Political Science Piece

After three and a half years of reading Political Science academic articles, it finally came time to write my own. The capstone seminar class for the Political Science major requires students to apply a scholarly argument related to enfranchisement or disenfranchisement to a contemporary voting rights issue of the students choice. I chose to focus my own research on vote-by-mail, a topic which I knew very little about at the onset. Specifically, I focused on the roll of party building in the passage of Ballot Measure 60 in the State of Oregon, which made Oregon the first state to use vote-by-mail as the primary method of voting across all elections. Countless hours of digging through 1998 Oregon newspapers later, and I am proud to present my own original research.