Hillsboro voters will have five official ballot drop boxes open starting Wednesday, Oct. 14, when ballots begin arriving in mailboxes across Washington County.

State and county officials are urging voters to skip the mailbox and use a drop box instead. U.S. Postal Service routing changes that send all Oregon mail through a Portland processing center for postmarking have delayed ballot delivery. In the May primary, more than 7,300 ballots statewide arrived with late postmarks and could not be counted, a 13.1% rejection rate among late-arriving ballots, the Hillsboro News Times reported.

The five Hillsboro drop box locations, listed on Washington County's elections page, are:

• Hillsboro Brookwood Library, 2850 NE Brookwood Parkway
• Hillsboro Public Library–Shute Park, 775 SE 10th Ave.
• Public Services Building parking lot, 155 N. First Ave. (newly added)
• Washington County Elections Office, 2925 NE Aloclek Drive
• Westside Commons (formerly the Fair Complex), 801 NE 34th Ave.

All five sites are accessible 24 hours a day once they open and will remain available until 8 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3. No postage is required. Voters can use any official drop box in Oregon regardless of which county they live in.

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read has pushed voters toward drop boxes since the May primary exposed the postmark problem. At a Sept. 27 town hall in North Bend, Read said that when a drop box is convenient, a ballot "can go directly to Julie and her team … It doesn't have to go to Portland for processing and postmarking and coming back," as OPB reported. He was referring to Coos County's clerk, but the same Portland routing applies to Washington County mail.

Separately, Oregon lawmakers in September approved Read's $1.25 million emergency request to add 20 drop boxes statewide and expand the BallotTrax ballot-tracking system.

Voters who prefer to mail their ballots should do so by Tuesday, Oct. 27, the last recommended mailing date, according to the city of Hillsboro's elections page. Anyone mailing after that date should ask a USPS clerk to hand-postmark the ballot at their local branch. Ballots mailed by Election Day must carry that day's postmark and can arrive at county offices up to seven days later.

The voter registration deadline for the Nov. 3 general election is Tuesday, Oct. 13. Washington County voters can track their ballot status through BallotTrax on the county's website.