Election Results in Pennsylvania and Oregon Delayed by Printed Errors in Mailed Ballots

Thousands of mailed ballots are being recalled in the Pennsylvania and Oregon primary elections after election officials found printing mistakes that make the ballots incalculable.

Election officials will have to go through the laborious process of redoing thousands of affected ballots, which could severely delay the results of Tuesday’s primaries for close races, ABC News reports.

In Pennsylvania, at least 21,000 mailed ballots in Lancaster County, which typically leans Republican, were unable to be scanned due to an error in the barcode. Officials said the company that printed the ballots included the wrong ID code, which prevented scanning machines from being able to read them, the network reports.

To fix the issuse, election workers will have to hand-mark fresh ballots, which could take several days.

Josh Parsons (R), vice chair of the Lancaster County board of commissioners, expressed frustration over the issue at a news conference Tuesday evening.

“Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later,” Parsons said. “But because of this, we’re not going to have final election results from these mail ballots for probably several days, so that is very, very frustrating to us.”

Lancster County is the sixth most populated county in state of Pennsylvania.

Other issues that could delay results in Pennsylvania’s primaries were reported in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County. The county had a higher-than-expected turnout which resulted in polling places running low on ballots, according to the network.

In Berks County, Pennsylvania, several electronic pollbooks were experiencing technical issues which forced a judge to rule Tuesday that all polling places would remain open an hour later, until 9 PM.

In Oregon, half the ballots sent to voters in Clackamas County, the third most populated county in the state, reportedly have blurry bar codes, which are unable to be processed by scanning machines, ABC News reports.

According to a spokesperson with the secretary of state’s office, Ben Morris, a bipartisan team on Republicans and Democrats are working together to duplicate every ballot so they can be scanned and counted.

Morris said the results could be delayed but will end in accuracy, according to ABC News.

The Pennsylvania primaries have garnered national attention the last few weeks, after Republican voters began to clash over former President Trump’s endorsement of Dr. Oz instead of Kathy Barnette for the GOP Senate.

Pennsylvania and Oregon were among five states holding primaries Tuesday, along with Idaho, Kentucky and North Carolina, where slight morning delays had been reported at polling places in three counties.