SALEM — Top Oregon elected officials on Tuesday urged Oregonians to use ballot drop boxes, not mailboxes, to return ballots in November as newly released data showed thousands of Oregonians missed having their May primary votes counted because of postal delays.
Secretary of State Tobias Read, Gov. Tina Kotek and U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, all Democrats, held a press conference at the state Capitol in Salem to reiterate their commitment to protecting Oregon’s decades-long history of mail voting.
Read, the state’s top election official, is seeking $1.25 million from the Legislature’s emergency board this week to add 20 drop boxes, expand a ballot tracking system used by five counties and cover other unanticipated election costs.
His funding request and the officials’ comments come as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether the U.S. Postal Service can implement a rule that would upturn how states run elections weeks before states begin mailing ballots. Oregon is among the states that sued to block the Postal Service rule and President Donald Trump’s executive order that preceded it.
Read and others said they’re confident the court will block the rule, and that even if it didn’t, it’s too close to the election for it to practically take effect.
“School’s back in session now,” Read said. “You could go to any playground and ask kids, ‘Does it make sense to change the rules in the middle of the game?’ The answer is ‘no.’ It’s not practical. It’s not right. And we believe it’s not legal.”
His funding request, which the Legislature’s emergency board will consider Thursday, includes roughly $150,000 to expand the BallotTrax ballot tracking system to all 36 counties.
Voters in Clackamas, Marion, Multnomah, Yamhill and Washington counties have been able to sign up for text alerts to follow their ballot from when it’s first mailed to them to when election workers have verified the ballot envelope signature and sorted it for counting.
It also includes $120,000 for 20 new ballot boxes at $6,000 apiece and $344,000 for operational support for ballot boxes, as well as 5 cents per voter, or about $153,000, for county election support.
And Read is seeking $480,000 to reimburse counties that have to mail notices to inactive voters, mostly people who moved without updating their addresses and who had their ballots returned as undeliverable. Inactive voters don’t receive ballots but officials must notify voters they’re inactive before removing them from voter rolls.
An official May primary election turnout report the Secretary of State’s Office released earlier on Tuesday showed a steep increase in the number of uncounted ballots over prior years. Since 2022, Oregon has allowed the counting of ballots postmarked by Election Day that arrive within the next week.
But changes at the Postal Service that require all mail to be taken first to a Portland processing center mean that in most of the state, mail doesn’t receive postmarks until at least the day after an Oregonian mails it.
Of the more than 55,000 ballots that arrived at county election offices during the seven-day grace period after the May primary, more than 7,300 couldn’t be counted because they had a postmark after Election Day. That’s a rate of 13.1%, higher than any prior election.
Merkley, Oregon’s junior U.S. senator, said mail voting is safer and more trustworthy than other systems.
“On Election Day, it is easy to manipulate the outcome,” he said. “You simply move the locations where people vote, so they get confused. You put the locations where there’s no parking. You put out misinformation about the election day. You put out misinformation about the location. You put in machines that don’t work and slow things down, so people have eight-hour waits to vote, like they did in Georgia. None of that can be done with vote by mail.”
Kotek said Oregon has spent decades building a voting system that works — the state routinely boasts the highest or near-highest turnout rates in the country — and will defend it.
“Vote by mail means a parent doesn’t have to choose between getting somewhere to vote or taking care of their child,” she said. “Vote by mail means a worker who can’t afford to take time off work can sit down at their kitchen table after work and participate in our democracy, and it means an older Oregonian, or a person with a disability, or someone who would live far away from a polling place can make their voice heard in an easier fashion. These are not abstract benefits.”
And Wyden, the first U.S. senator elected in an all-mail election in 1996, said constituents he spoke to in rural Oregon have been especially worried about maintaining mail elections. Some voters would face driving an hour to a ballot box or their county election office if they can’t rely on their mail, he said.
“To borrow a phrase from our wonderful letter carriers, I’ve got a special delivery message for Donald Trump: Keep the hell away from Oregon’s vote by mail,” he said.
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