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The humble ballot drop box is finally getting its flowers. Long the last refuge of the procrastinator, the 324 metal crates scattered across Oregon now look like pillars of democracy.
Earlier this month, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read warned voters not to mail their ballots and to instead use drop boxes. That was an astonishing admonition from an official overseeing a vote-by-mail system, but it showed how far President Donald Trump had gotten in his effort to reshape midterm elections via the U.S. Postal Service. On Sept. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump from restricting mail voting—but the damage to Oregonians’ confidence in mail delivery won’t be easily restored.
As a challenge to Trump’s executive order worked its way through the courts, Read secured $1.25 million to install an additional 20 drop boxes across the state. His spokesperson told WW this week that the court ruling would not change that plan.
The Secretary of the State’s Office could not say by press deadlines where the new boxes would be placed. “We’ve identified a number of locations where a new drop box would improve voter access,” said spokesman Connor Radnovich, “but county support, site preparation, and procurement may all influence final locations.” Read’s office did provide WW with a list of where 324 drop boxes stood during the May primary.
They stand in all sorts of places: city halls and the book-return windows of libraries, mostly, but also next to a public swimming pool in Eugene, a grange hall in Spray, and two different McDonald’s restaurants in Portland. (The box outside the Hollywood McDonald’s has a dedicated drive-thru lane, but the McDonald’s drop box on North Lombard Street is a walk-up.)
It would be a herculean task to evenly allocate them, but a WW examination of box distribution suggests the state has erred on the side of enfranchising rural counties. To some extent, this is an inevitable result of population density. While Multnomah and Clackamas counties boast the largest raw totals of drop boxes—27 and 25, respectively—they sit at the very bottom of the list of boxes per capita. Meanwhile, Wheeler County (home to the John Day Fossil Beds and also that grange hall in Spray) has the most boxes per person, but the county stretches 1,700 square miles, so dropping off that ballot still might require an hour’s drive.
