This Halloween, Oregon Republicans will be going door to door looking like Democrats — at least in action.
In legislative battlegrounds around the state, a small army of GOP volunteers are planning to fan out, knock doors, and offer to turn voters’ ballots in for them.
It’s a perfectly legal practice in Oregon, so long as you follow basic rules. But “ballot harvesting,” as it’s sometimes known, has more often been the province of Democrats and their allies. Republicans have previously looked askance at corralling ballots, even pressing to make it illegal.
Not this year. With the GOP staring down the possibility of losing more ground in the Legislature and a high-stakes governor’s race on the line, some say it’s time to pull out the stops to juice Republican turnout.
“It’s really just about getting out the vote,” said Senate Minority Leader Bruce Starr, R-Dundee, who supports the effort. “Republicans will win this election if every Republican ballot is turned in and every common-sense nonaffiliated voter votes.”
The effort is being spearheaded via a new committee, GOTV OREGON PAC, formed by a group of Republican political operatives and boosters. On a website announcing its intentions, the group says it aims to find 1,000 volunteers to chase ballots in competitive legislative districts — including areas of Clackamas County, the North Coast, the Columbia River Gorge, and Marion County.
Organizers say they’ll be primarily urging likely Republican voters to get their ballots in. But they’ll also be offering to turn in ballots for voters who are willing to hand them over.
“Maybe some people don’t give up their ballot, but it doesn’t mean that we’re not handing them material that says, ‘Here’s where the drop boxes are. Here’s who we think you should vote for,’” said Bryan Iverson, a Republican political consultant and legislative staffer who is helping to coordinate the new strategy.
It’s a common critique of Oregon Republicans that they are routinely outmaneuvered by a Democratic ground game that turns out hundreds of volunteers — many from labor unions or other allied groups — to knock doors and urge sympathetic voters to turn in their ballot.
Iverson says he relearned the lesson in 2024, when a Republican Senate candidate he was working for, Raymond Love, recruited dozens of people to knock doors in an attempt to unseat state Sen. Chris Gorsek, D-Gresham.
“And then the next weekend I see a photo with Chris Gorsek and 300 people all wearing SEIU T-shirts,” Iverson said, referring to the state’s largest labor group, Service Employees International Union. “We can’t beat them if they’re out there just scooping up ballots at the last minute.”
In fact, Democratic campaigns are not ballot harvesting this year, and haven’t for several election cycles, said Tom Crawford, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Oregon. Democrats do run a robust get-out-the-vote operation with allied groups in the days leading up to the election.
“Democratic Party of Oregon volunteers and staff are focused on helping voters get their ballots filed out and turned in by Election Day,” Crawford said.
Turning in ballots on behalf of voters can bring perils if not done with care, one possible reason why it appears to have gone out of fashion with Democrats.
In 2018, a labor-affiliated group revealed it had misplaced a stack of nearly 100 ballots from the November election, failing to get them in a drop box in in time to be counted. That ran afoul of a state law that requires anyone turning in a ballot on behalf of another person to do so within two days.
The group that made the error, Defend Oregon, ultimately avoided much of a nearly $95,000 state fine issued because of the gaffe.
Democrats OPB spoke with said the party hasn’t done much ballot harvesting since, saying it brings high risk for relatively little reward. But Republicans have made the practice a talking point anyway.
Two candidates for governor in this year’s Republican primary signaled they wanted to outlaw it.
And the eventual winner of that contest, state Sen. Christine Drazan, introduced a bill to ban ballot harvesting while serving in the House last year. It went nowhere in the Democratically controlled House, and The Portland Mercury reported in August that Drazan’s campaign for governor has discussed using the tactic to boost turnout this year.
A spokeswoman for Drazan’s campaign did not respond to an inquiry Friday. Starr described the GOTV Oregon effort as “complimentary” to Drazan’s campaign, not directly connected.
Whatever their history on the issue, legislative Republicans appear all in on a strategy that includes ballot collection this year. Six GOP lawmakers have kicked in campaign funds to GOTV OREGON PAC, which has reported raising roughly $60,000.
Iverson said the campaign will pay people who want to work extended shifts in the runup to Election Day — it’s offering up to $35 an hour. But he said the effort is largely relying on volunteers, who have signed up for more than 1,000 two-hour shifts.
Whether or not the effort pays off will be answered after Election Day. But in a year when Democrats appear to have momentum, Iverson says even an extraordinary get-out-the-vote operation might not be enough.
“If I was a Democrat, I’d be cautiously optimistic,” he said. “I don’t think I’d be bullish, but they’re not going backwards. That’s probably a fair statement.”
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
