Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall on Tuesday sent a written timeline to Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan saying her elections office will have tens of thousands of rejected ballots in last Tuesday’s primary election duplicated in four to nine days.
A printing error resulting in blurry barcodes on ballots caused those ballots to be rejected by ballot-counting machines. To get those votes tabulated, an all-hands-on-deck effort is now underway in Clackamas County to duplicate the rejected ballots by hand and get them counted before a June 13 state deadline.
Last week, Hall said she would get a written timeline to Fagan by Monday. That did not happen; instead, Fagan said Hall asked for another day.
In her written timeline to Fagan, Hall said there were 38,381 ballots that still needed to be duplicated as of 7 p.m. Monday. The county elections office had duplicated 7,543 by 7 p.m. Monday.
Hall said as of Tuesday, the county had received 116,012 ballots. Of those, 57,550 had been counted.
Read the timeline Hall sent to Fagan:
Other county workers have been pulled from their jobs to help duplicate ballots. Hall wrote to Fagan she is aiming to have a staff of 80 per shift. She said an expanded facility they have set up could accommodate up to 100 people.
With 80 people working each shift, Hall estimated that 8,000 ballots would be duplicated each day.
Hall said her staff first noticed there was a problem with barcodes on returned voted ballots May 3.
Two days later she said the ballots with the printing error would need to be duplicated.
"There is a unique identifying number on each ballot, and so that number will be transferred to the duplicated ballot," she said at the time. "Two people will do it, each from different political affiliations, and they will mark the new ballot exactly as the unreadable ballot.”
Hall has been criticized by how she has handled the situation, and last Friday, she admitted she hadn’t acted with the needed urgency.
The delay has caused the outcome of several races from last week's election to not be immediately known, especially in the 5th Congressional District where incumbent Kurt Schrader is fighting to keep his seat from challenger Jaime McLeod-Skinner.