Voting Re-imagined: Oregon Shows the Way
As interest over voting by mail skyrockets, Oregon’s vote-by-mail system has attracted national attention. 60 Minutes is the latest media outlet to showcase how Oregon has embraced voting by mail since 2000, when it became the first state in the country to end in-person voting. Mail voting for local elections had been the state custom since 1981.
In the 60 Minutes’ interview, correspondent Bill Whitaker asked Oregon Secretary of State Beverly Clarno—a lifelong Republican—about Oregon’s experiences with voting by mail. (Colorado, Hawaii, Utah and Washington are the only other states where mail voting is the law.)
“President Trump has attacked vote-by-mail,” Whitaker says to Clarno. “He’s called it dangerous. He says it’s the subject to massive fraud. What do you think when you hear that?”
Clarno responds, “Try it, you might like it.”
Oregon’s system, backed up with barcodes unique to each voter and drop boxes everywhere, has yielded some of the highest voter turnout rates in the country—79.8% in the 2016 presidential election.
And what about voter fraud?
According to Clarno, in 2016, for example, of the 2.8 million Oregonians who voted, only 22 tried to vote in two states. “I’m not a mathematician, but that sounds like pretty good odds to me.”
On the subject of controversy surrounding vote-by-mail, Clarno says, “Well, it’s not controversial in Oregon. I think that if you’d ask most Oregonians, they’d say, quite frankly, I like voting at my kitchen table.”
The first presidential election I remember was Eisenhower versus Stevenson in 1952. I was five then, living in New Jersey. My mother, who had grown up Republican in Illinois and barely knew there was another party, discovered the Democrats when she married and moved to the college town of Princeton. She threw herself into politics, but her cause was not only Democratic, but also convincing people to vote, period. She took me door-to-door to make the case for voting, figuring, I guess, that it was a lesson as important as learning my A, B, C’s.
I became eligible to vote when Nixon and McGovern squared off in 1972. I haven’t missed an election since.
“There’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter,” former President Barack Obama said on the cusp of the 2016 election. “It all matters.”
If only voting were easier, though.
For some, the biggest hurdles can be hours-long lines, malfunctioning equipment, and unexpectedly closed polling places. As Steve Colbert quipped: “Can’t wait for tomorrow when I get to exercise my patriotic duty as an American: Complaining about how long it’s taking to vote.”
But, of course, there is a darker story, one that leans towards disenfranchisement, not enfranchisement. It started with poll taxes in the 1890s that blocked African-Americans and poor Whites across the South from voting, until 1964 when they were abolished by the 24th amendment. Literacy tests had the same effect. The 21st century practices of purging voter rolls, limiting early and absentee voting, “voting procedure disinformation” (which gives voters false information about when and how to vote), and restrictive voter ID laws have all suppressed voting, the record shows.
In an ideal world, elections should be two things: free and fair. Every adult, with a few sensible exceptions, should be able to vote for a candidate of their choice, and each single vote should be worth the same.
When my husband and I moved to Southern Oregon in the spring of 2018, I knew nothing about voting in this notoriously liberal state, home also to some of the most rural counties in the country where “Make America Great Again” and local militia hold sway.
Oregon, it turns out, makes it easy for every eligible adult to vote.
When I obtained my Oregon drivers’ license, I was automatically registered to vote. In 2016, Oregon became the first state in the country to adopt Automatic Voter Registration (a.k.a. “motor-voter”), a practice 11 other states have since adopted.
When the 2018 elections loomed and we still we hadn’t received a postcard with our polling place—the rule in New York and before that Rhode Island—I learned that Oregon was a vote-by-mail state: no more standing in line and jumping hoops in the gym at a local elementary school. As noted earlier, it was the first state in the country to end in-person voting.
When I called the voter information hotline to request our mail ballots, the lady at the other end chuckled: “Oh my! We automatically send the ballot to you. You don’t have to ask for one. Where are you from?”
When our ballots arrived three weeks in advance of the election date, along with a 50-page pamphlet with information about local and state candidates and ballot measures. I did what I’ve never done before: I went local. I studied the positions of the candidates for the Oregon state legislature, I checked the backgrounds and records of local judges and commissioners, I investigated the state and county ballot measures (aghast to learn that one would make local county sheriffs the arbiters of gun control). I’d never spent so much time figuring out which boxes to blacken.
When I discovered that Tony and I were out of stamps, I found a secured ballot box behind the town library (on the way to the post office) and deposited our completed ballots there. This past August, Oregon became the first state in the nation to make “every mailbox, a dropbox,” requiring no postage on mail ballots.
Can dead people vote in Oregon? The director of elections in Oregon’s most populous county says this is impossible. The elections office gets notifications from the Social Security Office when someone dies, and they even comb through local obituary announcements to make sure they don’t send a ballot to someone who has died. He adds: “There are many documented cases of people making their last act, the act of voting,”
What about voter fraud? Every single Oregon ballot has a unique bar code. If you request a new ballot, your old one gets invalidated. So, for example, if your first ballot went to an old address, no one should be able to vote in your place.
Elections officials also double check the signature you leave on an envelope to match the one you used when you registered to vote. By the November 2020 election, Oregon’s system will be automated with new technology and will go through a 3-step authentication process: computer verification and two sets of eyes.
I tell my non-Oregon friends, “This is voting re-imagined.”
Having spent my professional life championing the voices and vision of adolescents and young adults, I keep an eye on youth voting. There are plenty of signs that young Americans could play a major role in the 2020 election, helping to determine the outcome of the race between Trump and Biden, as well as political control of Congress, and beyond. If there is good news in the upcoming election imbroglio, youth may play a role.
According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) based at Tufts University in Massachusetts, the nation-wide youth vote—a category that includes voters ages 18-29—more than doubled since the 2014 midterms. Back then, only 13 percent of eligible voters within that age range cast a ballot. In 2018, that number rose to 28 percent.
In Oregon, youth turnout went from 27 percent to just over 39 percent during the same time period. And those gains come as turnout among the overall population has more or less plateaued over the last two decades, hovering around 71 percent since 2002, according to figures compiled by the Oregon Secretary of State’s office.
Oregon’s embrace of “motor-voter” has made all the difference when it comes to the youth vote. The state has also enacted laws that preregister all eligible 16 and 17-year-olds and set up registration tables on high school campuses.
Legislators have proposed an amendment to the Oregon Constitution that would lower the voting age from 18 to 16. If the bill passes, voters would decide on the proposal in the 2020 election, possibly making Oregon the first state in the nation to allow 16-year-olds to vote.
Young Oregonians have pushed hard for all of these measures. The group Next Up, started in 2001 and led by a corps of young Latina activists, has been on the front lines of every advance, from Automatic Voting Registration to paid postage. “We are creating a generation of young people that are leading the charge on building a more accessible, equitable and innovative democracy,” their website says.
Yes, there’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter. Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country, and this world.
“It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society,” civil rights legend John Lewis said, “and we must use it.”
I’m using mine. America’s experiment in democracy has never been more at risk.
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