It is likely to take Clackamas County even longer than anticipated to finish tallying votes after the county badly missed a daily benchmark set by the secretary of state for hand-duplicating ballots marred by a printing error.
The county was supposed to duplicate 8,000 ballots Wednesday to stay on track as it works to finish processing ballots. Instead, it duplicated only about 2,400, according to the secretary of state.
Secretary of State Shemia Fagan provided the county with those benchmarks Wednesday after a stern press conference where she promised to hold Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall and other county elections officials accountable amid ongoing vote delays that have left the outcome of multiple primary races hanging and sullied the reputation of Oregon’s celebrated vote-by-mail system. As of Thursday evening, Clackamas County had reported tallying more than 81,000 of the 116,045 ballots it had received, or 70%.
The tone in Fagan’s office had changed Thursday – even though Clackamas County failed to meet her benchmark or to provide the public with a daily tally of ballots that had been duplicated, as Fagan had demanded.
Ben Morris, a spokesperson for Fagan, said Thursday that the county missed the benchmark because it was engaged in “prep work” Wednesday. It is unclear why the county would have needed to take that much time away from duplicating ballots when it told the secretary of state Tuesday that it had 164 workers signed up Wednesday to duplicate ballots.
When asked how many ballots the county had duplicated Tuesday, Morris said the secretary of state did not know. The county was supposed to duplicate at least 7,200 ballots Tuesday to meet Fagan’s benchmark.
The county duplicated 7,543 ballots Monday – the only day for which it has publicly released data on the number of ballots duplicated.
Even though the county has yet to show it is meeting the secretary of state’s benchmarks, Morris said they were pleased to see that the county had counted more than 11,000 ballots Wednesday that either did not have the printing error or had already been duplicated.
However, all the ballots that now remain to be counted are ones marred by the printing error and must be duplicated before they can be counted. The county believes about 60% of ballots have blurred barcodes that make them unreadable by vote counting machines.
It is unclear how many ballots the county still needs to duplicate. They haven’t publicly posted those numbers online and the numbers provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive by the county in recent days don’t match up with the number of ballots the county says it has counted and received.
Based on data provided by the county earlier this week, an analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive appeared to show that the county could finish counting ballots by Monday if it consistently hit the state’s benchmarks. It’s now unclear if that’s possible.
Scott Anderson, a county spokesperson, said Thursday that the county expects to finish counting ballots by June 2, 16 days after Election Day, based on the timeline it received from the secretary of state. But that timeline was based on the county needing to duplicate 55,000 ballots – significantly more than they say they have to duplicate – and only having the capacity to count 6,200 ballots per day.
Anderson said Thursday afternoon that 27,000 ballots have been duplicated so far, but he would not say how many ballots were duplicated Tuesday or Wednesday. (Some ballots were duplicated before Election Day). When asked why the county failed to meet the state benchmark Wednesday when it duplicated only 2,412 ballots, Anderson said, “We’re reconciling this number.”
According to Anderson, the county has yet to publicly release daily information on its duplication efforts because it is coordinating with the secretary of state on when to post that information to its website. However, Morris said Thursday that the secretary of state has wanted that data to be made public from “day one.”
Hall, who makes $112,700 a year, and her staff first learned of the blurry barcodes two weeks before Election Day but took few steps to prepare for the onslaught of problems that they would generate.
Multiple election results hang in the balance due to the delays in Clackamas County, including the nationally-watched 5th Congressional District race in which incumbent U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader appears to have lost to progressive challenger Jamie McLeod-Skinner, at least two seats in the Oregon House, two hotly contested county commission races and the presidency of regional government Metro.
