biographies. Pamphlets note that each biography was “furnished” by the candidate’s campaign, and that “candidates are not required to file voters’ pamphlet statements.”

The pamphlets also include a section for political party statements, in which they list the Democrat Party first and the Republican Party fifth.

Clackamas County Commissioner Ben West, a Republican from Oregon’s third-largest county near Portland, said that county voter pamphlets in the state are the “most important mailer a candidate could ever have.”

“Everyone reviews that around the kitchen table,” West said. “Everyone marks it up and makes their notes and dog-ears the pages.”

West said he had not heard the secretary left Trump and Vance off the online candidate list, but called it “highly irregular” and “bizarre.”

Griffin-Valade oversees Oregon’s “motor voter” system, which she recently defended after stumbling across loopholes that registered more than 1,500 potential noncitizens to vote, as The Federalist previously reported. Democrat Gov. Tina Kotek has suspended the system during an external review, but state Republicans have called for a more comprehensive investigation.

-The Federalist, October 11, 2024