OREGON CITY, Ore. — Clackamas County is facing delays in processing incoming ballots due to mechanical problems with a mail sorting machine, the county announced Thursday. Staff will continue processing using hand scanners while the machine is repaired, the county said, but the issue is impacting some voters' ability to track the status of their ballots online.
All returned ballots pass through the mail sorter at the start of processing, according to a news release from the county. The machine takes an image of the back of each envelope and scans the barcode to verify that the envelope is valid. Elections staff then review the images to compare the signatures on the envelopes with each voter's registration record.
Based on those results, the machine then sorts the ballots into the categories of "verified" or "challenged," the latter of which means the signature didn't match and the voter will need to be contacted to fix the issue. Accepted and processed envelopes are then opened and scanned by a bipartisan team.
Ballots were mailed out to voters starting Oct. 16, and elections staff found the following week that the machine had begun to abruptly and repeatedly stop moving ballots, interrupting the sorting process and making it difficult to process large volumes of ballots at a steady pace.
Representatives from the mail sorter company have already provided onsite support and will return to provide more "the week of October 28th" according to the county news release, which was sent out on the afternoon of Thursday, Oct. 31. There was no precise estimate for when the machine would be repaired.
In the meantime, county clerk Catherine McMullen has ordered staff to process ballots using hand scanners, according to the news release. The hand scanner method is how the county processed all ballots until it switched to the sorting machine in 2015, and smaller Oregon counties continue to use only hand scanners, according to the news release. Clackamas County will also use "chain of custody" forms to track the remaining ballots through processing.
The county had processed 82,869 ballots as of 8 p.m. Wednesday, according to the news release. Another 40,000 were on hand to being processing at the start of the day on Thursday, and another 12,000 arrived through the mail and at drop box sites on Thursday.
A few Clackamas County voters reported issues with their return ballot envelopes arriving already sealed earlier this month; McMullen recommended voters re-open the envelope, put the completed ballot inside and tape it shut, or request a new ballot online or at the elections office.
