In our last post, we looked at ballot return methods among Multnomah County, Oregon voters in the November 2020 election. As the most populous county in the first state to adopt vote by mail in 2000, Multnomah is an interesting case to explore voter use and adaptation over two decades of voting by mail. November 2020 is also interesting because the state began to pay for return postage as of August 2019, leading one well-known advocacy group to describe Oregon as a state where “every mail box is a drop box.” But is this actually how voters responded?
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For a full vote-by-mail jurisdiction, Multnomah County voters love voting in person! Data from the county shows that over half of November 2020 voters returned their ballots by hand at a drop box (rather than through the mail), and voters in precincts near drop boxes are most likely to utilize official drop sites. Despite changes to people’s daily habits in the pandemic, voters here really enjoy the convenience and security of dropping their ballots off in person at a neighborhood drop box. This is the first of two posts exploring data from Multnomah County about where and when voters returned their ballots in November 2020.
By Phil Keisling, who served as Oregon Secretary of State from 1991-99. The opinions and observations are solely his own views, and he takes full personal responsibility for any errors of fact, not to mention any predictions that prove wildly inaccurate!
During much of 2020, I’ve been promoting efforts to expand voter access to mailed out ballots, and to encourage states to adopt the “Vote at Home” model pioneered by Oregon, Colorado, and Washington, where 100% of active registered voters are automatically mailed their ballots.
Largely due to the Covid-19 pandemic, 92 million voters this year received mailed out ballots — compared to just 42 million in 2016.
Some have asked what all this might mean for tonight’s election. How will these votes be counted? Will these votes be counted? How might the vote tallies tonight (and even later this week) change as votes are processed, counted and announced in key states’ widely varying election systems? So I thought I might share a few brief thoughts, which I’ve distilled into three categories: Continue reading
As of this morning, Oregon and Washington voters have returned more ballots than they did in the 2016 election.
After a surge of ballots returned last week, this week we saw the number of ballots returned daily in Oregon drop to about the same rate as they were returned in previous years. Still ahead of us, however, are the three days when turnout has historically been the highest: Friday, Monday, and Tuesday. In previous years, around a quarter of all ballots have been received by elections offices on Election Day.
Paul Manson ’01 and Heather Creek
Election administrators face many headwinds in 2020. The confluence of an international pandemic and a historic presidential election has created numerous challenges for local election officials (LEOs). These administrators have navigated rapidly changing state rules and expectations about early and absentee voting, changes to the availability of traditional polling places and poll workers, and voters eager to participate in the 2020 election but with many questions of how and when to vote safely.
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Oregonians are eager to vote in the upcoming November 3 election. As of the morning of October 21, nearly 2 weeks before Election Day, almost 500,000 of the 3 million registered voters in the state have already returned their ballot. This is 24% of the 2 million ballots cast in the 2016 general election.
The U.S. Census Bureau just released data tables from their 2020 Voting and Registration Supplement, a biannual supplement to the monthly Current Population Survey that focuses on election related topics – particularly in the wake of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. These tables show what we’ve known intuitively and from other sources for a while: vote-by-mail rates were higher in 2020 than any year previously, as states across the country updated their absentee voting policies and voters adjusted to the COVID-19 pandemic.