An employee adds a stack of mail-in ballots to a machine that automatically places the ballots in envelopes at Runbeck Election Services on Sept. 25, 2024 in Phoenix. Clackamas County has had problems with its Runbeck sorter that caused a backlog in ballot counting. (Rebecca Noble/Getty Images)
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.
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