It’s not too late

October 29, 2020

But it’s almost too late. VOTE! Today if you can and haven’t already. We did, finally.

It took us long enough, but we finally got it done today. You might recall that we registered for absentee ballots, which is a relatively easy process in Oregon. Now that we’ve done it once and have seen how straight forward it is, I’m sure it will be routine for us.

As a reminder of how it works in Oregon, you register for overseas voting using the You Vote function on the Secretary of State’s office, in advance of when ballots are scheduled for distribution. You provide the overseas address to which the ballot is to be sent (in our case, to our hotel in Zagreb), and they mail your ballot there rather than to your home address.

Once it’s been mailed, you can vote - either by returning the mails d ballot, or completing it online through the web page. Since we never made it back to Zagreb, we voted online. It’s a pretty simple process: print out the mailing envelope and secrecy waiver form, both which require your signature. Vote, and print off the summary page. Email or fax all three documents to the address provided.

The only issue for us was finding a printer for the documents requiring signature; but we just emailed them to our hotel and they printed them for us. After that, we photographed the signed documents, made a screen print of our ballot summary, and attached the images to an email.

We won’t show you our ballot since our vote is confidential (but you might be able to make an educated guess about our preferences), but we can show you the other two documents to give you an idea of how this works in Our great state.

This form is your waiver of the right to a secret vote; necessary because your ballot is just out there in the open to whoever opens your email.

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Tricia GrahamVery very pleased that you got your vote done just keeping our fingers crossed that there will be a huge turn out of voters but feel a bit worried about the electoral college system
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4 years ago

Bob DistelbergIn my state, we don't have the online option. And that secrecy envelop gets stuck in another envelope to get mailed back, so it's not visible. I don't know if I'd be comfortable making my voter id public. That number, along with a few other bits of fairly public information about me, would be enough for someone to go into our voter registration website and chance my voter information.
Glad you got to vote! Now fingers crossed we all survive from Nov 4th
until Jan 20th.
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4 years ago

Scott AndersonTo Bob DistelbergGood point about the envelope. I deleted it.
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4 years ago

Jen RahnGreat that you were still able to vote despite all of the sudden changes.

And thanks for filling us in on how it works!
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4 years ago