This story originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle and is used with permission.
All Oregon voters will receive ballots by mail and should plan to return them by mail or an official dropbox despite a legal setback for states suing to block the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict mail voting, Secretary of State Tobias Read said Tuesday.
Read, a Democrat elected in 2024, directed county clerks and other local election officials to continue following all Oregon election laws and established deadlines for issuing ballots. Election officials must mail ballots to military and overseas voters by Sept. 19 and to all other voters beginning Oct. 14.
“The purpose of this directive is to provide certainty to local elections officials and to voters alike: Our elections will go forward as they normally do,” Read said at a press conference at the state Capitol Tuesday afternoon.
President Donald Trump, who has partially blamed mail voting for the 2020 election loss he has refused for years to accept, issued a March executive order instructing the U.S. Postal Service to collect voters’ names and addresses from state elections officials and only send ballots to voters on those lists. His order also instructed the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and prosecute state officials who violate the order.
States, not the federal government, are responsible for administering elections.
Oregon, 22 other states and Washington, D.C., promptly sued to block the order and won an injunction blocking it from taking effect.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an unsigned emergency docket opinion Monday that the states essentially sued too early and that a federal judge in Massachusetts was wrong to block the order because states had not established that it harmed them. The high court’s ruling did not weigh whether the order and the administration’s efforts to implement it would ultimately be found unconstitutional.
Read also directed local election officials to document when they drop ballots off with the postal service and any challenges they experience, including postal workers refusing to accept ballots, delaying delivery or giving contradictory instructions.
Read visited county elections offices in all 36 counties in 2025 and said he talked to clerks about the possibility of policy changes or natural disasters disrupting Oregon’s mail voting system.
“It’s been more than a quarter century since we conducted in-person elections, so that transition would be expensive and difficult,” he said. “It’s also worth remembering that this election is effectively underway.”
The U.S. Postal Service issued a final rule Friday for how it plans to implement Trump’s order, but it hasn’t yet been published to the federal register. It includes a provision that it will not be in effect for this year’s midterm elections if an injunction is still in place, but U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s injunction barred the federal government from changing states’ mail-in voting rules prior to the Nov. 3 elections.
Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield has pledged to immediately sue over any changes that affect Oregonians’ ability to vote.
