Secretary of State Tobias Read visited Reed in mid-September to discuss with students, alumni, faculty, and staff the value of voting, particularly in the upcoming midterm elections.
By Cara Nixon
October 27, 2026
The night before Secretary of State Tobias Read visited Reed for a discussion with students, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms.
For the September 15 event focused around the question, Does Voting Matter?, this created even more discussion fodder for a full room of engaged students, alumni, faculty, and staff. But even the fact the Supreme Court had to make such a decision, Read said, proves how much voting does matter. “Power answers to us,” he said, not the other way around, and this principle being tested reinforces that.
But voter turnout has been on a downward trend, particularly among young people, which is why Read started the Oregon Campus Voting Challenge, a program aimed at increasing student voter participation in the upcoming general election. Reed is one of 20 schools across Oregon joining the challenge.
Despite low voting rates, statistics back up how important a vote can be. Since 2018, 660 elections across the United States have been decided by 10 votes. In the same timeframe, 94 elections have been decided by just one vote.
So, voting does matter—that may have been an easy answer. But the discussion quickly turned to how we protect that civil right, and how we can best use it to our advantage, particularly in uncertain times. Attendees asked some key questions: Ten years from now, where will mail-in voting be? What are potential challenges and advantages to electronic voting? And, a question on everyone’s minds: What about 2028?
The best way to protect voting, it turns out, is to use that civil right. And Read recommended planning for your voting ahead of time, and to always vote early if you can. “Everyone has a responsibility to make their own plan,” he said.
Part of the problem for college students is that they often don’t know where to start. That’s why Reed’s student engagement program, Students for Education, Equity, and Direct Service (SEEDS), partners with TurboVote, a service that makes it easy to register to vote, receive election date reminders, and locate ballot drop off boxes. The closest ballot drop box to Reed is up Woodstock Boulevard, outside the library on 49th Avenue.
In Oregon, ballots have been sent out. The midterm election is on November 3. The Secretary of State left event attendees with an important message as voting begins: “Presidents don’t decide elections—people do.”