Outcry against Sen. David Brock Smith’s bill overwhelmed the state Legislature’s website

By Julia Shumway, Oregon Capital Chronicle

Thousands of Oregonians submitted letters opposing a Republican senator’s long-shot attempt to ask voters whether to repeal the state’s decades-old mail voting law, swamping the Legislature’s website on Monday. 

The outcry against Sen. David Brock Smith’s Senate Bill 210 could serve as a preview of what’s to come if his proposal or a separate initiative led by one of Brock Smith’s Republican rivals makes it to the 2026 ballot. Oregonians have voted entirely by mail since 2000, after nearly 70% of voters approved switching to mail ballots in 1998.

A quarter-century later, and after Republican party leaders including President Donald Trump spent years spreading debunked claims of voter fraud, Brock Smith argued that Oregon voters should get to decide again. 

“I think it’s time, which is why this is a referral for Oregonians to either reaffirm or deny vote by mail in this state,” the Port Orford Republican said during a Monday hearing of the Senate Rules Committee. 

The bill, which is unlikely to advance in the Democratic-controlled Senate, would ask voters to approve switching from mail voting to in-person voting on Election Day beginning in 2028. It also would repeal multiple recent laws aimed at making voting easier, including laws that added prepaid ballot-return envelopes and allowed the counting of ballots mailed and postmarked by Election Day that arrive at clerks’ offices up to a week later. 

Brock Smith’s proposal would allow people to vote by mail if they’re unable to vote in person on Election Day — if they ask for the ballot at least 21 days before an election and submit a valid Oregon driver’s license, driver permit, state identification card, U.S. passport or military identification card. 

Supporters of Oregon’s electoral system have long praised the state’s vote-by-mail system for its convenience. Oregon turnout in both presidential and midterm elections far exceeds the national average, even after automatic voter registration added hundreds of thousands of eligible but unengaged voters to voter rolls beginning in 2016. 

But proponents of ending mail voting, including Rep. Court Boice, R-Gold Beach, said convenience shouldn’t be the goal of the state’s electoral system. 

“The folks that I represent, the majority, want voting and Election Day to be about responsibility, not about convenience,” Boice said. 

Renee Asher lives in rural Coos County, one of the southwest Oregon counties Boice and Brock Smith represent. She attended the hearing virtually to say that she and other neighbors support Oregon’s mail voting.  

“I live in a rural community with a lot of people that lack accessibility or ability to get to a polling center,” she said. “We don’t have polling centers here. You have people that work multiple jobs, as I do myself, (and we) do face voter intimidation in our area. I think that it would be a big mistake to repeal mail-in voting.” 

Asher was also one of the more than 11,000 Oregonians who submitted written testimony ahead of Monday’s hearing, temporarily breaking the Legislature’s website and slowing it to a crawl for most of the day. More than 85% of the letters submitted opposed Brock Smith’s bill, while testimony in the hearing was more evenly split. 

Ayla Hofler said she drove 100 miles from her rural home near Banks to testify for the bill, which she considered the most important of the thousands of bills lawmakers introduced this year. 

“We all come out of the hills just fine to vote,” Hofler said. “We’re ready to train our volunteers and get on with the old way. We know what it’s like to have somebody stand in front of us, check our signature, know who we are, put a ballot number to our ballot, and it’s all tallied on the same day.”

Sen. James Manning, a Eugene Democrat who lost the Democratic primary for secretary of state last year, said he spent his campaign traveling the state and talking to voters about how the system could be better. Most of the people he talked to liked voting by mail, especially after the paid postage law he championed a few years ago, he said. 

“I’m trying to figure out if this is an issue looking for a problem, because I don’t see it here in our state,” Manning said. “I think that this is a national movement to try to make something of nothing.”

Registered Oregon voters automatically receive ballots at their homes, and they can choose to return them by mail, dropping them in a ballot box or turning them in at their county elections office. They can also opt to vote in person — each county elections office must have at least three private voting booths for voters who want the experience of filling out a ballot in a polling place.  

Erin Otey, a night shift nurse at a skilled rehab facility in Oregon City, said she came to testify against the bill on behalf of her patients who are able to exercise their right to vote because they receive ballots by mail. 

“These people are bedbound,” she said. “And even people that are housebound wouldn’t have the opportunity to get to an in-person place, and it would put their health further at risk by exposing them to germs and viruses that could actually end their life.”

Catherine Stearns, a retired state worker from Corvallis, said she brags to her out-of-state friends about Oregon’s higher voter participation rates and the state’s innovative approach to elections, including being the first state to adopt mail ballots and automatic voter registration. 

“In my opinion, Senate Bill 210 takes a giant leap backwards to a time when things worked only for some of the people,” Stearns said. 

Julia Shumway has reported on government and politics in Iowa and Nebraska, spent time at the Bend Bulletin and most recently was a legislative reporter for the Arizona Capitol Times in Phoenix, Arizona. This story first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.