Tobias Read tells Salem City Club Oregon election is safe from Trumpian meddling

Oregon is fortunate to have Democrats in all statewide elected offices. Keep that in mind if you’re thinking of voting for Republican Christine Drazan to be governor rather than incumbent Tina Kotek.

Because today our Democratic Secretary of State, Tobias Read, assured attendees at his Salem City Club program, “Safeguarding the Process: Oregon’s Stand for Secure State Run Elections,” that whatever the Trump administration may try to do to meddle with our upcoming November 3 vote by mail election, our state is ready to fight it.

Read started off by quoting Benjamin Franklin (this is from Google AI).

Benjamin Franklin famously replied “A republic, if you can keep it” in September 1787 to Elizabeth Willing Powel after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, when she asked whether the delegates had created a republic or a monarchy.

Our republic needs free and fair elections to avoid devolving into a monarchy. And the Constitution gives states the primary responsibility of deciding the time, manner, and place of elections, not the president. But Trump sought to have the Postal Service determine who is eligible to cast a ballot in Oregon by requiring that our voter roll match up with a federal database that had a 20% error rate.

And there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, so the whole scheme was meritless. Fortunately, the Supreme Court prevented it from being used in the 2026 midterm election. Read said that of 61 million votes cast in previous Oregon elections, there were just 38 cases of voter fraud.

Having gotten rid of a British king through the American Revolution, our founders obviously didn’t want an American king deciding our elections. So there’s nothing more patriotic than defending elections from a wanna-be king like Donald Trump.

In 1998 Oregonians voted to make vote by mail how we conduct our elections. It’s been a great success. Read said that no one should have to hire a babysitter or drive long distances to cast a ballot. Nationally, vote by mail has been used since the War of 1812. Every state uses it in one form or another. It reduces election costs by 1/2.

There are many safeguards in our vote by mail procedures. Tabulating ballots never is connected to the internet. Paper ballots can’t be hacked. Verification of results occurs after every election. However, Read identified several problems.

One is an erosion of trust in elections.

He said that “less than reliable sources” spread lies about widespread voter fraud. While this is more common currently among Republicans, some Democrats cast doubt on Trump’s election victory in 2024, claiming it was rigged. This contributes to threats of violence. The Jackson County election office has installed bulletproof glass. Everybody needs to push back against election disinformation.

Another problem is Postal Service changes.

Ballots aren’t being delivered as quickly. There’s a 38% increase in ballot rejection due to a late postmark. So Oregonians need to either mail their ballot at least.a week before the November 3 election, or use a drop box. The good news is that the Oregon legislature approved funding for more drop boxes and for ballot tracking, which Marion County has had for a while.

(I get a text message when my ballot has been mailed, delivered, received after I return it, and counted.)

Read said state and county election offices are ready for any other problems that may pop up. Several questions in the Q&A portion of his program related to dirty tricks that might be attempted by the Trump administration in the upcoming midterm election. Read’s response always was the same: we will respond to whatever happens; we’ve considered every possibility; we’re ready for anything.

One questioner asked why the federal SAVE act proposed by Republicans was so bad, since it simply required states to submit their voter rolls to the federal government. Read responded with what he’s said before: that a state’s voter roll would be compared to a federal database of eligible voters that had a 20% error rate. Meaning, a huge number of people would be flagged as being ineligible to vote, even though they actually were eligible.

This must have confused many people, including me at one point, because I’d read news stories that said all the Trump administration wanted was to make sure that ballots only were mailed to people on a state’s voter roll. That wasn’t true, since the Trumpian goal was to compare Oregon’s list of eligible voters with a separate federal list of people in Oregon who supposedly were eligible to vote.

Since the federal list had lots of errors, and state voter rolls are continually updated with address changes, name changes, deaths, new registrations, and such, there’s no way the federal list would have matched up with the more accurate up-to-date voter rolls maintained by Oregon county clerks.