Special Report

Here’s what Election Day will look like in Oregon this fall. Most of the voting will not take place on Election Day at all but probably sometime in October. It’s after dinner and the family gathers around the kitchen table to vote. Mom and dad, maybe with children old enough to be interested, get out […]

The first time you hear about Oregon’s approach to voting, the idea sounds almost un-American. In 1998, the state that gave us assisted suicide decided to run all of its elections by mail: no voting booths, no frantic Election Day get-out-the-vote efforts, no dueling poll-watchers — and no trooping off to the local firehouse to […]

Touch-screen, computerized ballots — officially known as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems — are not a way station to a glorious, all-Internet future for American democracy. They’re a technology cul-de-sac. An election system should be accessible, simple, and efficient. But it must also be as secure, risk-free, and confidence-inducing as possible. Reacting to the […]

Oregon’s statewide vote-by-mail system remains unique — for now. But with little fanfare, liberalized absentee balloting laws elsewhere have prompted a steady expansion of mail voting. In the process, popular support is growing, from the ground up. States are following the gradualist pattern of expansion first set in Oregon. Laws permitting at-will absentee registration in […]

How a vote-by-mail experiment transformed the democratic process.

“The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything. There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There’s enough alcohol in one year’s yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery […]

In a song dedicated to martin Luther King Jr., James Taylor sings: We are bound together By our desire to see the world become A place where our children can grow up free and strong. For more than three decades, the world movement for sustainable development has been driven by that aspiration. The […]

As presently structured, the global trading system frequently pits the working poor in the developed and developing worlds against one another. The subsidies that help sustain the livelihoods of American farmers have a direct, adverse effect on the ability of farmers in the world’s poorest countries to compete on the global market. The conventional wisdom […]

“Oh, and one more thing,” said Sebastian Paauw, organizer of a recent trip I took to the Netherlands, “we’re not going to rent you a car, but we’ll give you a bike.” True to his word, he promptly provided me with a bicycle. And while the cheese, wine, and charmingly narrow streets and alleyways made […]

When the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry was announced last October in Stockholm, the new laureates — Yves Chauvin of the Institute Français du Pétrole, Robert Grubbs of Caltech, and Richard Schrock of MIT — won recognition for creating “fantastic opportunities for producing new molecules.” They had explained and developed a reaction known as metathesis, […]