In the race for Clark County auditor, a seasoned Southwest Washington politician has based much of her campaign on questioning the integrity of the office she wants to lead.

Eileen Quiring O’Brien, a former Republican lawmaker and county councilor, is running against the longtime auditor’s office employee, Mitchell Kelly.

The nonpartisan race will decide who oversees a host of government functions, from auditing county departments and issuing marriage licenses to administering local elections.

Kelly’s pitch to voters has been to, essentially, keep doing all that, while shoring up public trust in security measures already in place around elections.

Quiring O’Brien has repeatedly taken aim at the status quo.

In a July editorial forum hosted by The Columbian newspaper, she waffled when asked whether she would try to change how the county issues marriage licenses to members of the LGBTQ community.

“I’d have to think about that,” she said, despite the issue being settled by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. A few minutes later, she said she would follow the law.

In August, she posted a YouTube video offering “to expose how the auditor’s office operates when its power is challenged.”

Then last month, in another video, she accused the current auditor of performing “security theater” when working with the state on election integrity.

With nationwide challenges to mail-in voting and the toss-up race for the 3^rd Congressional District as the backdrop, Clark County has drawn national attention from one voting rights group that tracks election risks. Local political observers say the auditor race has outsized significance.

“The auditor’s race is the most important race going on in Clark County right now,” said Temple Lentz, who served as a county councilor with Quiring O’Brien.

Whichever candidate wins the race in November will oversee elections in a purple county with consequential state and federal races as well as the looming 2028 presidential contest. Meanwhile, Quiring O’Brien’s campaign has cast doubt on the local auditor’s office and raised concerns about noncitizen voting that are reminiscent of the broader election-denier movement.

Greg Kimsey ran elections in Clark County for 28 years, as the region shifted between Democratic and Republican representatives in Congress. He announced his retirement in January, prompting a primary race this summer.

His final election will be Nov. 3rd — if he lasts that long. Just two weeks before the election, Quiring O’Brien filed an ethics complaint with Clark County arguing that Kimsey shouldn’t be able to run the local midterms because he endorsed her opponent in the auditor’s race.

A spokesperson for Clark County said the ethics complaint will be reviewed to see if it constitutes a violation of county policy or state law.

“The auditor’s responsibility is to make sure the administration of the office — and particularly of elections — remains impartial,” Quiring O’Brien said in response to emailed questions.

The candidates and their campaign promises

Quiring O’Brien is no stranger to politics. She served as a Republican in the Oregon Legislature from 1995 until 2000. She was elected to the Clark County Council in 2017, stepping down in 2022 during a chaotic period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the past four months, she has released a steady stream of YouTube videos casting doubt on the auditor’s office and her opponent. She has accused Kelly of “weaponized bureaucracy” by writing fiscal impact statements about proposed amendments to the county charter that involve elections. If Kelly takes over the role from his boss of the past decade, he will inherit “a legacy of administrative secrecy,” Quiring O’Brien said in one video.

As a county councilor, she disagreed with Kimsey that manual recounts are the best way to test the integrity of a close election. She has also said Clark County voter rolls are “bloated” and need to be cleaned to remove individuals who have moved, died or who were otherwise wrongly issued ballots.

Most election rules, including maintaining voter rolls, are decided at the state or federal level, said Stuart Holmes, the director of elections for the Washington Secretary of State.

Voters can’t be removed without their permission or written notification, according to federal law. If they stay inactive for two federal elections, they will automatically be removed. His office also matches state death records with information from the Social Security Administration to cancel outdated registrations. One thing local auditors can do, Holmes said, is review obituaries in local newspapers to keep his office informed.

If elected, Quiring O’Brien has promised to perform an independent third-party audit of the auditor’s office. The proposal “is not an accusation of wrongdoing,” she said, but a chance to establish independence after Kimsey’s lengthy leadership.

“I see this as an opportunity to bring fresh eyes, executive leadership, transparency and independent oversight to an office that has operated under the same elected leadership for nearly three decades,” Quiring O’Brien said in response to emailed questions. She declined two interview requests.

Kelly has described himself as a reluctant politician who chose to enter the race to serve the community where he grew up. For the past decade, he worked on the team that oversees the financial management of Clark County. Before that, he was an auditor for Washington state, where he audited local government agencies, including counties, throughout Southwest Washington.

“I’m not a political person,” Kelly said. “I have just wanted to provide the skills that I’ve developed over my life to this community that I love so much.”

If elected, Kelly would largely continue the work of his predecessor. One change, he said, would be focusing on improving communication between the auditor’s office and the public, to show off security measures that are already in place. The elections office was recently remodeled to expand public access, and the county offers an election observation training program for people who want to better understand the process.

“Spreading misinformation and stating things that aren’t supported by facts makes people less inclined to vote,” Kelly said. “Everyone should feel comfortable and confident that the process can be relied upon.”

An evenly split county

As the most populous county in Washington’s 3^rd Congressional District, Clark County voters play an important role in a toss-up race that will help determine control of the U.S. House. Outside groups are watching the district closely.

Clark County was ranked as a “moderate” risk for locations “where the conditions for election crisis are most likely to arise this year,” according to the nonprofit Voting Rights Lab, which tracks local election offices around the country. Such risks have not materialized thus far in 2026. But just days before the 2024 election, hundreds of ballots were destroyed in Clark County after someone dropped an incendiary device in a Vancouver ballot box.

Razor thin margins have decided the outcome of the 3rd District before, and this year the race between Republican John Braun and Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is expected to be extremely tight. Democrats are hoping to flip four seats in Washington state’s 17^th and 18^th legislative districts in hopes of gaining a supermajority in the state Legislature. Past races have been decided by the thinnest of margins. In 2024, Democrat Adrian Cortes flipped the 17^th Senate seat by just 172 votes.

Other local election officials across the country have sown distrust in voting systems in recent years. In Shasta County, California, a wave of election denialism led to county supervisors trying to remove electronic voting machines and introduce a hand count system until the state intervened.

In an election there this summer, the head of elections was so suspicious about the results that he locked away several boxes of ballots until members of the Secretary of State’s Office and FBI agents came to inspect things.

Concerned colleagues from both sides of the aisle

Quiring O’Brien received the most votes during the four-way August primary election at just over 29%, followed by Kelly at 28%.

Since then, several Clark County residents have voiced their concerns about what would happen if she were elected.

Julie Olson served alongside Quiring O’Brien on the Clark County Council. Both were Republicans, though Olson said she has moved away from the party to the point where she is politically “homeless” today.

The prospect of Quiring O’Brien being elected auditor “would give me grave concern,” Olson said.

“I believe that many of her decisions, if not all of them, were through the lens of a narrow political perspective,” Olson said.

Voters in Clark County made the auditor a nonpartisan role by amending the county’s charter in 2020.

If elected, Quiring O’Brien wrote, she would follow Washington law, not “selectively enforce statutes based on personal beliefs or political preferences.”

Temple Lentz was a member of the Clark County Council during the same period. Today, she is the CEO of The Historic Trust, a nonprofit in Vancouver, as well as a commissioner for the Port of Vancouver.

The Democrat said Quiring O’Brien’s election criticisms fall in line with federal policies like the SAVE Act, the Republican bill that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, which bill opponents argue would disenfranchise millions of people.

“These are similar forces just at a local level and at a federal level,” Lentz said.

Such efforts, she said, are attempts to discredit systems that have controls in place and add extra layers of complexity for the people they’re supposed to serve.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/10/20/a-candidate-for-clark-county-auditor-casts-doubt-on-the-office-she-hopes-to-win/