On Monday, Benton County officials announced, by way of a social-media post, a discovery that had the quality of a small, bureaucratic farce: voters in Millersburg had been sent the Benton County Voters’ Pamphlet, and some voters in South Corvallis had received the Linn County pamphlet instead. Benton County officials blamed the error at the U.S. Postal Service. They added that they were working with the Postal Service “to address this issue as efficiently as possible,” a phrase that promises diligence while committing to no particular outcome. A voters’ pamphlet is a modest object, a stapled civic primer about who is running and what is being asked of you. A voter handed the wrong one is at least equipped to be wrong in an informed way, about the wrong county.
But, This is No Farce
It would be easy to treat this as an administrative hiccup. Millersburg sits on the Linn County line, and South Corvallis sits near the edge of Benton’s, and mailing lists, ZIP codes, and political boundaries do not always agree. But the mix-up arrives in a county that has spent the summer asking what, exactly, the Postal Service does with the democratic mail entrusted to it.
In July, the Corvallis Gazette-Times spoke with two postal workers who said letter carriers were directed on May 19, the day of Oregon’s primary, to focus on package deliveries. The president of the local letter carriers’ branch, David Bauer, said the order affected 11 employees, and that 12 of Corvallis’s 38 city routes did not receive regular mail delivery.
The consequence was plain enough: carriers who deliver only packages do not stop at the mailbox where a ballot is waiting to go out. One carrier estimated seeing five to seven ballots still in mailboxes the next day.
Oregon’s system leans heavily on the postmark. A ballot can be counted if it arrives within seven days of Election Day, provided it was postmarked by Election Day.
Benton County, by its own count, received 388 ballots postmarked after Election Day in the primary, against 79 after the May 2024 primary.
At the time, County spokeswoman Anne Thwaites said the county could not tell which ballots had been affected, because collection was not all or nothing: some houses on the affected routes had their mail picked up, and some did not. The county has said the late ballots did not change the outcome of any race.
An ironic twist. The county’s own pamphlet for this election carries a notice that, due to delays at USPS, voters should mail their ballots at least seven days before Election Day or ask for a manual postmark at a post office.
So, it’s a county government that prints in its own civic guide, a recommendation to leave a week of slack for its federal government postal partner, making the former’s judgment of the latter plain. Now the pamphlet itself has gone astray.
For voters who want to read what they were meant to receive, the Benton County Voters’ Pamphlet for the November 3 general election is online here. The Oregon Secretary of State’s statewide pamphlet is at oregonvotes.gov/voterspamphlet.
The county advises voters to use its official ballot drop sites whenever possible. As Thwaites put it in July, “We the county have complete control over the ballot as soon as it goes into that box.”
Who is Charge of the Corvallis Post Office
Nicole Archer serves as our local postmaster. The most reliable way to contact Archer may be hand delivery. We could not find an email address for Archer, and good luck getting anyone by phone, we tried. If you’re new to town, the post office is at 311 SW 2nd St., Corvallis, OR 97333.
To contact Chris Evenson about this story, email office@corvallisadvocate.com
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