Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com
Lars Larson is right about the thing that matters. Ballots cast in good faith are not being counted. Where he goes wrong is on who is losing them.
The 32 percent figure he cites is not an accusation against Sen. Cantwell. It is Cantwell's own number, released September 2 alongside Secretary of State Steve Hobbs. Read past the headline and the explanation Larson offers falls apart. If late ballots were the fault of procrastinating Democrats, we would expect more ballots coming through the mail. Fewer are. Mail returns dropped from 41.3 percent of primary ballots in 2024 to 30.9 percent this August, while drop box use climbed. More rejections out of a smaller pool is not a story about voter habits.
It is also not a story about King County. Stevens County rejected 172 ballots for late postmarks in 2024. This August it rejected 602, on lower turnout. Stevens County went for Trump by roughly forty points. Its auditor, Lori Larsen, put in writing that she did not believe voter behavior or wildfires explained the spike and suspected a local postal breakdown. Mason County saw a similar multiple. The voters being disenfranchised here are rural conservatives, and their own county election officials are the ones raising the alarm.
On Jimmy Carter, the record is not ambiguous. The 2005 Carter-Baker report did warn about absentee ballots. The same report named Oregon, then seven years into all-mail voting, as a state that had avoided significant fraud through signature verification. Carter called for expanding mail voting in 2020, said so again in 2021, and voted by mail himself. The Carter Center has stated publicly that claims Carter opposed mail voting are untrue.
Oregon's DMV errors were real, and the state should be embarrassed by them. About 1,800 people were mistakenly registered because staff miscoded citizenship documents, most of those records dating to 2010 through 2023. Of the group identified through November 2024, seventeen had voted, and most of them turned out to be citizens. Those errors were found by Oregon's own audit, which is the roll maintenance Larson says nobody is doing.
What Hobbs and his Oregon counterpart declined to hand over was not a clean voter list. It was an unredacted file including Social Security and driver's license numbers. Federal judges have dismissed the Justice Department's suits on that demand in twenty-two states, Oregon among them.
The SAVE America Act does not poll at 80 percent. Harvard-Harris put the bill at 71, Rasmussen at 62. And it is no longer just a registration bill. The current version requires photo ID to cast any ballot, including a mailed one. Larson's remedy would put one more obstacle in front of the Stevens County voter whose ballot the Postal Service already failed to stamp.
I use the drop box outside the Camas library, and I would tell any neighbor to do the same this November. But that is a workaround, not an answer. Nobody has yet explained why mail out of Stevens County got slower while the Postal Service insists nothing changed. That question deserves the hearing Cantwell is asking for, and conservatives ought to want it more than anyone.
Anthony P. Teso
Camas
