Oregon officials are grappling with a new twist this election year: The state’s relatively new rule allowing them to accept late ballots might soon be history.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in a case challenging a Mississippi law that allows mailed ballots to be counted if they arrive after Election Day as long as they are postmarked on or before the election. While justices likely won’t rule until June or July, the court’s conservative majority indicated strong skepticism that the Mississippi law passes muster.
If the court does invalidate the practice, Oregon and 13 other states — including Washington, California and Nevada — that accept late ballots would have to alter their practice in November.
That may be an easier switch to flip in Oregon than other places. The state has only accepted late ballots since 2022, when a law kicked in allowing late ballots. Before that, voters had to have their ballots — mailed or not — in by 8 p.m. Election Day.
“If it were to go away, we’d really change nothing,” said Harney County Clerk Dag Robinson, who administers elections in the sparsely populated eastern Oregon county. “We’d go back to how we did it in 2021.”
The picture isn’t much different in dense Multnomah County, where Elections Director Tim Scott said officials “don’t anticipate any significant impact to operations” if the court invalidates so-called “postmark rules” that allow late-arriving ballots.
Both Scott and Robinson told OPB the chief challenge of the switch would be ensuring voters understand that things have changed.
Not sharing that laid-back response: Gov. Tina Kotek, who put out a statement Monday linking the Mississippi case to President Donald Trump’s broader attempts to end mail-in voting. For years, the president has claimed without evidence that voting by mail has led to widespread election fraud.
“President Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting threaten to silence working people, undermine states’ rights, and threaten the foundation of our democracy,” Kotek said. “The Supreme Court must stand firm and uphold the Constitution — and not give in to Trump’s long-debunked lies and conspiracy theories.”
In Washington, Elections Director Stuart Holmes expressed concern that a rule change could confuse the public, according to The Seattle Times.
Oregon has conducted all of its elections using ballots mailed to voters since 2000 — the first state in the country to do so. But the state trailed others when it came to accepting postmarks as proof of timely voting.
Current law allows officials to accept a ballot if it arrives up to a week after Election Day, as long as it has been postmarked on or before the election. Officials also accept ballots with illegible or missing postmarks that arrive in that time frame.
Data from the two statewide general elections since the postmark rule went into effect suggest Oregon voters are hardly relying on the extra time — particularly in an era where changes at the U.S. Postal Service raise questions about when mail is actually postmarked.
In November 2022, as Oregonians decided a heated election for governor, officials accepted around 34,400 ballots that trickled in late, about 1.8% of the total votes cast. Multnomah County was the highest utilizer of late ballots that year, with 3.3% of its 368,665 votes arriving after Election Day, according to data from the Oregon Secretary of State.
Two years later, as the nation sweated out a presidential election, far fewer votes arrived late: about 13,600, or 0.6% of votes cast. That year, Clatsop County claimed the late-voting prize, with nearly 2% of its 23,525 ballots coming in after Election Day.
“In presidential elections, we have a larger turnout, and the ballots tend to come in earlier,” said Robinson, who serves as president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks. “I think people are more in tune to what they’re doing.”
Accepting late-arriving mailed ballots has been a point of contention among Oregon elections officials. Robinson noted that the clerks’ association did not take a position on the law change when lawmakers approved it in 2021.
“There was a faction that thought postmarks were a great idea, that it would solve some problems,” he said. “There was a faction of folks who said, ‘No, it’s a bad idea.’ They felt that postmarks were never intended to be a date timestamp.”
Robinson counts himself in the latter category. He won’t be sorry to see the postmark rule go, if that’s what justices decide.
But he said he does worry about other possible fallout from a court ruling. If the court, for instance, were to give counties less time to “cure” ballots that don’t appear to have valid signatures, it would pose major challenges for sprawling Harney County. Currently voters have up to three weeks to submit information proving they did cast a vote that is in question.
Robinson contributed an amicus brief to the court saying tighter timelines for processing ballots would pose a major challenge in a county where some voters need to drive 80 miles to reach the elections office.
“We just don’t know until the ruling comes how far reaching it is,” Robinson said. “I guess we will find out.”
The Supreme Court case is just one possible change Oregon’s elections officials are preparing for.
Far more consequential — though presently unlikely to pass — is the so-called SAVE America Act currently being debated in the U.S. Senate. The bill, which already passed the House, would require voters submit proof of citizenship when registering to vote and to send in a photocopy of valid ID when voting by mail, among other things.
That second requirement, in particular, could wreak havoc on Oregon elections this fall. Officials currently have a streamlined process for comparing the signatures on ballot envelopes with voter signatures on file. No such process exists for swiftly processing photocopies of a person’s ID, and the SAVE America Act contains no new funding for state elections offices.
“If this happens, we’ve tried to figure out, ‘OK, what do we do to implement this and how do we deal with it?’” Robinson said Tuesday. “Our biggest concern in Oregon is time and money. Nothing happens quickly and especially with no money.”
The bill doesn’t currently have the 60 votes necessary to move forward in the Senate, but Trump has been ratcheting up pressure on Republicans to get it through.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.