Ballot fiasco delays results in Oregon, vote-by-mail pioneer (OR-05 primary affected)

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Ballot fiasco delays results in Oregon, vote-by-mail pioneer

By GILLIAN FLACCUS and SARA CLINE
May 20, 2022

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Thousands of ballots with blurry barcodes that can’t be read by vote-counting machines will delay results by weeks in a key U.S. House race in Oregon’s primary election, a shocking development that is giving a black eye to a vote-by-mail pioneer state with a national reputation as a leader on voter access and equity.

The fiasco affects up to 60,000 ballots, or two-thirds of the roughly 90,000 returned so far in Oregon’s third-largest county. Hundreds of ballots were still coming in under a new law that allows them to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day, and 200 Clackamas County employees were getting a crash course Thursday in vote-counting after being redeployed to address the crisis.

Elections workers must pull the faulty ballots from batches of 125, transfer the voter’s intent to a fresh ballot, then double-check their entries — a painstaking process that could draw the election out until June 13, when Oregon certifies its vote. The workers operate in pairs, one Democrat and one Republican, in two shifts of 11 hours a day.

Voters from both political parties milled about in a narrow room with windows that allowed views of workers opening ballots, transferring votes, reviewing flagged ballots and using the vote-counting machines. They expressed shock at the error and anger at the slow reaction by embattled Elections Clerk Sherry Hall, who has held the elected post for nearly 20 years. By Wednesday night, workers had counted 15,649.

-snip-

In the Democratic primary for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, seven-term Rep. Kurt Schrader, a moderate, was trailing in the vote behind progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner. The outcome could have an outsized impact in November, with the possibility that voters could flip the seat for the GOP.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-oregon-primary-congress-78a759dc0b2c59b73a2259153fb8dd80

[brush]

1. Hasn't Oregon been voting by mail for years with no problems?

Now DeJoy is in and there are unprecedented problems.

[LisaM]

2. It's the ballot itself, which has a bar code they can't read.

The article doesn't say who printed it, but they probably outsourced it somewhere. It has nothing to do with the mail.

[barbaraann]

3. I've been posting about this on the Oregon forum.

The ballots were printed in Bend, OR. Clackamas County uses the Hart InterCivic ballot/voting system which is based in Texas and formerly had ties to the Romney family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_InterCivic

[gratuitous]

5. Yes, the problem resides in the ballots themselves, not how they got to election HQ

Vote-by-mail in Oregon worked as it has always worked. Easy and convenient for voters, efficient and accurate for the county elections people. The problem in this case resides with the poor quality printing of the ballots, and the slow response by the Clackamas County Elections Division Clerk Sherry Hall.

The County is going through a tedious, but fair (in my estimation) process wherein there are two-person teams assigned to re-create the defective ballots. There is a Republican reviewer and a Democratic reviewer. One reads through the defective ballot while the other marks a duplicate ballot according to what the reader says. Then the two swap ballots and go through it again, reading off the defective ballot and checking it against the marked duplicate. Only when both reviewers agree that the duplicate ballot coincides with the defective ballot is the duplicate ballot submitted for processing by the County ballot processing machine.

It's going to take a while, but there are experienced elections workers from other counties and from the Secretary of State's office ready to help out should Clackamas County need additional manpower to process all the ballots.

[barbaraann]

4. The current issues have to do with ballot printing and Clackamas Co. ballot counting for

this election; and as far as I know, there weren't any USPS problems.

[Initech]

7. I take it this is the work of Louis DeShithead?

[Celerity]

11. no, it has nothing to do with mail delivery, it's a faulty ballot print job

[Retrograde]

6. Fiasco? Sounds like they have a process

in place to deal with damaged or otherwise unreadable ballots and are following it. I'd call it the exact opposite of a fiasco!

I'm more familiar with the process in my California county: unreadable ballots (ones that got rained on, dropped in a puddle on the way to the mailbox, chewed by the dog, or whatever) are set aside and later remade be a bi-partisan team under the supervision of the county registrar. It takes some time, and the new ballots have to be compared to the originals to make sure everything was copied correctly, but that's all built in to the process and the timeline. The "fiasco" the press seems to be referring to here is that they can't have the instant gratification of knowing who won as soon as the polls closed.

All that being said, how come nobody did any quality control with the printers?

[barbaraann]

9. The County Clerk, a Republican, is slow-walking the process and can't even provide a timeline for

counting the vote or certifying it.
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/2022/05/20/clackamas-county-clerk-cant-say-when-she-will-even-have-a-timeline-for-counting-vote-much-less-certifying-it/

There are all kinds of other issues that I have been posting about on the Oregon forum. What will happen if the Clackamas Co. count is not certified by the State certification date, June 13? Will the entire election be invalidated? I have no idea what the laws are regarding these issues.

[maxsolomon]

8. Oh Noez! A BLACK EYE! A FIASCO!

It's a fucking printing error. It's being addressed. An accurate tally will be made.

WTF, AP.

[barbaraann]

10. It started with a printing error by a printer in Bend used by only one county in Oregon-Clackamas.

Lot of other problems caused by the Clackamas County Clerk, Sherry Hall, have popped up and now she cannot even provide a timeline for the count or the certification date, June 13. Clackamas (in the Portland area) uses the Bend printer because they are supposed to be able to follow all of the guidelines as an associate of Hart InterCivic, a Texas voting system company that in the past had ties to the Romney family. I've been making lots of posts about this and am very, very worried.

One of the unresolved races involves Rep. Kurt Schrader, a blue dog Democrat, who ran against a progressive and another involves a Qanon Republican.

Republican Sherry Hall has thrown a monkey wrench into the 2022 Oregon primary election.