The official county ballot box in Oregon is where a voter can return a ballot.
Alan Sylvestre / OPB
A printing error has caused Multnomah County to receive their May ballots later than usual this year.
Staff at the county elections office printed the District 3, race for a Multnomah County Board of Commissioners seat, on all ballots and not just those of District 3 voters.
Two days before the scheduled mailing of ballots, Elections staff discovered an error. They will have reprint every ballot, pushing back the date of mailing.
Officials from the elections department said that voters should receive their ballots by May 2 if possible, allowing them two weeks to complete their ballots before the deadline of May 16.
The error traces back to when staff entered ballot information into the state’s voter management system, according to elections director Tim Scott. When staff entered information into the system for this race, they mistakenly marked it as a countywide race instead of a race specific to a district.
Although staff proofed ballots multiple times before printing, Scott said they didn’t catch the error until a voter noticed it on a sample ballot published on the county’s website.
“We should have caught it, but we didn’t,” Scott said. “The great news is we caught it before all the ballots were mailed. So, we’re really fortunate that we’re able to get the correct ballots to more than 560,000 voters.”
Scott stated that a few thousand overseas and military voters received ballots with an error. However, they are still able to use their ballots.
“I just wanted to assure those voters that if they have a ballot that contains the error, they can turn that in,” Scott said. “We have lots of processes on the back end when we receive the ballots where we’ll be able to flag those ballots for hand processing.”