Tobias Read and Dag Robinson
For The Oregonian/OregonLive
Read is secretary of state for Oregon. Robinson is the Harney County clerk and president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks.
Recently, Oregon’s election system came under fire when President Donald Trump said he wanted to ban vote by mail, citing fears about the integrity of our elections.
The president would have Americans believe that vote by mail is part of a conspiracy to rig elections against him. But in Oregon, we know better: vote by mail isn’t a new experiment, and it has nothing to do with the current president. It’s a commonsense way for Oregonians to participate in our elections. We’ve been using it for more than 25 years to elect Republicans, Democrats and nonaffiliated candidates in races for governor, legislators, county commissioners, school board members and other positions at the state and local levels.
The practice dates back even longer if you consider that absentee voting – common throughout the United States – is a form of vote by mail that was first used in the War of 1812. President Abraham Lincoln also pushed for soldiers to vote by mail during the Civil War. The system is fair, accurate and secure — and it protects one of our most fundamental freedoms: the right to vote.
When more eligible citizens vote, our elections better reflect the will of the people — not the will of any one political party. And the data proves it. States with vote by mail consistently report the highest turnout in the country, and studies have shown no evidence of a partisan advantage. The true “winner” is the voter. Whether you’re a senior citizen in Medford, a parent trying to juggle jobs and kids in Enterprise or a deployed Oregon service member, vote by mail is accessible and secure for you and every other eligible Oregonian.
How do we know vote by mail is secure? Because as elections officials with direct knowledge of how our system works, it’s what we do. We use signature verification, and bipartisan observers oversee the counting process from start to finish. Ballot-counting machines are never connected to the internet, and our paper ballots ensure every vote is traceable and auditable. If there’s ever a question, we can double-check the results.
Over 20 years, with more than 60 million ballots cast, Oregon saw just 38 cases of voter fraud — all caught, all prosecuted, and none of them changing the outcome of an election. That’s a fraud rate of less than one in a million.
It’s also worth noting that voting by mail isn’t unique to Oregon. Other healthy democracies, like Canada and the U.K., use it too. And here in the United States, about 30% of voters nationwide voted by mail in 2024. The president himself voted by mail in 2020. This system belongs to the people, not just one side of the political aisle.
Vote by mail also saves taxpayers money. In-person voting requires more staff, more facilities and more security — and all that will cost more. By contrast, we’ve been working to streamline and cut costs in our system for more than two decades. Oregon’s cost per ballot for the 2022 vote-by-mail midterm election was just half the inflation-adjusted cost per ballot of the 1998 in-person midterm election – even including the cost of prepaid postage on mail-in ballots. On top of that, voters would pay their own price: time off work, transportation and childcare costs just to cast a ballot.
It’s our job to protect our elections, and we remain vigilant against threats to the security of our systems. Oregon continues to look for ways to do more with less, but recent cuts to federal agencies tasked with supporting election security efforts is further stretching our limited local budgets. Moving to a fully in-person system by 2026, as the president is suggesting, would require significant new spending and possibly higher taxes — neither of which makes sense for Oregonians.
Oregonians trust vote by mail because it works. It protects every voter’s right to hold government accountable, keeps our elections secure and saves taxpayers money. That’s why, under the U.S. Constitution, Oregonians chose this system and continue to support it today.
Politics should never interfere with how we run elections. Our system of elections should be about trust, security, and making sure every lawful vote counts. That’s what we have in Oregon, and we intend to keep it that way.