Oregon ballot fiasco delays House election results

(20 May 2022) SHOT LIST:
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oregon City, Oregon - 19 May 2022
1. Ballots being sorted by hand
2. Clackamas County Election Clerk Sherry Hall points out ballot counting room UPSOUND (English) "All of the ballots coming in for election come through that door, and they get placed into mail trays, facing all the same direction."
3. Ballot drop box
ANNOTATION: Results from a key U.S. House race in Oregon's primary election
is being delayed by thousands of ballots with blurry barcodes.
4. Sherry Hall holds sample ballots UPSOUND (English) "The barcode at the bottom has very intense black ink with crisp lines. The one that's bad at the top is ..."
5. Close-up of two sample ballots, one good one bad
ANNOTATION: The faulty barcodes, which can't be read by voting machines, could delay the election results by several weeks. Up to 60,000 ballots are affected.
7. SOUNDBITE (English) Sherry Hall, Clackamas County elections clerk:
"It needs to be duplicated exactly as the voter voted their original ballot.  And that's where the process is long and tedious."
8. Ballots being sorted by hand
ANNOTATION: The ballot debacle has stunned Oregon, a vote-by-mail pioneer state with a national reputation as a leader on voter access and equity.
9 Sherry Hall holds sample ballot UPSOUND (English) "We definitely want to get to the bottom of what happened. But we haven't yet. We have an election to get done first."
STORYLINE:
Thousands of ballots with blurry barcodes that can't be read by vote-counting machines will delay results by weeks in a key U.S. House race in Oregon's primary election, a shocking development that is giving a black eye to a vote-by-mail pioneer state with a national reputation as a leader on voter access and equity.
The fiasco affects up to 60,000 ballots, or two-thirds of the roughly 90,000 returned so far in Oregon's third-largest county. Hundreds of ballots were still coming in under a new law that allows them to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day, and 200 Clackamas County employees were getting a crash course Thursday in vote-counting after being redeployed to address the crisis.
Elections workers must pull the faulty ballots from batches of 125, transfer the voter's intent to a fresh ballot, then double-check their entries — a painstaking process that could draw the election out until June 13, when Oregon certifies its vote. The workers operate in pairs, one Democrat and one Republican, in two shifts of 11 hours a day.
Voters from both political parties milled about in a narrow room with windows that allowed views of workers opening ballots, transferring votes, reviewing flagged ballots and using the vote-counting machines. They expressed shock at the error and anger at the slow reaction by embattled Elections Clerk Sherry Hall, who has held the elected post for nearly 20 years. By Wednesday night, workers had counted 15,649.
The debacle has stunned Oregon, where all ballots have been cast only by mail for 23 years and lawmakers have consistently pushed to expand voter access through automatic voter registration, expanded deadlines and other measures. It's also thrown into question a key U.S. House race in a redrawn district that includes a large portion of Clackamas County, which stretches nearly 2,000 square miles (5,180 square kilometers), from Portland's liberal southern suburbs to rural conservative communities on the flanks of Mount Hood.
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