Marion County has 1/3 ballots to count after machine breaks | Exclusive
About a third of Marion County ballots have yet to be counted for the Nov. 3 election and they may not all be until Nov. 10, Marion County Clerk Bill Burgess told the Statesman Journal. That means the neck-and-neck races for Marion County Commissioner positions 1 and 2 won't be determined for a while. Burgess said an envelope sorting machine in the Marion County Clerk office broke on election night. Because of that, Marion County has lagged far behind other Oregon counties in reporting results. “We certainly did have a lot of different challenges with our processes,” Burgess said. “Our sorter, the envelope sorter, was down between about four o’clock and about 10, 10:30 on election night. “Any bottleneck anywhere creates problems for the rest of the flow. It’s fine now. It’s working now. In fact, now most everything has gone through the sorting process and the signature checking process.” According to Marion County data, the county received 144,209 ballots as of Nov. 4 and 137,690 had been accepted. The most recent results, which were released at 5:45 p.m. on Nov. 6, reported 97,699 votes. That means there were at least 39,991 votes left to be counted. As many as
