By 6:43 a.m. Pacific on Tuesday, when the Oregon Secretary of State's office generated its Election Day morning report, county elections offices had logged 1,505,694 returned ballots for the November 3 general election, 48.3% of the state's 3,117,439 active registered voters. That is more ballots through the day before Election Day than in any Oregon midterm since at least 2002, the earliest midterm in the state's published ballot-count history. By count, that is 150,729 ballots more than 2022 and 128,793 more than 2018 through the same day. By share of registered voters, this morning's still-incomplete 48.3% is 3.1 points above 2022's 45.2% and 1.5 points below 2018's 49.8% (matching 2018's share would take about 47,000 more ballots); the earlier years' figures were recorded after Election Day, when more of the Monday ballots had been logged, so that gap may narrow. Ballots are due in an official drop box or at a county elections office by 8 p.m. tonight. A mailed ballot counts if it is postmarked by today and reaches the county elections office by November 10.
More ballots than any midterm; the share so far trails 2018
| Midterm | Ballots received through the day before Election Day | Share of registered voters | Final turnout |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 1,505,694 | 48.3% | not yet known |
| 2022 | 1,354,965 | 45.2% | 66.9% |
| 2018 | 1,376,901 | 49.8% | 67.8% |
| 2014 | 1,091,634 | 50.2% | 70.9% |
| 2010 | 1,064,722 | 51% | 71.9% |
| 2006 | 1,005,873 | 50% | 70.8% |
| 2002 | 914,595 | 49% | 69.1% |
The 2026 row is this morning's count, which is still being logged; the earlier rows were recorded after Election Day. For 2026 the state divides by active registered voters. Sources: Oregon Secretary of State, 2026 Election Day morning report; earlier years from the state's Ballot Count History on data.oregon.gov, which rounds the older shares to whole percentages, and its Voter Turnout History for general elections. 2024, a presidential year, was 1,738,820, or 56.5%, the day before Election Day and 75.4% in the end.
Secretary of State Tobias Read, a Democrat, said on Monday that turnout looked strong compared with previous midterms, KOBI-TV reported, and the Daily Tidings reported that he told KGW the numbers were tracking ahead of 2018 and 2022. By count the state's figures bear that out: this morning's total is about 129,000 ballots above 2018's and 151,000 above 2022's through the same day. By share they bear it out against 2022 (3.1 points ahead) and not yet against 2018 (1.5 points behind).
Two things separate the two measures. First, the 2026 count is still being logged: the state's report at 4:50 p.m. Monday had 1,481,943 ballots, the Daily Tidings reported, 23,751 fewer than this morning's. Second, the voter roll has grown. The state counted 2,763,105 registered voters in the 2018 general election and 2,985,820 in 2022, against 3,117,439 active registered voters in this year's report. Since January 2016, Oregon's Motor Voter law has automatically registered people who get a driver's license or state ID card, and it registers them as nonaffiliated voters, OPB reported; the share of eligible Oregonians who are registered rose from 75% in 2012 to 94% by 2024. Nonaffiliated voters return ballots at far lower rates than party members, as the figures below show, so a larger roll can mean more ballots and a lower percentage at once. Profoundd did not measure how much of the gap with 2018 each of these accounts for.
Who has returned ballots
Party here means a voter's registration, not how anyone voted; ballots are not opened or counted by party. Registered Democrats have returned 612,415 ballots, 40.7% of all those returned; Republicans 462,306 (30.7%); nonaffiliated voters 326,940 (21.7%); members of the Independent Party of Oregon 79,870 (5.3%); and the smaller parties 24,163 (1.6%). That puts Democrats 10.0 points ahead of Republicans in share of returned ballots (about 150,000 ballots), while Republicans have returned ballots at a 0.8-point higher rate: 62.7% of registered Republicans against 61.9% of registered Democrats, measured against the state's October registration report. Democrats lead on count because they outnumber Republicans in registration by 8.1 points (31.9% to 23.8%; about 251,000 voters). The Independent Party's return rate is 51.6% and nonaffiliated voters' 28.3%.
| Registration | Ballots returned | Share of ballots | Share of the group's registered voters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Democrats | 612,415 | 40.7% | 61.9% |
| Republicans | 462,306 | 30.7% | 62.7% |
| Nonaffiliated | 326,940 | 21.7% | 28.3% |
| Independent Party | 79,870 | 5.3% | 51.6% |
| Smaller parties | 24,163 | 1.6% | 36.1% |
| All voters | 1,505,694 | 100% | 48.3% |
Each group's rate divides by its registered voters in the state's October 2026 registration report (3,103,265 voters in all). The all-voters rate uses the ballot report's 3,117,439 active registered voters; against the registration report's count it would be 48.5%.
