Overview:
While we are getting tired of all the same baseless, harmful tropes that the President of the United States keeps trotting out on social media, we recognize that it is important to reiterate the importance of good governance.
Attacks on immigrants. Recriminations of the press. Accusations of corrupt elections.
While we are getting tired of all the same baseless, harmful tropes that the President of the United States keeps trotting out on social media, we recognize that it is important to reiterate the importance of good governance.
The latest threat — to abolish vote-by-mail — cropped back up last week. It’s deeply ironic to see the president rail once again about corrupt elections, given that he just won one less than a year ago. But this latest distraction from the other troubling issues of our time feels especially acute in Oregon, where our vote-by-mail process has been in place for over 20 years.
The President wants you to believe that voting by mail is un-secure, and, worse, that the process favors Democrats. But that’s just not true.
In Oregon, Republicans still win elections. And in several states that implemented the system, it actually saw Republicans winning in bigger numbers, according to reporting in the Palm Beach Post. Since Oregon has a higher population of Democratic voters, and Florida has a higher proportion of Republicans, that all makes sense. The goal of such a system is not to favor one particular party, but to make voting as easy as possible and to get more people to do it. In comparing Florida and Oregon, that seems to be what the data is bearing out.
But of course, the current administration doesn’t much care for facts or data. It doesn’t even seem to mean much that the U.S. Constitution outlines that states dictate the “time, place and manner” of administering elections, not an executive order. And the fact that this is all cropping up, according to reports, after Vladimir Putin made comments to Trump about his concerns about vote-by-mail is all just more of the same outrage-trafficking.
Oregon’s elections systems work well, and as Secretary of State Tobias Read pointed out in commentary to MSNBC, when issues have arisen, they have been caught and have not affected elections. An audit of the voter rolls ahead of last year’s elections found a number of people who were registered in error, and any rare votes that were cast did not affect the outcome of any elections, Read pointed out. If we learned anything from that process, it’s that audits of our state government processes are too important to be underfunded.
And if there’s anything we are learning from yet another Trump administration, it’s that he’ll typically say the most outlandish things he can, often at key moments, to turn our heads away from real troubles at hand. Here in Oregon, we’ll soon face a $15 billion state budget shortfall, due to federal cuts, that will kick kids off health care and leave them hungry during their developing years. Our nursing homes are about to become underfunded and less safe and unfortunately, our country’s progress toward a greener energy future is also being suspended.
If we’re lucky, under these conditions, voting by mail seems like a minor problem — a fix to something that isn’t broken and what would appear to be a distraction from more profound problems. And yet, creating an electoral system in which as many people have access to help decide the way the country moves forward is probably the most important thing to pay attention to as a current voter, since it underpins all of the other issues harming our state.
This article appears in the Source August 28, 2025.
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The election in 2020 wasn’t stolen and vote-by-mail is a good thing BUT … when it comes to elections optics mean almost as much as reality. When we went to sleep on election night in 2020 Trump was clearly winning but when we woke up suddenly Biden was ahead in many states where he had been behind. The optics associated with how these mail ballots are counted isn’t good. First and foremost, it takes far too long to count them. Figure out a process to get these mail-in-ballots counted on election night and included in election night results and most of the distrust goes away.