Thousands of ballots from Oregon’s largest county are unreadable by ballot scanning machines because a bar code on the sheet was printed too blurry for scanners to read, leading to a weeks-long delay in tallying the vote, the Associated Press reports.
The selections from ballots from Clackamas County, the state’s third most-populous county, will have to transferred by hand to proper ballots before they can be entered into the county’s system to compile votes, a process that could take weeks and will likely have a small percentage of transcription errors.
Politicians from all over the political dial have showered blame on Clackamas County Elections Clerk Sherry Hall, who had plenty of time to test and scan the ballots before being mailed out earlier this year. Hall apparently did not conduct quality control tests on the ballots after they were delivered by the private contractor who printed them.
The problem leaves in doubt the outcome of the races involving Clackamas County voters, including a key Democratic primary race pitting moderate 5th District, seven-term Congressman Kurt Schrader against progressive candidate Jamie McLeod-Skinner.