SALEM, Ore. — Election officials across the U.S. are worrying about whether their aging voting machines will fail next Tuesday, whether hackers will try to create chaos and whether voters will even show up to vote.
In Oregon, they don’t have to worry as much, because they don’t have any voting machines — or any polling places.
Twenty years ago, Oregon became the first state in the nation to conduct all statewide elections entirely by mail. Three weeks before each election, all of Oregon’s nearly 2.7 million registered voters are sent a ballot by the U.S. Postal Service. Then they mark and sign their ballots and send them in.
You don’t have to ask for the ballot, it just arrives. There are no forms to fill out, no voter i.d., no technology except paper and stamps. If you don’t want to pay for a stamp, you can drop your ballot in a box at one of the state’s hundreds of collection sites.
