In the Pacific Northwest, mail-in ballots have been the norm for decades, but President Trump’s war on such voting has turned a point of regional pride into another partisan battle line.
By Anna Griffin in the NYTT
The American system of voting by mail can, like flannel and grunge rock, trace its roots to the 1990s Pacific Northwest, where Washington and Oregon moved to adopt mail-in balloting as the statewide default, driven in part by Republicans hoping to improve turnout among rural populations.
But like so much in contemporary politics, what was once bipartisan has broken down into familiar battle lines, as President Trump declares war on voting by mail. Now, even where mail-in balloting has become as much a part of the culture as artisan coffee and eschewing umbrellas, officials are worried that a three-decade-old tradition is already fraying under pressure from the president, his government and his followers.
“They’re undermining trust, even here where voters understand the system so well,” said Stuart Holmes, who oversees Washington’s elections.
Last August, Mr. Trump promised an executive order written “by the best lawyers in the country” to end all mail-in ballots. Last month, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised to curtail at-home voting by rejecting a Mississippi law that allows ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they are received within five business days after the election. Oregon and Washington could both have to change their election schedules, and they’re already warning voters to mail ballots earlier this year because of U.S. Postal Service cuts.
Late last month, Mr. Trump voted by mail in a special election in Florida, and then declared, “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.” Then, last week, the president issued a new executive order directing federal agencies to scrutinize state election practices and consider withholding funding from states that do not comply.
The president’s attacks have local ripples: Ben Edtl, a Republican activist and consultant in Oregon, said he has gathered 85,000 signatures for a proposed November ballot measure to kill mail voting in the first state to adopt it statewide. He blames it for Democratic dominance.
So far, such efforts have stalled, largely because the system is so popular and Republicans are outnumbered by Democrats and independents. Repeal bills died in the Washington legislature this year, and a similar proposal in Oregon last year drew so many comments, almost 10,000 and mostly negative, that the state legislature’s website froze.
Mr. Edtl’s effort is just halfway to the 160,000 signatures needed by July 2 to make the fall ballot.
The irony is that Republicans initially seemed like the biggest beneficiaries of voting by mail — and were its earliest boosters.
“Oh, it was intensely partisan in the beginning,” said Phil Keisling, Oregon’s secretary of state in the 1990s. “Democrats hated it.”
Oregon’s first mailed elections were the brainchild of a rural county clerk who wondered whether local election officials, already required to send sample ballots to voters, could just ship them the real thing instead. Early experiments in the 1980s focused on minor local races like school levies, where mailed ballots increased turnout and led to a series of defeats for funding measures as the pool of voters expanded beyond education advocates.
The Republican-led state legislature approved taking the “Oregon experiment” statewide in 1994, but the Democratic governor vetoed it. (continued on Page 2 or here)