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QuickTake:
The electronic drop box is the first of its kind in Oregon and is currently located at the ground floor of the Lane County building.
A new “smart” ballot drop box at the Lane County Public Service Building is back up and running after malfunctioning Tuesday afternoon.
The smart drop box scans the barcodes on the outside of each ballot return envelope to document the time and location ballots are returned.
It is the first of its kind in Oregon and is on the ground floor of the Lane County building, alongside three ordinary ballot drop boxes, all of which opened to accept ballots last Thursday, Oct. 15.
Lane County Clerk Tommy Gong said the smart drop box went down for a period Tuesday afternoon, but is now functioning again. He said he plans to examine footage from surveillance cameras to investigate what happened, including how long the outage lasted.
“There was a ballot that was in the feed area that didn’t advance, and so that’s why no one else could put in an additional ballot,” Gong said. “So they cleared that, put that ballot through again, and it accepted it.”
Gong said the county will also submit an incident report to the drop box vendor to find out more about the incident.
One voter told Lookout Eugene-Springfield in an email that the smart drop box was down at roughly 2 p.m. Tuesday. He said he and two other people attempted to feed their ballots into the slot, but encountered a “clog” after pushing the ballot most of the way through.
The election is Nov. 3. Election security has been a hot-button issue, locally and nationwide, as President Donald Trump casts doubt into the integrity of systems like mail-in voting.
If the “test” of the smart drop box is “successful” in Lane County, the box will be moved to a different location before the next election, according to a county news release.
“We’re excited to be the first jurisdiction in Oregon to test this new technology,” Gong said in the release. “One of the most compelling features is its ability to keep track of whose ballots were returned at that location, which in turn improves our chain-of-custody process for ballots and makes it possible for us to communicate with voters if something were to happen to the box and its contents before ballots had been collected by election workers.”
