The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office said it has removed from public view an election test website that was accidentally exposed to search engines after a system update.
The website showed mock-up results across a variety of contests, including the hotly contested gubernatorial race between Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek and Republican state Sen. Christine Drazan.
Connor Radnovich, spokesperson for the secretary of state, said results shown on the website were “absolutely not” real vote tallies. He said a system update misrouted the website outside a firewall. It was only meant to be seen by county elections offices to ensure systems are ready for Election Day, he said.
“Anything online right now is testing data to make sure our systems are working. This is normal,” Radnovich said Saturday. “Having testing data before Nov. 3 is standard so we can make sure everything is functioning appropriately when election results are released.”
State officials zeroed out any mock-up election tallies and subsequently blocked access to public web users by early Saturday afternoon.
Paul Manson, a research assistant professor at Portland State University who specializes in election administration, said he stumbled upon such a website a few election cycles ago. He said state officials are right to test their systems ahead of the big night, but said the mistake that caused the site to become discoverable was “unfortunate” because it could feed false claims around election integrity.
“This is such a keyed-up year,” Manson said.
The mistaken release comes amid a broad push by the Trump administration to increase federal scrutiny of state-run elections, including demands for voter-registration data and litigation over states’ voter rolls.
Trump has continued to question the reliability of voting machines and mail ballots and to falsely claim that widespread election fraud is a significant problem in U.S. elections. The Trump administration told Oregon election officials it plans to deploy election monitors to Multnomah County on Election Day Nov. 3.
The test website was flagged by former Republican state Rep. Julie Parrish, an attorney who said a candidate who’s a client of hers found the data Saturday morning while Googling for the secretary of state’s election results page. The Oregonian/OregonLive was able to independently access the test site from Google after the search engine appeared to have indexed the webpage.
Parrish said she was alarmed because she didn’t know if the results shown were early counts or test data. Either way, she said, if a campaign saw the website, its strategists might shift tack one way or another based on how results appeared.
“Anyway you slice it, it’s bad,” Parrish said.
Oregon law allows county officials to open ballots and “begin scanning ballots into a vote tally system” as counties receive them. Radnovich said counties don’t start tallying on a specific day, other than they must wait until the completion of what’s called a “logic and accuracy test” of their vote-tallying machines.
Counties typically begin to count ballots midweek before Election Day, Radnovich said, after which the data remains on the tallying machines until it is transmitted to the secretary of state’s office at 8 p.m. on election night to be posted to its results page.
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