THE RIGHT MAN
FOR THE JOB
SESSIONS FORCED
OUT AFTER DEMS
TAKE HOUSE
PHS FOOTBALL/1B
NATION/7A
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2018
143rd Year, No. 17
One dollar
WINNER OF THE 2018 ONPA GENERAL EXCELLENCE AWARD
How the ballots fell
HERMISTON
Staff photo by Kathy Aney
Hermiston High School juniors Rogelio
Lemus, left, and Ethan Orozco developed
a computer app that won the 2018 Con-
gressional App Challenge for District 2.
The app uses facial recognition to find
missing people by uploading a photo and
comparing it with a national database.
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
A bundle of ballots sits in a bin after election specialist Debbie Swenson visually verified each voter signature Tues-
day evening at the Umatilla County Elections Division in Pendleton.
Inside
Three takeaways
from the midterms
Complete results from
Umatilla and Morrow
counties / 3A
By PHIL WRIGHT
East Oregonian
Umatilla County voters
just don’t do it.
More than 68.4 percent
of Oregon voters cast bal-
lots in the midterm election
Tuesday, according to the lat-
est results from the Oregon
Sectary of State. Umatilla
County, however, continued
its trend of low voter turnout
at 56.5 percent.
Once again, Umatilla
County is dead last in the
state.
Malheur County was sec-
ond to last, at 59.2 percent,
and third to the bottom goes to
Jefferson with 62.2. Wheeler
County had the highest turn-
out — 83.4 percent.
Umatilla County’s turn-
out was not even in the same
neighborhood as its bordering
neighbors. Morrow County’s
turnout was 62.4 percent,
Union County’s 67.6 percent
and Grant County’s was 73.4
percent.
And while Oregon set a
record for total ballots cast at
1.9 million, Umatilla County
voters returned 24,629, or
3,445 fewer than in the 2016
general election.
Tuesday night also turned
Pamplin Media Group photo
Gov. Kate Brown hugs two supporters on Tuesday in
Portland during her re-election win celebration.
Democrats face hurdles
despite supermajority
By ANDREW SELSKY
Associated Press
SALEM — The elec-
tion gave Democrats a
three-fifths supermajor-
ity in Oregon’s Legisla-
ture with greater power to
impose taxes, but the Sen-
ate president said Wednes-
day he’ll still seek bipar-
tisan support, noting that
Republican
lawmakers
the blue Oregon House bluer.
Democrats in the Ore-
gon House already had a
supermajority, and the elec-
could doom revenue-rais-
ing bills if they sit out the
votes.
Senate President Peter
Courtney told The Associ-
ated Press he felt Oregon
Democrats’ celebrations
Tuesday evening were too
strong. Not only did they
win supermajorities in the
state House and Senate,
See DEMS/8A
tion added two more to their
ranks. Rep. Greg Smith,
Republican from Heppner for
House District 57, said he and
This facial ID
app is bananas,
B.A.N.A.N.A.S
By JAYATI RAMAKRISHNAN
East Oregonian
his caucus face a new reality,
but he is ready to forge new
relationships and friendships
to take care of the needs of
his district.
“I can work with anyone
if they can help solve a prob-
lem and I can help them solve
a problem,” he said.
Smith also said he is going
to work as closely as he can
with Gov. Kate Brown, Dem-
ocrat, and her office, “but I’m
going to ask her to remem-
ber even though Republicans
might be in the minority, we
still have good ideas and want
to find common ground.”
That is going to be a big-
ger key for members of the
minority party than in the
recent past. Republicans who
can cross the aisle and make
deals will find ways to help
their districts. Republicans
who let political ideology
get in the way of the district
needs are apt to find them-
selves in the corner.
Smith also said the mid-
term election could signal
some real change is afoot in
Eastern Oregon. He said he
plans on holding town hall
meetings before the start of
When two Hermiston High School juniors
started their Technology and Web Develop-
ment class at the beginning of the school year,
they wanted to develop their skills and make
something useful.
A few months later, they’ve created an
app that got the attention of U.S. Rep. Greg
Walden, and may be of help to a much wider
audience.
Rogelio Lemus and Ethan Orozco cre-
ated an app that was selected as the winner of
the Congressional App challenge. They cre-
ated the “B.A.N.A.N.A” (Basic App to Notify
Authorities of Non-Authorized Abductions)
app, which helps recognize photos uploaded
to the app, and tells the user whether the photo
matches anything in a statewide database for
missing people.
Walden called the students to congratulate
them on the app, and invited them to a recep-
tion in Washington, D.C., which the students
hope to attend.
Orozco and Lemus said they came up with
the idea for the app pretty quickly.
“It had been a while since I coded, so the
first week was getting warmed up,” Orozco
said.
“I really wanted to use API,” Lemus said.
API, or application programming interface, is
a set of tools and methods for building soft-
ware. The students used code created by
someone else — a practice their teacher Rob-
ert Theriault said is common in programming
— and rewrote portions of it to meet their spe-
See MIDTERMS/8A
See APP/8A
6 Oregon cities vote to allow marijuana businesses
By CLAIRE WITHYCOMBE
Oregon Capital Bureau
SALEM — Voters in
six Oregon cities appear to
have lifted or rejected bans
on recreational marijuana
businesses.
Ontario, Joseph, Klamath
Falls, Gates, Sumpter and
Clatskanie voted to allow
recreational marijuana busi-
nesses within city limits,
according to unofficial elec-
tion results from the state
Elections Division.
Voters in Joseph, Clats-
kanie, Ontario and Klam-
ath Falls were overturning
existing bans on recreational
marijuana in those places.
Altogether, 29 local mea-
sures related to marijuana
were on the ballot, accord-
ing to an Oregon Capital
Bureau analysis of the unof-
ficial results.
Some communities had
multiple measures relating
to marijuana on the ballot,
separating the question of
whether to allow retail sales
and to tax such sales.
The impact of those
measures on the workload
of the Oregon Liquor Con-
trol Commission, which
regulates recreational mar-
ijuana, depends on local
time, place and manner
restrictions imposed by the
cities, said Mark Pettinger,
an OLCC spokesman.
Such restrictions could
effectively limit the number
of marijuana businesses that
could operate within a city’s
limits.
The state’s workload will
also depend on the type of
licenses that prospective
cannabis purveyors seek
in those communities, Pet-
tinger said.
For example, a license
for someone who grows
marijuana takes longer
and is more complicated
to approve than a license
for someone who wants to
sell marijuana products in a
store.
The election results show
that opposition to canna-
bis may be eroding in rural
areas, said Don Morse,
director of the Oregon Can-
nabis Business Council.
See MARIJUANA/8A
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