Others states to follow Oregon's vote by mail system, Bradbury says
By Joel Gallob   Newport News-Times    10 August 2005

  Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, speaking as a guest of the Newport Rotary Club last Thursday at The Embarcadero Resort, lauded Oregon's vote by mail election system and said other states around the country are likely to adopt some version of it in the next few years.

He identified several reasons why the vote by mail system has gone from being something other secretaries of state found to be "cute" when Oregon first adopted it to something approaching "a model" that other states that may soon emulate.

"I'm thrilled with how the election process worked in Oregon in the last presidential election," Bradbury said. "There's never been so highly scrutinized an election before in United States and local history. We did very well as a state. We had 86.5 percent of our registered Oregon voters actually vote in the presidential election. That was the third highest in the U.S., and the only two states with a higher percentage did not have a cut-off ... for registering to vote." And, he said, Oregon had no issues of "vote suppression or voter intimidation" of the sort alleged to have occurred in other states, particularly Ohio, in the 2004 presidential election.
Bradbury looked at several aspects of the Oregon vote by mail system that, he believes, contributed to that success.

His office, Bradbury said, has made a number of changes in how it handles elections. For one, the Secretary of State Elections Division has established a toll-free information hotline to inform people how to vote, where to get the ballots, and where to them off. "We took 30,000 telephone calls in the month before the election," Bradbury said. "That was a real service to the voters, and it reduced the work load on the county clerks so they could spend their time administering the election."

His office also offered "online, real-time election results" on the night of the election, Bradbury continued, "and we have online campaign finance information explaining who is getting money from whom; I think that's a real improvement."

Further, he continued, the only other state that actually checks every signature before counting the person's ballot is New York. The long voting period enabled by vote by mail allows for that kind of extended process.

Oregon's vote by mail system, he said was "the real winner in the last election. It went very smoothly, there were no improper ballot counts, there was no vote suppression and no voter intimidation. There were no people waiting on long lines for eight hours to be able to vote, like in Ohio."

After the 2004 presidential election, Michigan Representative John Conyers (D) held hearings in Ohio to investigate what happened in that state's controversial balloting. Conyers' subcommittee produced a report that alleged voter intimidation, widespread unavailability of balloting machines in low-income and minority neighborhoods, and tampering with electronic voting machine returns. Bradbury said he had not read the Conyers report, but is "aware of some real issues regarding possible voter disenfranchisement."

The Oregon vote by mail system, he said, works much better than the systems employed in Ohio and most other states, and avoids the possibility of fraud and voter intimidation while also providing for a "better administration of the election process" in general.

"I've seen a dramatic change in attitudes" of other secretaries of state, Bradbury told the group, since Oregon first adopted its unique vote by mail system. "At first, they thought it was 'cute.' Now I'm getting lots of question from lots of secretaries of state about it. In fact, I see my job now as including being an advocate for the vote by mail system," Bradbury continued.

The Oregon system is unusually accurate because if a voter moves the post office cannot deliver the ballot. "That keeps our rolls up to date," he said. And the system he administers, Bradbury said, will get even better with a planned centralized voter registration system. That system, which is nearly ready for use, will make Oregon one of the only two or three states that will meet the federal deadline established after the 2000 presidential election debacle for adoption of a centralized statewide registration system.

One attendee asked Bradbury about the danger of illegal immigrants making use of an Oregon driver's license to vote.

Bradbury replied one must swear to be a U.S. citizen before being eligible to vote, and falsely swearing to that is a Class C Felony. He did not think it likely many illegal immigrants would risk being caught and deported just to be able to vote.

Bradbury predicted vote by mail would become more widespread, and said he would be advocating for it the following day when he was scheduled to be a speaker at the National Elections Commission. The Washington State Legislature, he said, has authorized the counties of that state to adopt vote by mail, and 29 of the 39 counties there have decided to do so. He said he expected that by the 2006 election all Washington counties will have gone to a vote by mail system.

Not everybody along the 40 or so people at the Rotary get-together agreed with Bradbury. Local lawyer Chris Minor said he feels that voting is a "sacrosanct" act, and it is "trivialized" when people do not go to a public polling place, and vote instead in a kitchen.

Bradbury replied that in a recent poll 20 percent of Oregonians feel that way. On the other hand, he suggested, "it does seem to give people a chance to give a wonderful civics lesson over breakfast to their kids" as they discuss the issues and candidates before voting.