Clackamas County Elections Undecided, 'Unacceptable' Delays Mar Count

OREGON CITY, OR — Not a lot of people have anything positive to say about the county's handling of the vote county in Tuesday's primary elections,from Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall to Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, with many politicians and voters in between.

As of Wednesday afternoon, it was unclear to county officials how many votes were left to be counted or how long it will take to finish the tally.

"We call this our elections wildfire," Hall said Wednesday in an emergency meeting. "We can't wait until it is out."

Hall added that she would accept help from other counties to get the votes counted, a reversal of her stance Tuesday when she said that she was not concerned with the delays. She said at that time that "accuracy is way more important than speed."

Ballot counting was delayed because about 90,000 ballots were mailed to voters with blurry barcodes. The blurry barcodes made it impossible for the county's election machines to read them, according to the county.

The solution was to make a Democratic observer and a Republican observer open the machine-unreadable ballots by hand, copy the results onto a readable ballot, have each observer give the OK, and feed the new ballots into a machine counter.

The delays were considered so dire Tuesday night that Fagan, who is the state's chief election officer, released a statement that "the county's reporting delays tonight are unacceptable."

She added: "Voters have done their jobs and now it's time for Clackamas County to do theirs."

To get the votes counted, Clackamas County Chairwoman Tottie Smith said Wednesday that the county will move 1,000 employees from other departments to assist.

Smith called it "an all-hands-on-deck moment."

One race whose results were eagerly awaited was the Democratic primary contest for Oregon's 5th Congressional District, which includes much of Clackamas County.

Democrat Rep. Kurt Schrader is trying to get back on the ballot so that he can seek his eighth term. President Joe Biden endorsed him, but Schader has angered many in his party for taking stances in opposition to the majority of his colleagues in the Democratic caucus.

Schrader was the only Democrat in the House of Representatives to vote against last year's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. Schrader said that he couldn't support a provision of the bill that would have increased the minimum wage.

He was challenged from the left by Jamie McLeod-Skinner. McLeod-Skinner is a civil engineer turned politician who also worked as the interim city manager in Talent, where she oversaw wildfire coordination efforts. In 2018, she lost to Republican Greg Walden in what was then a diferently drawn district. In the process, she became the first Democrat in more than 50 years to win Deschutes County.

As of Wednesday afternoon, only 48 percent of the vote had been counted. McLeod-Skinner had 61.3 percent of the vote, compared to Schrader's 38.7 percent.