How the count has grown
| State report | Ballots received | Share of active registered voters | Democrats' share of ballots | Republicans' share | Nonaffiliated share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Friday, Oct. 30, 8:13 a.m. | 1,086,787 | 34.9% | 42.1% | 31.1% | 19.9% |
| Monday, Nov. 2, 4:50 p.m.* | 1,481,943 | 47.5% | 40.8% | 30.7% | not reported |
| Tuesday, Nov. 3, 6:43 a.m. | 1,505,694 | 48.3% | 40.7% | 30.7% | 21.7% |
*As reported by the Daily Tidings, which gave the Democratic and Republican counts only. The October 30 and November 3 rows are from the state's reports, which Profoundd saved and analyzed on each day.
The 418,907 ballots logged between the October 30 and November 3 reports came 37.1% from registered Democrats, 29.7% from Republicans and 26.4% from nonaffiliated voters, so the nonaffiliated share of all returned ballots rose from 19.9% to 21.7% over those days. Democrats' lead in returned ballots grew from 119,170 to about 150,000 even as their share of the total fell.
The state's 2024 party breakdowns survive from two reports that bracket today's point in the count: one from the morning of Monday, November 4, 2024, a day earlier than today's report, and one from the evening of Election Day, November 5, after many Election Day ballots had come in. Democrats were 39.9% and then 38.7% of returned ballots; Republicans 31.4% and then 29.5%; nonaffiliated voters 21.9% and then 24.8%. In the final 2024 count Democrats were 38.1%, Republicans 28.0% and nonaffiliated voters 27.0%. Of the roughly 876,000 ballots logged as received after that Monday morning, 35.4% came from nonaffiliated voters, 35.1% from Democrats and 22.3% from Republicans.
In all, 87.8% of registered Republicans, 86.8% of Democrats and 56.6% of nonaffiliated voters returned a ballot in 2024, according to the state's statistical summary of that election. 2024 was a presidential election, when turnout runs higher than in midterms. Registration has also shifted since: between that election and October 2026, by the state's counts, Democrats went from 33.1% to 31.9% of registered voters (about 23,000 fewer), nonaffiliated voters from 36.0% to 37.2% (about 53,000 more) and Republicans from 24.0% to 23.8% (about 2,000 more).
By county
Return rates run from 63.2% in Wallowa County, followed by Grant and Gilliam counties at 60.5% and Wheeler County at 60.1%, down to 37.2% in Malheur County, 40.2% in Umatilla, 40.4% in Morrow and 43.3% in Multnomah, the state's largest county. Registered Republicans have returned more ballots than registered Democrats in 26 of Oregon's 36 counties. Democrats lead in the other 10, which hold 62.6% of the state's active voters: Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, Lane, Deschutes, Benton, Lincoln, Hood River, Clatsop and Tillamook, where the margin is 1.3 points (159 ballots). Among the other large counties, Republicans lead in Marion County by 1.9 points of ballots returned (2,024 ballots) and in Jackson County by 4.6 points (4,007 ballots). The three Portland-area counties, Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas, have 42.5% of the state's active voters and have sent in 41.0% of the ballots so far, a return rate of 46.6% against 49.6% in the rest of the state.
What is on the ballot
At the top of the ballot is a rematch of the 2022 governor's race between Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat who is also the Working Families Party's nominee, and Republican Christine Drazan, who is also the Libertarian Party's nominee. Brett Smith of the Pacific Green Party is also running. In 2022 Kotek won with 47.0% to Drazan's 43.5%, with independent Betsy Johnson at 8.6%. Also on the ballot are the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Jeff Merkley, who is seeking a fourth term, all six of Oregon's U.S. House seats, all 60 seats in the Oregon House and 15 of the 30 in the state Senate. There are no statewide ballot measures, the first November election in an even-numbered year without one since 1908, according to Ballotpedia.
Tonight and the next week
Unofficial results "will begin to post at results.oregonvotes.gov shortly after 8:00 PM," the state's Voters' Pamphlet says, and the deadline for certifying the election is December 10. Those first numbers will not be complete. Under House Bill 3291, passed in 2021 and first used in 2022, a mailed ballot counts if it is postmarked by Election Day and reaches the county within seven days.
Republican groups challenged a similar Mississippi law, arguing that counting ballots that arrive after Election Day violates the federal law setting the date of the election. On June 29, in Watson v. Republican National Committee, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the federal Election Day statutes do not bar counting ballots postmarked by Election Day and received afterward, which left Oregon's rule in place. "The electorate's choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received," Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority. Justice Samuel Alito, in a dissent joined by three other justices, wrote that accepting late ballots "effectively postpones the date on which the electorate's choice is made, and federal law precludes that postponement." Ballots that arrived after Election Day were 1.8% of Oregon's votes in 2022 and 0.6% in 2024, according to OPB.
