QuickTake:

Lane County’s ballot processing is back on track after a clogged inkjet line delayed the work for a few hours. 

The Lane County Elections Office has resumed processing ballots and will have updated results by 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, county officials said in a news release.

Ballot processing stopped for several hours Wednesday after an equipment breakdown. Ballot-sorting equipment at the Lane County Elections Office stopped working because of a clog in an inkjet line. That equipment prints the date and time a ballot is sorted onto the return envelopes, county officials said in the release. 

“Our sorting equipment is older and that may have contributed to yesterday’s issue,” Lane County Clerk Tommy Gong said in a statement. “We’ve been able to resume processing ballots and if you watch our livestream today you’ll see lots of activity in the office this afternoon. It’s important voters know there have been no issues with our counting machines and we are confident we’ll be able to count every vote accurately and efficiently.”

To resume processing ballots, the county decided to suspend the printed time and date stamps on the return envelopes, the release said. Each ballot return envelope also has a unique barcode that is scanned by the sorting equipment and it logs the time and date electronically.

This means the county will rely upon the electronic record for reference if needed rather than print the ballot return envelops with a time and date stamp after a repair, the county said.

“The printed time and date stamp was a feature added a couple of years ago,” Devon Ashbridge, a county spokesperson, said in an email. “Prior to that we also relied on the electronic record.”

The same machine electronically logs data and, when fully operational, prints time and date stamps on return envelopes.

The public can view the livestream of ballot processing work.

An updated results reporting schedule is available online. All results are unofficial until certification on November 25, 2026.

More information about ballot processing and election security is available at www.LaneCountyOR.gov/ElectionSecurity.

Ben Botkin covers politics and policy in Lane County. He has worked as a journalist since 2003, most recently at the Oregon Capital Chronicle, where he covered justice, health and human services and documented regional efforts to combat fentanyl addiction. Botkin has worked in statehouses in Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma and, of course, Oregon. When he's not working, you'll find him road tripping across the West, hiking or surfing along the Oregon Coast.