Voting machine problems delay counting in Oregon, where a crucial race for the US House of Representatives is taking place

OREGON CITY, Ore. (AP) — Problems with a ballot sorting machine are slowing the vote count in a Portland suburb that also was plagued by counting problems in 2022 and is home to a key congressional race this year.

The sorter in Oregon’s third-largest county, Clackamas, began experiencing mechanical problems about a week after ballots were sent to voters in mid-October, election officials said Thursday.

Sometimes it stops moving the ballots abruptly, making it difficult to process a large volume without interruptions. The issue has also left voters unable to keep track of whether their ballots have been counted, officials said.

Representatives from the company that manufactured the sorter were on site to repair it.

County Clerk Catherine McMullen, who was elected in 2022, told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Wednesday, ballot processing was “about a day behind where we want to be.”

Clackamas County covers much of U.S. House District 5, considered one of the closest races in the country, as a Republican incumbent seeks to win a seat it narrowly knocked off from Democrats in 2022.

That same year, a printing error on primary ballots delayed results by nearly two weeks, as it did for tens of thousands ballots with blurry barcodes were rejected by a counting machine, forcing the county to move nearly 200 employees to ballot tabulation duties.

This year, U.S. Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer faces a tough reelection bid in the district where voters favored the president Joe Biden over Trump by nearly 10 percentage points in 2020. The Democratic nominee is state Rep. Janelle Bynum.

Election workers are now processing mail-in ballots using handheld scanners, a practice currently used in smaller Oregon counties and last used in Clackamas County in 2015, officials said. Employees will continue to collect both mail-in ballots and ballots placed in mailboxes at the same pace and process the ballots in the order in which they are received.

As of Wednesday evening, officials said nearly 83,000 ballots had been processed.