John Nelsen unfairly attacked for error caused by State Election software

[John Nelsen Press Release]Nelsen Campaign Rejects Fiscal Mismanagement Attacks from Opposition, Explains Reporting Errors

East Multnomah County —Candidate John Nelsen (R-HD49) has recently been attacked by the Democrats and local press for some campaign finance reporting errors. The Democrats have charged that John has been financially irresponsible both in his campaign and on the Reynolds School Board, where he sits as Chair.

John Nelsen said, “The Reynolds School Board has repeatedly and publicly refuted that the budgetary issues fall on the shoulders of any one person, yet the Democrats have continued to ignore the information in an attempt to make me look bad to voters. Their information is false and as the investigations proceed, it will be even clearer that they are incorrect in their attack. Once again, they are just using this to distract and mislead voters like they’ve done this entire campaign.”

Regarding the campaign finances, Nelsen’s campaign manager Rebecca Tweed said, “As I stated when I spoke with the press last week, the accounts payable amount that was referenced was a mistake in the ORESTAR system. It took a few days to figure out exactly what was wrong, but we did and the error has been corrected. It was brought to our attention and all of the issues will be rectified within 24 — 48 hours.”

On the ORESTAR system used by the Secretary of State for public recording of campaign finances, it listed an accounts payable amount of $429,205.56. The ORESTAR system will automatically add decimal points at the end of a entry if they aren’t entered manually. The Nelsen campaign had entered an accounts payable of $2,488.00, but forgot the decimal point, which then automatically reported as $248,800.00, a clearly incorrect and very large mistake.

When the Nelsen campaign called officials to confirm the error and take the necessary steps to correct it, the Secretary of State’s office said this is a common mistake and has happened before in other campaigns. It is just a matter of making a logistical amendment to the report, which the Nelsen staff has done and will show on the system within a few days.

Tweed continued, “We will not have a balance deficit when this is said and done, we don’t run our campaigns that way. We do what we can afford and spend a majority of our time focused on grassroots campaigning. We’ve been hugely outspent by our opposing candidate and FuturePAC, yet we’ve still managed to knock on almost every door and get out almost 1,000 lawn signs in the district. Our campaign has focused on hard work and real communication with the voters and John’s done that. We’ve far outworked our opposition and we believe it will make the difference.”
In regards to a few other reporting errors, John Nelsen stated, “My campaign staff has been working long, hard hours for months and sometimes mistakes get made. No campaign is without an accident here or there. We have all of the information on record and it will be reported publicly in the next day or so””somehow the copies of checks just never made it from the copy machine to the fax machine.” He continued on, “We take responsibility for it and apologize to everyone for the mistake; there was never an intention to mislead citizens on the amount of fundraising we’ve done.”

“We haven’t financially mismanaged our campaign. Every mistake is important to correct and we do our best to ensure everything is 100% perfect, but sometimes things just happen and you have to make them right.” said Tweed. “I’m glad it was brought to our attention, but it’s frustrating that it automatically becomes an attack from the Democrats before they’ve even taken the time to ensure their charges are accurate.”

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