DSA Aligned Portland Employees Conspire to Keep Police Funding Off the Ballot

City staff decided the outcome of an election before Portlanders cast a single vote.

Portland, Oregon has a policing problem. Or, rather, a problem with a lack of police. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members on the city council have exacerbated a problem already years in the making, despite claiming otherwise. So, when a coalition of concerned citizens teamed up to try to do something to improve police staffing, the DSA and its crony bureaucrats swung into action to put a stop to it. 

Portland's Enhanced Community Safety Initiative, filed by a group called Safer Portland, would amend the city charter to guarantee no fewer than 2.0 sworn police officers per 1,000 residents, almost double the current 1.2. It would pay for the increase without raising taxes by using 25 percent of the surplus generated by the Portland Clean Energy Fund—a corporate tax officials originally projected to raise $30-60 million a year that now brings in nearly $200 million annually. Because it's a charter amendment rather than an ordinary budget vote, the initiative would bind future councils to that staffing floor—taking the annual "cut police to cover a shortfall" option off the table unless voters change the charter again. 

Using the citizen's initiative process completely bypasses a vote of the city council, which, in spite of claims to the contrary, has systematically dismantled the Portland Police Bureau. The backers of the initiative gathered enough signatures to get it on the ballot this November. 

That's when the city's director of Small Donor Elections Program stepped in to derail the effort, in partnership with several DSA activists and a city attorney directly tied to the ACLU. They appear to have conspired to destroy the audit trail after rejecting hundreds of pages of signatures, blocking the initiative from qualifying for the ballot.

City Council Opposes Public Safety

Portland's council has used its own budget authority repeatedly to squeeze the police bureau. This June, the council cut $21 million from the police bureau while insisting it hadn't touched a single sworn officer — a claim that concealed an 80 percent cut to unarmed Public Safety Support Specialists and roughly 20,000 fewer hours of officer overtime, according to Chief Bob Day. A year earlier, councilors Angelita Morillo and Candace Avalos led a successful amendment redirecting $1.9 million the mayor had earmarked for police toward parks maintenance, with fellow councilors Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane, and Steve Novick voting for it. 

The same members who vote to shrink the department call it fiscal responsibility, not defunding—while a newly hired police officer still faces an 18-month academy and field-training pipeline before patrolling solo, but the city cut the training budget. Cutting the budget takes one vote. Rebuilding what the council cuts takes years, which is why a charter floor—not a line item the council can zero out next time revenue runs short—is the part of this measure its opponents seem most determined to prevent.

Here's Where It Gets Really Dirty—Destroying the Audit Trail

The City of Portland took unprecedented steps after Safer Portland submitted the signatures for tabulation. Safer Portland submitted roughly 63,300 signatures for its petition, and the city rejected 7,478—nearly 12 percent. 

The same city office handled a second initiative on the identical July 6 deadline, with a stark difference in how the city treated it. The Community Budgeting for All initiative submitted 78,743 signatures—the largest count any Portland ballot measure has ever submitted—and the city rejected 1,759 of them, about 2.2 percent.

Both campaigns used paid and volunteer circulators, filed under the same city code—and Safer Portland had more than five times the rate of rejected signatures.

The scheme deployed by city bureaucrats, working with DSA activists, was diabolical. 

When the signatures went to verification, the process broke down completely. Safer Portland had applied sequential Bates numbering to its own petition sheets before submitting them—the standard method for tracking which page holds which signature through a multi-step review. According to people familiar with the matter, the city then removed entire pages—ten signatures per page—from several of the campaign's highest-producing paid circulators, thousands of signatures at a time. 

Rather than leave gaps, the city filled the empty spots with pages pulled from the end of the stack and renumbered the entire submission from scratch, erasing the original sequence that would have shown exactly which pages had been pulled and from where. The total page count fell from roughly 8,800 to about 8,300. 

Staff blamed mismatched circulator signatures but wouldn't show the campaign the rejected pages, even while keeping other pages those same circulators had submitted. In a July 27 demand letter, campaign counsel Tracey Frazier Wigglesworth put the accusation in writing: the city was "destroying the audit trail by renumbering petition sheets" and running a review "whose totals cannot be independently verified." 

Only after campaign representatives caught the discrepancy and pressed for an explanation did city staff attempt to reconstruct, after the fact, an audit trail for what had happened to the missing pages.

Campaign representatives asked the city to start the count over, since officials couldn't account for thousands of rejected pages or explain the numbering discrepancy. They raised it directly with Elections Division Manager Deborah Scroggin and P.K. Runkles-Pearson, general counsel to the City Auditor's Office—who also lists herself as a board member and cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Oregon, a detail that cuts to exactly the credibility problem Safer Portland has described. Both said no. Neither gave a reason.

A second irregularity turned up at the county level. Multnomah County staff are supposed to log both a sheet's page number and a signature's line number on it — page 598, line 9, for example. According to people familiar with the matter, staff instead entered the page number a second time in the field where the signature's line number should go, rather than the actual line number on that page—a duplication the county later called a data-entry error. That page number fell high enough in the sequence that the error landed exactly where it had to land to obscure how many signatures the city had already tossed. A misplaced digit that did exactly what the City of Portland needed is difficult to reconcile as coincidence.

Will Anyone Do Anything About It?

The City of Portland has told the Oregon Secretary of State's office there is nothing wrong with how it has handled signature verification for the "Safer Portland" police staffing measure. Secretary of State Tobias Read (D) has so far declined to step in and take over the count himself, despite dozens of complaints and the authority to do so. It is one of several fronts on which this single ballot measure has had to fight just to reach voters.

