A Clackamas County elections official displays barcodes on bad (top) and good ballots on May 19 in Oregon City, Ore. Ballots with fuzzy barcodes that can’t be read by counting machines are delaying results in the all-important US Home race.
Gillian Flaccus / AP
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Gillian Flaccus / AP
A Clackamas County elections official displays barcodes on bad (top) and good ballots on May 19 in Oregon City, Ore. Ballots with fuzzy barcodes that can’t be read by counting machines are delaying results in the all-important US Home race.
Gillian Flaccus / AP
The primaries in a key competitive Oregon precinct are still undecided more than a week after voting ended because of machine crashes due to misprinted ballots.
More than half of the votes cast in Oregon’s third most populous county had to be reprocessed because the bar codes were smudged making them unreadable by the tabulator. This lawsuit affected tens of thousands of ballots in Clackamas County and it left the Democratic primaries for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District in limbo.
In that contest, center incumbent Representative Kurt Schrader trailed his more progressive opponent, Jamie McLeod-Skinner. As of 3 p.m. PT Thursday, McLeod-Skinner had a 58% to 42% lead over Schrader, according to The Associated Press. (On the GOP side, Lori Chavez-DeRemer claimed victory; the AP did not call the race.)
If McLeod-Skinner continues, it will be the first time in 42 years that party-aligned voters in Oregon topple a sitting member of Congress in a primary election.
County administrators directed 200 employees from other departments to help carry out a time-consuming process of manually copying ballots from faulty ballots to new, error-free ballots. . This process requires two people from different political parties to process each ballot. County officials are providing nightly updates with new ballot sheets, but they say they may not finalize results until closer to the certification date on June 13 — weeks after Preliminary closing May 17.
Call for manual counting of votes
Members of the public are allowed to observe ballot reprocessing through a paneled glass window from a long hallway supervised by voting staff. The workers wore colored ribbons to designate their political parties.
From the hallway, Renel Murr, a local Republican volunteer organizer, explained that she went to the polls building to keep an eye on the voters.
“We’re watching this part of the election process to make sure that everything goes smoothly and to make sure that nothing nefarious happens,” Murr said. “So we just, you know, keep them on their toes.”
For some voters like Murr, the failure to misprint their ballots added to their underlying fear that the counting machines were unreliable, a belief rooted in the mistaken theory that the polls could not be counted. The 2020 election was against former President Donald Trump.
A small crowd of protesters this week gathered in front of the county elections building to protest the failure to get results. They blame counters, the state’s mail-in voting system, multi-day voting and other conspiracies planted by Trump supporters.
Hand-counting election results have become a fixture among some Republicans, with GOP lawmakers and local officials in states across the country backing proposals to phase out ballot machines. Election experts say back to counting votes by hand will extremely expensive and time consumingand a degree of human error will make election results less accurate.
Question for the county clerk
Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall speaks at the elections office May 19 in Oregon City, Ore.
Gillian Flaccus / AP
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Gillian Flaccus / AP
Mistakes by Clackamas County election officials have caused some voters to lose confidence in the system, with the county’s independently elected secretary, Sherry Hall, at the center of most of the criticism. Democratic Secretary of State Sheemia Fagan, the state’s top election official, hit Hall for a number of alleged mistakes, including acting unhurriedly when he first learned of the misprinted ballots. Hall later admitted that she should have acted sooner, but would not explain why she didn’t.
“I just don’t,” Hall said. “I don’t have any other reason than to say I didn’t.”
Hall – whose Facebook page “likes” several far-right pages, including one promoting Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen – also caught up in an obvious lie for reporters. During a press conference last week, she said that her office had no idea how someone on Schrader’s campaign got early access to see workers counting votes. Video released by the county shows her talking to an employee before they let the campaign man into the building. McLeod-Skinner has called for an investigation into the incident, and Fagan called the footage “outrageous.” Hall did not comment on the video footage.
The lack of clear answers has left some voters wondering if these mistakes were intentional, adding to their distrust of the electoral system.
That’s what brought local voter Jim Arn to the election observation lobby the day after Election Day. Arn said he doesn’t trust the vote counter.
Arn said: “You don’t know. It’s in a black box.” “I want someone to look at those machines and see what’s in them.”
Arn says he believes false accusations that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and he says this mistake with his local elections office adds to his fears. that.
“It’s just really convenient, isn’t it?” Arn said.
