Oregon’s top election official and senior U.S. senator warn that congressional Republicans’ efforts to end mail-in voting and impose strict voter ID requirements are voter suppression tactics disguised as election integrity.

At a news conference Friday in North Portland’s Albina Library, Sen. Ron Wyden and Secretary of State Tobias Read, both Democrats, raised alarms about the SAVE Act.

It’s a priority for President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, who have introduced several versions of the measure in recent years. The most recent, a House amendment to an unrelated Senate bill, passed the House earlier in February and is expected to come up for a vote in the Senate next week.

Read said the bill would create chaos for election workers and disenfranchise millions of voters in the run-up to a federal midterm election that’s expected to go poorly for Republicans. He added that it would saddle states with massive costs in the middle of an election year, requiring them to remake voter registration systems.

“All of this while doing nothing to address the actual threats to our elections — cyber security and misinformation and the violence and harassment that election workers are facing in the real world,” he went on.

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Wyden vowed to fight the bill in the Senate, where it’s expected to get a vote next week, and he and Read vowed to protect Oregon’s decades-old vote-by-mail system.

Wyden in 1996 was the first federal official to be elected entirely by mail ballots. By the 1998 primary election, Oregon became the first state to have more ballots cast by mail than at polls, and a ballot initiative to move to 100% mail-in voting passed later that year. Oregon became the nation’s first all vote-by-mail state in 2000.

The measure isn’t expected to pass the Senate, where Republicans hold 53 of 100 seats but it takes 60 to end debate and reach a vote on most legislation. President Donald Trump at a GOP conference in Florida Monday said he won’t sign any new legislation until the SAVE Act passes, adding that passing it would “guarantee the midterms.”

“What a staggeringly brazen disclosure,” Wyden said. “We’ve never had a president of the United States of any party say something like this.”

Wyden’s latest warning comes on top of concerns shared earlier this week that wide-scale changes to when the U.S. Postal Service collects mail and postmarks envelopes could also jeopardize voters in Oregon and other states.

What is SAVE?

Under the SAVE Act, people registering to vote would have to present documents proving citizenship — such as a passport or birth certificate — to an official at an elections office. The bill would impose criminal liability on officials for accepting invalidated forms of ID.

Only about half of Americans have a passport, and election experts say the move would disenfranchise many women voters who changed their names after marriage.

Trump says he won't sign bills until Congress overhauls voting

Most Oregon voters today register to vote online with a driver’s license or at the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services Division. Since 2016, the state has automatically registered adult citizens to vote when they obtain or renew driver’s licenses or state ID cards at the DMV, and the number of registered voters rose to more than 3 million in the near-decade since the law took effect.

“This is truly God awful for millions of married women whose current name doesn’t match their birth certificate or passport before their marriage. What a phenomenal headache it’s going to be if they (Republican lawmakers) get away with that,” Wyden said.

Voters mailing in ballots would also need to send proof of ID when they request a mail-in ballot and when they return the ballot. The bill would invalidate high school and college IDs as forms of identification voters can use at polls.

It would also require states to regularly turn over voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. The U.S. Justice Department last year sued Oregon and several other states who refused to turn over voter rolls to the federal government, and a federal judge ruled in January that Oregon didn’t have to share that information.

Republicans supporting the bill have said it’s necessary to stop non-citizens from voting. Read refuted this as a “solution looking for a problem.”

“There is literally no evidence that this is a problem that is affecting any outcomes, any elections. Non-citizen voting is vanishingly rare,” Read said.

A 2020 analysis by Oregon’s Legislative Fiscal Office found the state’s justice department obtained just 38 criminal convictions for voter fraud across 20 years of votes and nearly 61 million cast ballots. It showed an effective 0.0000006% rate of voter fraud in Oregon elections during the past quarter century.

“That is not a crisis. It’s not even really a rounding error,” Read said.

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How Oregonians can make sure their May primary and November general election mail-in votes are counted, according to the Secretary of State’s Office:

1) Drop your ballot in an official drop box.

2) If mailing a ballot back, send it a week or more before the election. If you can’t do that or get the ballot to a drop box, go to a post office and ask an employee for a hand postmark.

“The Postal Service has assured us they will do that, and that will give us a much better chance of being able to count your ballot,” Read said.

3) If you have questions about your registration status, or are unsure if your information such as address is accurate and up-to-date, reach out to your county election clerk.

“The heroes of democracy are the 36 county clerks and elections directors around the state,” Read said.

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News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/03/14/read-wyden-warn-voter-suppression/