Read has urged voters to use a drop box today. Anyone who must mail a ballot should have it postmarked by hand at a post office before 5 p.m., he said, KOBI reported. Postmarks are sometimes delayed now that mail from outlying areas is sent to Portland, the state's only remaining mail processing center, OPB reported.
Multnomah County's schedule shows updates at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. tonight and at midnight; at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; on Thursday, November 12, the first business day after the November 10 deadline for postmarked ballots to arrive; on November 25, after the November 24 deadline for voters to cure challenged ballots; and on November 30, the county's certification deadline. Results of Multnomah County and city of Portland candidate races, which use ranked-choice voting, appear only on the county's own results site, rcvresults.multco.us, and are not updated at 10 p.m. tonight.
In Multnomah County, election monitors from the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division are scheduled to observe today as staff accept and process ballots; the department told state officials on October 22 that it would send an unspecified number. "Our monitors only observe and take notes," Anelise Powers, a Civil Rights Division attorney, wrote to Read, according to OPB. "They do not intrude or interfere in any way in the voting process." The department told NPR it prioritizes counties with competitive races, and Oregon's 5th Congressional District, the state's most competitive, includes part of Multnomah County; OPB reported that it was not immediately clear why the department chose Multnomah. The county is one of a growing list: the department told Bloomberg it would deploy up to 1,000 monitors nationwide, and counties in Washington, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota and Texas have also been notified, OPB reported, citing NPR.
Read said in a statement that "it is not legal for these observers or anyone else to interfere with Oregon's elections – even the Department of Justice." "They're just observers," Multnomah County Elections Director Tim Scott told OPB. "They have to follow the same rules that everybody else does." The Secretary of State's office says the Justice Department has sent election monitors for decades to protect voters from racial discrimination or intimidation, and that monitors may observe, "document potential violations of federal voting laws, and raise concerns with election officials," but have no authority over how the election is run. County rules bar observers from, among other things, talking to election workers, interfering in conversations between election workers and voters, photographing or filming sensitive voter information, and handling ballots, according to the office.
About these numbers
The 2026 figures are the Secretary of State's unofficial ballot-return report for the November 3, 2026 election, generated November 3 at 6:43 a.m. It counts ballot envelopes that counties had logged as received through Monday, November 2. Counties log ballots by the date received, not the date processed, so Monday's count will keep rising for a while; the report's day-by-day table totals two fewer ballots than its county and party tables. Active voters are a snapshot from October 16. Party rates divide each group's returned ballots by its registered voters in the state's October 2026 registration report, prepared October 5 (3,103,265 voters in all), so they use a slightly different voter count from the 48.3% overall figure.
Earlier midterm figures are from the state's Ballot Count History, which records ballots received through each day as logged after Election Day; because the 2026 figure was taken the morning after, the comparison with earlier years, if anything, understates 2026. Final turnout is from the state's Voter Turnout History. The 2024 party figures are from the state's reports generated November 4, 2024 at 10:06 a.m. and November 5, 2024 at 6:58 p.m., both read from the Internet Archive's copies because the state has removed the file, and from its statistical summary of that election. Profoundd found no copy of the state's Election Day morning report for 2022: the Internet Archive's only capture of that file, checked November 3, is an error page, and Profoundd did not ask the Secretary of State's office for it, so this story gives no 2022 party comparison. Other tallies, such as the 1.16 million ballots for Monday that KTVZ reported from NBC News and TargetSmart, use other data and a larger count of registered voters, and do not match the state's.
This article reflects data and reporting through the morning of Tuesday, November 3, 2026. Sources: Oregon Secretary of State, unofficial ballot returns (generated November 3, 6:43 a.m.), the October 2026 voter registration report, the Ballot Count History, the Voter Turnout History, the 2026 Voters' Pamphlet, the 2024 daily ballot returns reports of November 4 and November 5 (Internet Archive) and 2024 statistical summary, and its October 23 release on the federal monitors; Multnomah County Elections, November 2026 results schedule; the Oregon Legislature, House Bill 3291 (2021); the U.S. Supreme Court, Watson v. Republican National Committee, No. 24-1260 (June 29, 2026); OPB, June 29, 2026, October 23, 2026 and December 26, 2024; KOBI-TV, November 2; the Daily Tidings, November 3; KTVZ, November 2; Ballotpedia, September 21; Wikipedia's pages on the 2026 Oregon elections and the 2026 and 2022 governor's races. Party figures describe voter registration, not votes.
