Democratic Oregon Treasurer Tobias Read wants to bring stability to Secretary of State’s Office

After eight years leading the Oregon State Treasury, Tobias Read says he’s ready to bring a steady hand to the Secretary of State’s Office.

With two political scandals that led to then-Secretary of State Kate Brown becoming governor after John Kitzhaber resigned in 2015, and Secretary of State Shemia Fagan stepping down last year, and the death of former Republican Secretary of State Dennis Richardson in 2019, Oregon has had six secretaries of state and two acting secretaries over the past decade. Read, a Beaverton Democrat who is term-limited as treasurer, contends he’s the state’s best choice as an experienced administrator to run the office that oversees Oregon’s elections, audits state government and administers state archives. 

“We’ve gotten to a spot where the office I think has suffered from turnover, and there’s really important stuff coming – campaign finance reform, to potential ranked choice voting, to just the misinformation and violence that we see in other places and to some extent in Oregon,” he said. “We can step right in and restore some confidence and capacity in that office and I’m well-prepared to do that.” 

Read will face four other Democratic candidates in the primary: state Sen. James Manning of Eugene, retired attorney Jim Crary, inventor Dave Stauffer and retired electrical engineer Paul D. Wells. The Capital Chronicle is profiling frontrunners Read and Manning and running answers to written questions from the candidates who responded.

Read represented Beaverton in the state House from 2007 until 2017, when he began his first term as treasurer. He ran for governor in 2022, coming in second to now-Gov. Tina Kotek in the Democratic primary.  

The secretary of state is first in the line of succession if the governor leaves office – which is how Brown initially became governor. Read said he doesn’t view the office as a stepping stone and that he hopes to serve two full terms as secretary of state because he’s driven by a desire to contribute to making the state a better place. 

While the treasurer and secretary of state have different responsibilities, he said the offices are ultimately quite similar. Both involve overseeing large teams – 213 full-time employees at the Treasury and 242 at the Secretary of State’s Office in the current two-year budget cycle – and both roles are regulators and administrators. 

“It is about how to lead an agency and set a culture and make sure that we’re hiring the kinds of people who are committed to that mission and holding them accountable, and that’s what I’ve done for seven-plus years,” Read said. “At the risk of being a little bit flip about it, people have good data on me and my performance and my approach, and I don’t imagine that changing, even as the office I hold hopefully does change.”

As of early April, he had visited 24 of the 36 county clerks in Oregon and planned to visit the remainder to learn more about how elections are run on the ground and the challenges they’re facing. Throughout Oregon, and the rest of the U.S., local election officials have spent the past several years pushing back against unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and misinformation about elections, spurred on by former President Donald Trump and his allies. 

Read thinks there are “relatively inexpensive” ways to help voters who have lost trust in elections feel more confident. Washington County, where he lives, is one of several Oregon counties that use BallotTrax to send text messages to voters who opt in, letting them know when their ballots are in the mail, when they’ve been received by the clerk’s office and when election workers have verified the signatures and prepared their ballot to be counted. Not all counties use the system because of its cost, and Read said that would be a good investment for the state to make. 

He’s also interested in adopting the ballot ridealong program run in California’s San Benito County. The program, modeled off police ridealongs, allows residents to join election workers as they collect ballots from ballot boxes and return them to election offices. 

Oregon has been a national leader in voting access and election turnout for decades, including being the first state in the nation to adopt automatic voter registration in 2015 and universal mail voting in 1998. But it’s been dinged in recent years for keeping closed partisan primaries and requiring voters to register three weeks before an election, while neighboring Washington and California have primaries that allow voters to choose anyone in a race and allow same-day voter registration. 

Same-day registration was allowed in Oregon for a decade, but voters amended the state constitution to ban it after followers of the controversial Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh tried to register in droves to take over Wasco County government in 1984. Read said he doesn’t see a chance at changing that law any time soon, but he is interested in a proposal he heard from one county clerk that would extend the statutory deadline to change party affiliation for a primary. 

“Making it easier for people to vote as they wish I think gives people, particularly people who are newly registered, newly arrived in Oregon, a positive experience,” Read said. “It means it’s much more likely they’re going to continue to vote.”

Read also wants to speed up the office’s investigations of election complaints, saying his work handling unclaimed property at the Treasury is a model for efficiency. The Legislature moved control of the state’s unclaimed property program from the Department of State Lands to the Treasury in 2019, and Read convinced lawmakers to give him more resources so that state workers could proactively return people’s unclaimed money to them without waiting for Oregonians, who in many cases didn’t know they had uncashed checks, security deposits or forgotten bank accounts, to make a claim.  

He said he has proven during his years as treasurer that he can advocate for department needs, including hiring more employees at the Treasury. That experience could prove critical as the Secretary of State’s Office oversees a transition to campaign finance limits ahead of the 2028 election. 

“When I got to Treasury, we joked that we were emaciated looking up at skinny,” Read said. “So we convinced the Legislature to give us the authority to do a pretty massive and historic expansion of the capacity of the investment division. They did that because we built a solid case and it has saved money for the entire state.”

Read doesn’t have specific programs he wants to audit, though he said everyone he talks to has an audit to recommend. What the state really needs, he said, is a clear plan for the Audits Division that avoids politics to focus on assessing risks and vulnerability, especially when it comes to programs that cost the state a lot of money and where lives are at stake.