Center for Public Integrity: Oregon improves voting access while targeting misinformation, harassment

In the past two years, Oregon has improved multilingual access to ballot instructions, made it easier to register to vote and strengthened privacy and legal protections for election workers subject to harassment as former President Donald Trump spread false conspiracy theories about the results of the 2020 election.

Oregon has served as a decades-long model for a universal vote-by-mail system that was embraced by other states during the COVID-19 pandemic and now made permanent by some of them.  …

“Oregon generally embraces a positive voting environment,” said Kate Titus, executive director of Common Cause Oregon. “All of these little changes around the edges help.”

Titus said the state could revisit further expanding its automatic voter registration system to allow registration to occur through other state agencies in the coming years. …

Oregon lawmakers also created penalties for spreading misinformation about how to vote in Oregon in 2021 as well as passing personal information privacy protections for election workers to prevent the disclosure of their home addresses in 2022. In the former law, people who knowingly spread misinformation about how to vote in Oregon within 30 days of a primary or special election or within 60 days of a general election can face civil penalties up to $10,000. The law was advocated for by Common Cause Oregon with the aim of stopping misinformation that includes where people can vote in Oregon, who is eligible to vote and election deadlines.  …

The recent redistricting process frustrated Native communities because some districts split them up and diluted the influence they could have on choosing representatives, Titus said.

But Titus said Oregon’s current maps, while unfair and uncompetitive, pale in comparison to some of the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina.   …

Advocates have criticized the Democrats in control of the Oregon legislature over the compounding inequity of felony disenfranchisement and the way the state has drawn voting districts.

Oregon’s redistricting process in 2021 once again drew boundaries that counted incarcerated people in the district where they are imprisoned instead of their hometowns, despite those people not having the right to vote while in prison, Titus said, giving more power to predominantly white districts that house prisons and less to the communities of imprisoned people who are disproportionately Black.