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Elections office reports readiness for February special primary but flags 600‑DPI ballot‑image mandate as major operational cost
Summary
Director Fall reported logic-and-accuracy testing complete, absentee ballots to begin mailing Jan. 21, poll-worker hiring progress and voter-registration keying; staff warned a new 600‑DPI ballot‑image requirement will be time‑consuming and costly to implement for legacy ballots.
Director Fall gave the board a multi-part operational update ahead of the Feb. 11 special primary and underscored a significant implementation challenge posed by a new requirement that post‑2025 records requests may demand ballot images at 600 dots per inch (DPI).
Office readiness and near-term calendar: Fall said logic-and-accuracy testing for voting equipment concluded the morning of the meeting and that ballots for the upcoming special election "will begin going out on the 21st in accordance with OCGA 21 238042 for special elections." Absentee-by-mail applications were low at the time of reporting (12 regular ABM and 1 UOCAVA application), and the office planned training for advanced in-person (AIP) and election staff in the coming weeks. Poll-worker hiring stood at 562 of a 651 target.
Voter-registration and precinct cards: Registration staff keyed roughly 20,000 registration updates since the last election (changes of address, transfers and other updates); staff expected to finish keying within days. Following the board's approval of the Oregon 02 move, Fall said the office will place orders for new precinct cards to mail countywide so precinct cards list current districts and polling locations.
New legal and technical requirements: Fall summarized several recently effective provisions her office is implementing: a rule for determining residency for people who are unhoused (mailing address to be the elections office address) and a new candidate ballot-proofing process that gives candidates 24 hours to check printed proofs. She highlighted a separate change that allows requesters to demand ballot images at 600 DPI; the county's current scanners create 200‑DPI images, not 600 DPI.
Fall said producing 600‑DPI images for historical ballots is a major lift: scanning the county's backlog of roughly 396,000 ballots at 600 DPI on available equipment would require roughly 2 hours per workday and about 35½ weeks to complete without interrupting normal operations. The office is working with county ITS on server capacity and called the effort "quite a big lift." Fall said an open-records request for 2020 ballot images prompted the estimate and that the requester had been given a cost estimate and until the end of the next day to authorize scanning.
On the 600‑DPI issue Fall said counties have limited guidance from state; some counties that changed scanner settings faced equipment-certification problems. She said counties that still possess ballots because of litigation holds are determining costs, timelines and whether to outsource or charge requesters under the Open Records Act. Fall said an initial cost estimate for pickup/delivery and scanning was "just under $14,000" for the requester to decide whether to proceed.
Board members asked clarifying questions about the difference between registration keying and absentee-by-mail application processing and whether the 600‑DPI requirement will prompt legislative or state guidance. Fall said she and counsel had contacted peers and ITS and that the office will provide detailed cost estimates and options to the requester and the board.
