Clackamas County faces ballot processing backlog following machine breakdowns

Clackamas County election workers face a backlog of tens of thousands 
of unprocessed ballots due to the repeated breakdown of a ballot 
sorting machine, county officials said Friday.

Catherine McMullen, the clerk in Oregon’s third largest county, said in 
a news conference that its ballot sorting machine was at the end of its 
life and had posed “persistent” problems and had a number of different 
mechanical issues, forcing technicians from the company to fly in and 
work on the machine. McMullen indicated that the technician from 
Phoenix, who worked on the Runbeck machine on Thursday, appeared to be 
very experienced, and she expressed confidence that workers would make 
progress in the coming days.

“We do expect to stay on track and to start to catch up from where we 
were through the week,” she said.

Election staff started the day Friday with a backlog of 52,000 ballots 
and by early afternoon still had 48,400 to sort.

The machine is the first step in the ballot counting process. It snaps 
a photo of the signature on the envelope and scans the barcode for an 
election worker, who reviews the signature to determine whether it is 
valid. If so, the ballot is run again through the machine to continue 
the vote-counting process. In response to the machine breakdowns, the 
county doubled the number of signature verification stations for hand 
sorting to 20, McMullen said. The county has 130 temporary election 
workers, and it increased the number of personnel working on 
verification by reassigning people to that task. Hand sorters can scan 
about 500 ballots an hour compared with 700 for the machine.

The Secretary of State’s Office shows that 26.1% of the nearly 320,000 
registered voters in Clackamas County had voted as of Friday, but 
McMullen said the figure is probably closer to 45% counting all the 
ballots the office has received but not yet processed. That would be 
much higher than Multnomah County – at 30.8% on Friday – and Washington 
County, with 38.8%. Both Grant and Wallowa counties tied for the 
highest turnout so far in the state – 55.9% – while the statewide total 
is 38%.

McMullen said she expects all ballots to be counted in Clackamas County 
by next Friday, after all ballots are processed, and she estimates a 
turnout of 85%. Some ballots may still trickle in during the following 
few days, as Oregon law requires counties to count any ballots 
postmarked on or before Nov. 5 that arrive within a week after Election 
Day. 

There’s a lot at stake in the county, which is part of the 5th 
Congressional District where Republican Rep. Lori-Chavez-DeRemer, the 
incumbent, is in a tight race with Democrat Janelle Bynum, a state 
representative. The result could determine who controls the U.S. House 
and is being widely watched across the country, with the candidates 
raising more than $12 million total. 

In 2022, the county also had issues in the primary caused by a printing 
error that delayed the processing of 300,000 ballots. The 20-year 
county clerk initially rejected help from the state and the debacle 
ended up costing about $600,000. Hall was ousted in the 2022 general 
election by McMullen, who got about twice as many votes. 

McMullen said the county knew the ballot sorting machine was reaching 
the end of its life and started looking for a replacement last year. It 
signed a contract in September for a new one from BlueCrest, the same 
one that’s used by other large counties, she said. The machines cost 
about $680,000, and only the larger counties have them. The new machine 
will be put into operation next year, she said.

https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2024/11/01/clackamas-county-faces-
ballot-processing-backlog-following-machine-breakdowns/