A handful of Central Oregon’s elected leaders representing all levels of government gathered at Bend City Hall Wednesday afternoon to push back against President Donald Trump’s recent attempts to overhaul the country’s voting system.

Oregon voters turn out to vote at some of the highest rates in the nation, ever since the state led the country in adopting an all vote-by-mail system more than 25 years ago.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order to create a federal voter database and require the U.S. Postal Service to process mail-in ballots with specialized envelopes and barcodes for tracking.

Top officials in Oregon and Arizona, another state that heavily relies on vote-by-mail, swiftly pledged to sue. With legal battles likely, Central Oregon’s elected leaders say they are worried the president’s false claims about the trustworthiness of vote-by-mail systems have already soured some voters ahead of the midterm elections.

Local and state officials convened at the city hall press conference with Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat who’s represented Oregon in the U.S. Senate for 30 years. They pledged to not back down from a fight to protect Oregonians’ right to vote-by-mail. They took aim at Trump’s executive order and at the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, a Republican-backed bill aiming to fundamentally change how people register to vote.

Oregon officials push back against Trump order limiting mail-in votes

State Rep. Emerson Levy of Bend said that she’s concerned the administration’s agenda will have “a chilling effect on voters.” She said that despite the long odds on the SAVE Act passing the Senate, or the executive order standing up to legal challenges, the confusion is real.

Redmond City Councilor Kathryn Osborne agreed.

Voters are “being inundated with changing information and they are looking for someone to offer clarity,” Osborne said, adding that local leadership has a responsibility to let voters know that as of now, nothing has changed.

Deschutes County Commissioner Phil Chang blamed the Trump administration’s rhetoric for years of complaints directed at the county clerk’s office, which administers elections, and mounting distrust in the process.

The county clerk, Chang said, has experienced an “exponential increase” in “frivolous threats of litigation” and “insults” since Trump lost the 2020 election.

Wyden pointed to his own political history as evidence of the voting system’s fairness.

“I’m the first United States Senator in America elected through a vote-by-mail system, and I’m very proud of that,” Wyden said, referring to the January 1996 special election. “And I’m also very proud of the fact that shortly after my election, Oregonians chose a Republican.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/01/central-oregon-leaders-vote-by-mail/