Oregon Republicans Take Aim at Vote-By-Mail
No, this isn’t a typo. At a recent forum of all the Republican candidates vying to be Oregon’s next Governor, none of them defended vote-by-mail, and almost all endorsed three concepts: restrict a woman’s right to chose, get tough on crime that doesn’t involve middle-class, white male voters and trash Oregon’s vote-by-mail system.
Why would the state’s other major political party want to destroy our vote-by-mail system? Their answer is “fraud.” Except Republican Secretary of State Dennis Richardson did an extensive audit of Oregon’s election during his term (2017-2019) and found no fraud. With a comprehensive, established record of solid, free and fair elections that encourage voters to vote, something critical for a democracy, why would Oregon Republicans want to dismantle our vote-by-mail system?
The only logical answer is: so they can win elections.
As is happening nationwide, Oregon’s Republican Party is seeking to gain power so they can put barriers up to make it difficult for voters to vote. Since they clearly are unable to win the policy and issue battles, they want to create a system where candidates select their voters, not the one we have now, which allows voters to select their representatives.
One Party rule is never a good thing. It’s as bad for one Party to constantly rule urban areas of our state as it is for the other Party to rule rural areas. What gets lost is a full and robust debate about policy issues. But when one Party has no platform and its entire appeal to voters is fear and opposition for the sake of opposition, then everyone suffers.
Nowhere in our recent history is this clearer than in the current Affordable Care Act system. President Obama, in order to create bipartisan support for the ACA, designed the system based on a Republican-created, health-care program in Massachusetts. Instead of working with President Obama to scale-up this Republican program and then take credit for it during the elections, not a single Republican voted for it. They then based their next two electoral campaign cycles on defunding a program that was based on their own initial ideas to provide health care through markets for all US citizens.
Today the ACA provides coverage for more than 31 million Americans. Experts from both sides of the aisle will acknowledge that the ACA could be designed better and be more efficient. But for that to happen, Republicans would have to accept that American citizens deserve affordable health care. To do so would give Democrats an advantage for an election cycle or two. As a nation, we continue to have over-priced, lower-quality health care. The pandemic just made it worse.
At the moment there appears to be only one way back to sanity. That is for voters to vote in Democratic candidates from the top of the ticket to bottom, which would give Democrats a chance to succeed or fail (without being held hostage to Joe Manchin in DC or Betsy Johnson in Salem). It would also force Republicans to do an assessment of the path forward and perhaps bring them back onto the road that supports democracy rather than the road that seeks to undermine it.