Vote by mail is leading the nation.

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http://www.newportnewstimes.com/articles/2005/08/10/news/news09.txt

Elections: Vote by mail is leading the nation.
Others states to follow Oregon's vote by mail system, Bradbury says

By Joel Gallob Of the News-Times
August 10, 2005

Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, speaking as a guest of the Newport Rotary Club last Thursday at The Embarcadero Resort, lauded Oregon's vote by mail election system and said other states around the country are likely to adopt some version of it in the next few years.

He identified several reasons why the vote by mail system has gone from being something other secretaries of state found to be "cute" when Oregon first adopted it to something approaching "a model" that other states that may soon emulate.

"I'm thrilled with how the election process worked in Oregon in the last presidential election," Bradbury said. "There's never been so highly scrutinized an election before in United States and local history. We did very well as a state. We had 86.5 percent of our registered Oregon voters actually vote in the presidential election. That was the third highest in the U.S., and the only two states with a higher percentage did not have a cut-off ... for registering to vote." And, he said, Oregon had no issues of "vote suppression or voter intimidation" of the sort alleged to have occurred in other states, particularly Ohio, in the 2004 presidential election.

Bradbury looked at several aspects of the Oregon vote by mail system that, he believes, contributed to that success.

His office, Bradbury said, has made a number of changes in how it handles elections. For one, the Secretary of State Elections Division has established a toll-free information hotline to inform people how to vote, where to get the ballots, and where to drop them off. "We took 30,000 telephone calls in the month before the election," Bradbury said. "That was a real service to the voters, and it reduced the work load on the county clerks so they could spend their time administering the election."

His office also offered "online, real-time election results" on the night of the election, Bradbury continued, "and we have online campaign finance information explaining who is getting money from whom; I think that's a real improvement."

Further, he continued, the only other state that actually checks every signature before counting the person's ballot is New York. The long voting period enabled by vote by mail allows for that kind of extended process.

Oregon's vote by mail system, he said was "the real winner in the last election. It went very smoothly, there were no improper ballot counts, there was no vote suppression and no voter intimidation. There were no people waiting on long lines for eight hours to be able to vote, like in Ohio."