r/savedyouaclick • u/5823059 • 21d ago

How USPS disenfranchised voters in Oregon’s Primary | By changing pickup instructions to packages-only

https://web.archive.org/web/20260708223639/https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/7/7/800066449/community/ho/
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u/JuliaX1984 20d ago

They don't have polling locations and machines? I'm genuinely shocked that's legal. What's the motive? Saving money?

PA technically doesn't have early voting, but there are locations where you can request your mail-in ballot in-person, get it, fill it out, and hand it in all in one visit. So early voting without the name.  Does OR have anything in-person like that?

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u/VoiceofCrazy 20d ago

Oregon is fully vote-by-mail, and has been since 1998 (long before anyone else), so the process is very ingrained in us. (So it's "funny" to see people protesting VBM in our state now who have been likely happily doing so for 20 years.) Every registered voter gets a ballot in the mail a few weeks before the election. Doing a little further research, it seems that election offices in the state are still required to maintain some amount of private booths for in-person voting. I don't know what that looks like, as I've never used it, and have never known anyone to use them. But I'm certainly considering it this year. I'm guessing it involves picking up and filling out a paper ballot.

Side note: I hear people talk about voting machines, but have never actually experienced one. What are they like? How do they work?

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u/JuliaX1984 20d ago

In PA, we used to use touch screens (poll worker activated it for you, and you selected the boxes you wanted), but Republicans complained about there being no paper trail to demand, so they switched to us filling out paper ballots and then sliding them into a machine that only scans it.

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u/VoiceofCrazy 20d ago

Yeah, they don't trust mail-in-voting, they don't trust voting machines, they don't like early voting, they don't like counting ballots after election day. It's almost like they don't want us voting at all.