Dan Lonai, the Umatilla County director of administrative services, watches as ballots run through a counting machine at the Umatilla County Elections office in Pendleton on May 15, 2020.

UMATILLA COUNTY — Despite next Tuesday being the first election where Oregon voters don’t have to pay for postage to submit their ballots, Umatilla County election officials said Friday they had received an average number of early votes so far.

According to data provided by the county election office, 9,697 accepted ballots had been received as of Friday, which is about 21.4% of eligible voters in the county.

“I had hoped for a little bit more turnout and a lot more early voter turnout, but I guess it didn’t matter very much,” said Kim Lindell, Umatilla County elections manager.

Helping sort through those ballots, verify their signatures and ensure that each one is properly counted were four women on Friday, all of whom have been working for the last week to go through every ballot by hand.

“It’s definitely laborious, but it’s fun,” said Michelle Morrison, who is working with Umatilla County Elections for her second year.

For each and every ballot, Morrison or one of the other three workers must open it and check to see that there’s no tears, bubbles have adequately been filled in and the signatures are valid.

The four women are split up into two teams consisting of conflicting political parties so that in the event that there is a problem with a ballot, they can fairly “enhance” or “duplicate” a ballot. An enhancement could be filling in a bubble, for example, while duplicating a ballot may be necessary if the original was torn and can’t be run through the county’s ballot counting machine.

“There’s some people who send them in without a single mark, and then there’s others that people have drawn all over,” said Marge Normington-Jones through a face covering.

However, there won’t be a need for manual sorting of ballots in Umatilla County after next week’s primary election after the board of commissioners approved a $58,000 purchase on May 6 for a machine to sort ballots mechanically starting in November.

“This eliminates a lot of those steps and condenses down essential five steps into two steps,” said Dan Lonai, Umatilla County director of administrative services.

A pandemic also seemed like an ideal time to evolve from sorting ballots by hand.

“Part of the reasoning behind this is this device allows us to increase our production so we’re handling the envelopes less,” Lonai told the board of commissioners on May 6. “Part of my problem is that it’s harder for me to find dependable people that are willing to dedicate their time to work on this. And now my biggest problem is those workers are usually in the at-risk demographic.”

The new machine can have ballots dropped in and automatically sorted, with signatures appearing on a computer screen for somebody to verify rather than going one by one.

Lonai estimated that the machine will speed up the ballot counting process by as much as 20%, though the process will still always be held back by people who wait to cast their vote until the last second.

“We’ve been pretty much COVID friendly for over 20 years, but still people want to drop them off on Tuesday when the hype is,” Lonai said.

For Morrison and Normington-Jones, that could mean a late night on Tuesday.

“We’ll be here until we’re done,” Morrison said. “However long that takes.”