Clackamas County faces ballot processing backlog following machine breakdowns

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 in this election cycle, forcing a technician from the company to fly in and work on the machine. McMullen indicated that the technician from Phoenix who worked on the 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.



https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2024/11/01/clackamas-county-faces-ballot-processing-backlog-following-machine-breakdowns/