We're betting that, as in this case, a few failures won't bring down the entire system and that the overall situation can be discovered and repaired in time to prevent an application outage. Thus, I believe that our design and testing standards carried us thru this heat wave, not luck or accident. The method being discussed usually involves voting by phone or by computer. Sen. Packwood's replacement, to be elected on January 30, will be the first member of the U.S. Congress ever elected in an all-mail election. Ballots will be mailed out to all registered voters a few weeks before the election date.
Voters fill out the ballots in their own home at their leisure.
They can then either send them back through the mail, or take them in person to a designated drop-off point. All completed ballots must arrive by January 30. Oregon has used all-mail elections before for local elections, with pretty good success. But this will be the first time it has been tried in a state-wide election. No one claims to fully understand the risks involved, so people will be watching this election very carefully.