While Oregon counties on average had verified receipt of ballots from 17% of their registered voters as of early morning Wednesday, Yamhill County elections officials reported fewer than 1% of its voters had gotten their ballots in.
Every other county in Oregon had reported more than 10 times as high a share of its eligible voters' ballots were in.
Yamhill’s near-zero count freaked out plenty of people, particularly voters who’d mailed or dropped off their ballots last week, and they flooded the county elections office with calls, said Yamhill County Clerk Brian Van Bergen.
But Yamhill voters have nothing to worry about and all the county’s many returned ballots will be properly verified and counted, Van Bergen said Wednesday.
The county has long relied on the unusual practice of waiting until 13 or fewer days before Election Day to begin verifying signatures on ballots. That’s the step that triggers the official count that a ballot has been returned.
The process began Wednesday morning in Yamhill County, as planned, and is going well, he said.
In past years, the delay hasn’t triggered any alarm or even public notice, Van Bergen said, because few voters turn their ballots in as soon as they receive them. But this year has brought a “monumental amount of early voting.” And Yamhill County has joined the system that provides voters with a text or email notice that their ballots have been received and their signature verified.
Those two factors led to a lot of Yamhill voters worrying when they returned a ballot, then waited multiple days without receiving the reassuring notice, he said.
As of Wednesday morning, the county did report that 418 of its 73,000 registered voters had returned ballots. Those were its military and overseas voters, who get early ballots that are verified ahead of regular local ballots.
Van Bergen said he anticipated high voter turnout this fall and thus arranged for more ballot processing teams than ever before. Those teams should have no problem handling the load, he said, but it will take them into Thursday to get through the backlog of unverified early ballots.
-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@oregonian.com; @OrPol