The Multnomah County Elections Office has confirmed earlier reports from letter carriers that some Portland voters received ballots late in this week’s special election.
Tim Scott, Multnomah County’s elections director, told Street Roots that two letter carriers had contacted the elections office to say they’d delivered ballots either Tuesday or Wednesday, and one Portland resident posted on social media that they had received a late ballot.
Typically, Oregon voters get their ballots 20 days before the election, according to Tim Scott, director of elections for Multnomah County.
In some cases — such as when someone has changed their address or party registration, which in primary elections triggers the elections office to issue a different ballot — ballots may be issued later, Scott said. The county’s self-imposed deadline to get ballots to voters is the same as its recommended deadline for mailing ballots: five days before the election.
But this past Friday, just three mail-delivery days before the election, 133 ballots were sent out, according to Scott. These were ballots for voters who had recently changed addresses or registration.
Those late-issued ballots are “kind of a Hail Mary for people we don’t have direct contact with,” Scott said.
He said 133 ballots were mailed Friday, just three mail days before the election.
Scott said the ballots issued toward the end of the election cycle are supposed to be sent first class, not the bulk nonprofit rate the county uses for the ballots issued earlier on.
But this time, he said, the county mismarked the mail.
“We believe they had been metered as nonprofit, and there had been a slight delay because of the class of mail,” he said.
Scott also noted that one person he heard from had been voting at the same address for years, but had made a slight change to the way their address was listed on her driver’s license — it listed the apartment number and street address in different orders — which apparently created a glitch in their voter registration and led to their ballot being issued late.
The most important thing voters can do if their ballot is late — or if it’s close to the election — is to get in touch with the local elections office, Scott said.
“If people don’t get a ballot, they should contact us,” Scott said. He said rather than an election day, the county technically has 20 election days. Therefore, if an eligible voter requests a missing ballot in that timeframe, his office will figure out a way to get it to them.
“Vote by mail is a great system,” he said. “We can get them an option that works best for them.”
On Thursday Street Roots reported that, according to Communities and Postal Workers United organizer Jamie Partridge, some letter carriers were still delivering ballots and political mailers (which campaigns typically stop sending to individuals marked as having voted) as of Wednesday — one day after the Portland’s special election to replace Commissioner Nick Fish ended.
These incidents were part of a larger story about changes to the U.S. Postal Service that have resulted in delays — and raised concerns among community members and progressive activists that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is deliberately trying to slow mail delivery and undermine confidence in one of the country’s oldest public utilities.
Those concerns intensified Thursday as President Donald Trump admitted he didn’t want to provide funding the Postal Service asked for under the CARES Act because he doesn’t want to see it used for mail-in voting in November.
Also on Thursday, as reported by Willamette Week, the Postal Service confirmed it was removing dozens of public mailboxes in Portland and Eugene.
According to Ernie Swanson, a spokesperson for USPS’ Portland and Seattle districts, the Postal Service is removing the boxes due to declining mail volume, because “people are mailing less” since the coronavirus pandemic.
A press release issued by USPS last week paints a more complicated picture: between April and June of this year, first-class mail revenue was down by $373 million, or 6.4% due to a volume decline of 1.1 billion pieces or 8.4%, when compared with the same quarter last year. Marketing mail revenue — that is, flyers and circulars — was also down by $1.4 billion.
But Americans’ increased reliance on e-commerce this spring and summer has been good news for the Postal Service: revenue from shipping and packages was up $2.9 billion, or 53.6%, with an increase in 708 million packages compared to last spring.
Scott said that in this week’s special election, 65% of the ballots that were returned were returned by mail and 35% were returned to drop boxes. Typically, about 55% of ballots go into drop boxes and 45% are mailed — a change Scott attributes to the pandemic as well as the fact that return envelopes now come with prepaid postage.
According to Scott, Oregon’s postal system employs a full-time liaison whose job it is to ensure Oregon’s vote-by-mail system — which the state has used for all elections since 2000 — runs smoothly, and Oregon has “ a good planning structure to set everybody up for success.”
But county officials are monitoring the national changes to the Postal Service and may adapt its messaging this fall to account for them.
“We’re still evaluating the impact of some changes at the national level and we’ll probably be changing some of our messaging in November, encouraging people to give their ballot more time,” Scott said.