The tool Safer Portland is using to try to get there—the citizen initiative petition—is not incidental to Oregon's identity. Oregon adopted the initiative and referendum process in 1902, the first state in the nation to do so, so voters could write laws and amend the constitution directly when the legislature wouldn't act. The state built its elections process to make that path available and accessible to its citizens. 

Disputes over petition drives happen; they're a normal part of Oregon politics. What's unusual here is the sheer number of separate points at which this particular measure has run into trouble, each with an official or set of officials who could make the call—officials who, in several cases, also had a stake in the outcome.

It isn't only the Secretary of State's posture that raises questions. When the campaign had barely started collecting signatures, a legal challenge to the measure's ballot title found it partly deficient, forcing a court-ordered rewrite in April. 

Attorney Alan Kessler was the named complainant in a second, separate challenge, filing a complaint alleging Safer Portland's canvassers misled voters—yet another attempt to derail the measure. Around the same time, Susan Mottet, who directs the city's own Small Donor Elections Program, joined DSA activist and part-time lobbyist Janna Tessman in personally recording and helping build a complaint against those same canvassers—an unusual role for a sitting city elections official to take against a citizen petition. 

Organized opposition also followed and confronted the campaign's signature gatherers in the field, handing out fliers urging people not to sign. The push to get people to rescind signatures they'd already given came later, after Mottet's video surfaced.

Sec. of State Read's own letter undercuts the idea that any of this is business as usual. He wrote to City Auditor Simone Rede that what he'd seen "reflects poorly on our state's entire election system" and that "there has been a breakdown somewhere in this process." He warned the episode, if "allowed to fester, will be used by bad actors as a cudgel to sow doubt in our elections this November." 

Read has a real tool available: under ORS 246.820, he can go directly to circuit court for an order compelling a city or county elections official to comply with state directives when they've failed to. He hasn't used it—he sent a letter instead, telling Rede she had "all the tools and experience needed" to fix the same office that claimed it had properly tracked every change to the petition sheets, when the record shows it hadn't.

Defund the Police by Any Means Necessary

Nationally, the Democratic Socialists of America softens how it talks about "public safety" for a broader electorate, even as its own 2026 platform plainly calls for cutting police funding "annually towards zero" and abolishing the institution outright, not reforming it. 

Portland is arguably the clearest real-world test of that platform in office, and the gap between the national messaging and the local voting record is the whole story. A DSA-aligned city council bloc that campaigns on public safety and equity has voted, repeatedly and on the record, to shrink the one department whose job is emergency response—then leaned on procedural mechanisms, rather than public argument, when voters tried to reverse that decision at the ballot box. 

If DSA-aligned officials believe cutting police toward zero is right for Portland, they are free to make that case to voters. What they have done instead is govern that way while describing it differently, and work to keep the measure that would let voters weigh in from ever reaching them. 

Pulling these kinds of tricks looks more like the Maduro regime in Venezuela than an American election, but perhaps the DSA prefers it that way.

Of course, city officials dispute that any of this adds up to sabotage, and taken one at a time, each decision has an individually defensible explanation. But an elections system is supposed to run on predictable rules that work the same way no matter who benefits. Safer Portland instead ran into a city office that rejected its signatures at five times the rate of a comparable measure filed the same week. That office admitted it never used Bates numbering on the pages and then somehow produced numbered pages anyway. This effort included Susan Mottet, the city's Small Donor Elections director helping build a complaint against the canvassers whose signatures her colleagues were simultaneously rejecting. (Incidentally, most of the sitting DSA members on the city council got elected with help from the Small Donor Elections Program.) A general counsel for the city—an ACLU of Oregon board member—said no to a fresh count without giving a reason. 

Add a county whose own duplicate digit landed exactly where it needed to, opposition volunteers pressuring circulators in the field, and a Secretary of State who called the episode a threat to public trust and still declined to use the authority he has to stop it. That isn't a technical dispute over petition mechanics. It's a demonstration that the people running an election can decide its outcome before voters cast a single vote—and none of it happens at arm's length from the politics involved. 

Portland's elected DSA bloc has spent several budget cycles voting to shrink the department this measure would rebuild, and the official who helped build a complaint against Safer Portland's canvassers did it alongside a DSA activist, not a disinterested bystander. The people with the most to lose if this measure reaches voters are the same people currently deciding whether it gets to the ballot.

Free and fair elections don't run on good intentions. They run on someone enforcing the rules when the people counting the votes have a stake in the outcome. Oregon built the citizen initiative process in 1902 for exactly one scenario: a government unwilling to act on its own, which the people it governs can override directly. Nobody built a backstop for what happens when the review process itself is the thing unwilling to act.

So who does a Portland voter turn to when the city won't explain its numbers, the county's math breaks one direction, biased city attorneys deny any appeal, and the Secretary of State writes a strongly worded letter and calls it a day? There is no fourth branch standing by. If election interference this easy to document—a rejection rate five times higher than a comparable measure, a numbering system that appeared only after the campaign caught the city skipping it, a data-entry error landing with suspicious precision—draws no response from anyone with the power to act, the lesson for the next campaign isn't subtle: the outcome doesn't belong to the voters who sign the petition. It belongs to the bureaucrats and activists willing to ignore ethics, the rule of law, and the voters themselves—as long as the count keeps coming out their wa

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