Oregon voters who plan to mail their ballots for the Nov. 3 midterm election should send them by Oct. 27, Secretary of State Tobias Read said Tuesday, after a statewide test found uneven U.S. Postal Service delivery times, particularly in rural counties. Read and county election officials tracked 108 pieces of mail sent on three weekdays in August to election offices in all 36 counties. Every piece would have received a postmark in time to count as a ballot, Read said, but delivery took longer in some parts of eastern and rural Oregon. One letter sent to the Harney County elections office took 11 days to arrive. Oregon accepts ballots that arrive up to a week after Election Day, provided they are postmarked on or before Election Day. Read said voters can be confident their ballots will be postmarked and delivered on time if they mail them at least a week before the election. Ballots not mailed by Oct. 27 should be taken to a drop box or county elections office, he said. Postal workers’ union president Daniel Cortez said a postmark may not reflect the day a ballot was dropped off: under current procedures, it can be applied when mail passes through a processing machine, potentially days later. Voters can ask a postal clerk to postmark a ballot at a retail counter, he said. The warning comes as President Donald Trump has intensified criticism of voting by mail ahead of the midterms. Read also urged voters to report ballot-box tampering or intimidation rather than intervening themselves. They can contact law enforcement, their county elections office or the Secretary of State’s hotline at 503-986-1518. Read said Oregon is preparing to expand its ballot-tracking service statewide in the coming days. Voters in the 31 counties not already covered will be able to sign up at OregonVotes.gov/track for text, phone or email alerts when a ballot is sent, received and accepted for counting. The expansion is funded by part of a $1.25 million allocation from the Legislature’s Joint Emergency Board in September and will be available for the 2026 midterm election. The allocation also helped add more than 20 ballot drop boxes, bringing the statewide total to more than 300. Election workers are scheduled to begin mailing ballots Wednesday. Read urged Oregonians to remain alert to voter intimidation, especially involving federal officials, and to contact election authorities if they have concerns.