The Portland Tribune is a KOIN 6 News media partner
PORTLAND, Ore. (Portland Tribune) — Clackamas County reports that 90% of primary election ballots have been counted by the morning of Monday, May 30.
According to the county’s dedicated website, 105,180 of the 116,045 ballots received by May 24 have been counted. An additional 9,566 remain to be duplicated to overcome the printing error preventing them from being counted.
The only election still in doubt is the Democratic nominee in Oregon House District 38. Democratic voters in the district are nearly evenly split between Multnomah County voters in Southwest Portland and Lake Oswego voters in Clackamas County.
As of Monday morning, the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office reports Neelam Gupta, a Lake Oswego School Board member, leads Daniel Nguyen, a Lake Oswego City Council member, by just 26 votes districtwide.
Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall has promised that election workers will finish counting all ballots by Thursday, June 2 — 11 days before Oregon law requires the results to be certified.
Clackamas County officials told KOIN 6 News they continued the count on Memorial Day and expect to have counted the ballots by the end of the week.
Hall made the commitment in a Tuesday, May 24, memo to Oregon Secretary of State Shemia Fagan, who had requested the schedule last week.
Each ballot must be duplicated by a two-person team consisting of people from different political parties, usually a Democrat and a Republican. The memo includes a shift chart and estimates of how many ballots will be duplicated and counted each day.
“Based on 20 ballots per team per hour, we estimate that the latest count of 38,381 ballots that we know require duplication, elections staff should duplicate anywhere from 4000 to 10000 ballots each day. The time estimate to complete the duplication efforts of the 38,381 ballots ranges from four days to nine days,” the memo said.
The county has launched a new website devoted to the primary election count with updated figures and additional information about the problem created by blurry barcodes on most ballots. It is being updated each evening and can be found here.
Hall’s memo can be found here.
A previous Portland Tribune story on the issue can be found here.