Oregon blazes mail trail

Nation looks to state for new election system model Post office has been the main polling place since 2000

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, May 16, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Is vote-by-mail the solution to the election controversies that have gripped other parts of the country for much of the past six years?

A growing number of election reform advocates think so, including Dave Jackson, a member of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition, one of numerous grass-roots groups across the country worried that elections are rife with fraud and cheating.

“From what I know, Oregon’s vote-by-mail system is the most secure voting system in the country,” Jackson said, explaining that he first began worrying about elections after the 2000 Bush-Gore counting debacle.

The vote-by-mail system will be on full display in today’s primary election. The offices of the Multnomah County Elections Division will hum with activity as around 150 temporary workers process ballots that have been filled out and mailed in by county voters.

Signatures will be checked, ballots will be inspected and automated counting machines will tabulate the results that are scheduled to be released beginning at 8 p.m. Voters have until then to bring their ballots by the office, at 1040 S.E. Morrison St., for them to count.

To learn more about how the system works, Jackson and two other coalition members Ñ Jim Andrews and Kathleen Bushman Ñ visited the office May 8. They met with Multnomah County Director of Elections John Kauffman, who walked them through the office where workers already were busy processing the vote-by-mail ballots that had been streaming in since blank ones for the May 16 primary election were mailed out in late April.

As they walked from room to room, Jackson and the others peppered Kauffman with questions about how the ballots are handled. They wanted to make sure ballots could not be stolen or switched and to know what safeguards prevented elections workers from learning how individual voters cast their ballots.

Jackson, Andrews and Bushman are among thousands across the country who are worried about the integrity of the nation’s voting system. Their concerns were heightened by numerous problems with Ohio’s primary election, which was held May 2. Among other things, some Ohio voters and elections workers had problems using the state’s new computerized touch-screen voting machines. Similar problems have plagued elections in other states in recent years, too.

In response to questions about the situation in Ohio, Kauffman explained that such problems cannot happen in Oregon because vote-by-mail requires paper ballots that are fed through relatively simple tabulating machines.

Voters cast their votes by using pens to fill in ovals on the ballots. Because nothing has to be punched out, the ballots are not marred by the hanging, dimpled or pregnant chads made infamous in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

At one point in the tour, Kauffman, Jackson and the others watched workers test the six machines that will count all of the ballots cast in Multnomah County, beginning early in the morning on election day. The same set of specially prepared ballots was run through each machine, which then produced a printout of the results. Elections workers checked to make sure each machine tabulated the ballots correctly.

After the tour, Jackson praised Kauffman and the other elections workers for carefully handling the ballots and properly maintaining the counting machines. Despite that, Jackson and the other coalition members still plan to spend election day at the office, watching for any irregularities.

“I think Kauffman and the other employees are trying really hard to do their jobs right, but you can’t be too careful these days. There’s too much at stake,” Jackson said.

System has its critics

Longtime anti-tax activist Don McIntire believes vote-by-mail elections are open to more fraud than conventional polling place elections, however. McIntire, the father of Oregon’s property-tax limitation system, is convinced that unscrupulous partisans are coercing voters in their homes and using ballots that have been mailed to the wrong addresses.

“It should be called fraud-by-mail, not vote-by-mail,” McIntire said.

But no proof of widespread fraud has ever been found in vote-by-mail elections, said Anne Martens, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, who oversees all elections in Oregon. According to Bradbury’s office, only six people have been prosecuted for voting violations since the state began conducting all elections by mail six years ago.

“That’s a very small number,” Martens said.

The state first began experimenting with local vote-by-mail elections in 1981 and started holding all elections by mail in 2000. Today’s election is the fourth statewide primary to be conducted through the mail in Oregon.

According to Kauffman, there are many reasons why Oregonians have embraced vote-by-mail elections, including their convenience.

“If you want to vote at home, you can. If you want to vote someplace else, you can. If you don’t want to put it in the mail, you can bring it in or drop it off at an official drop site,” he said.

McIntire decries vote-by-mail as undermining the sense of community created by traditional elections, however. As McIntire sees it, democracy came alive when all voters visited their local polling places on the same day.

“It was like a Norman Rockwell painting. You got to see your neighbors, they got to see you, and you all got the sense you were doing something important,” he said.

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