Some Clackamas County Ballots Defective, Bar Code Blurred, Clerk Says

OREGON CITY, OR — An unknown number of ballots for the May 17 primary election were sent to Clackamas County voters with a printing error, according to County Clerk Sherry Hall. The error caused the bar code on those ballots to be smudged.

The smudged bar code means that the county's automated ballot processing machines will reject the ballots, according to Hall — who added that when a ballot is rejected, it will then be processed manually.

The county already has a system in place to deal with ballots damaged in the mail, and the ballots with the printing defect will be treated the same way, according to Hall, who laid out the process.

If a ballot is rejected by machine, it's then passed on two election workers from different political parties who transfer the votes of the damaged ballot to a machine-readable duplicate ballot. The two must agree that the transfer is accurate before the ballot is counted.

"It is our objective to count every validly cast vote in this election and every election," Hall said. "Our voters are entitled to expect nothing less."

Hall said that the printer responsible for the smudge is the same printer that the county has been using for more than a decade without incident.