The Lane County Elections Office released the official results of the May 19 Oregon Primary, which yielded a nearly 50% turnout rate.

Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis has been reelected after receiving 67% of the vote. Vinis received 32,193 votes while the six other candidates shared an average of 2,435 votes.

“I am eager to build on the foundation and critical issues I began working on in my first term,” Vinis said.

Measure 20-306 passed, granting a $121.5 million bond to Lane Community College to improve campus safety, security and accessibility. The bond will also be used to improve workforce training and upgrade learning spaces.

Former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump secured the majority of the Democratic and Republican votes for president, respectively. Biden received 64.8% of the democratic vote and while Bernie Sanders, who dropped out of the race on April 8, received 23%. President Trump is the leading Republican candidate with 92.7% of the Republican vote, receiving 27,866 votes while Biden received 41,861.

Voter turnout in Lane County was 45.9% while voter turnout in the state was 46.4%. Oregon consistently ranks as a national leader in voter turnout, according to the Oregon Secretary of State, which it attributes to the state’s voting by mail system, which has been in place for the last 20 years.

Freshman political science and economics major Heather Barclay, who serves as the ASUO Athletics Contracts and Finance Committee, said that voting by mail “should be helping with turnout.”

“Voting in primaries is as relevant and important as voting in November,” Barclay said.

Many Americans and politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are pushing for alternatives to in-person voting due to the COVID-19 pandemic, asserting that voting by mail reduces potential exposure to the coronavirus.

Barclay said she supports voting by mail as it “allows people to not fear exposure to COVID while being able to cast their ballots.”

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman made a similar statement to Time, saying that the vote by mail system “gives voters confidence that they can participate and not have to worry about risk, going out and getting exposed because they’re in a big group of people at a polling place.”

Despite recent statements by Trump regarding the increased potential for voter fraud via voting by mail, the Lane County Elections office said that elections conducted exclusively by mail in the state of Oregon are safe.

“The concerns expressed across the country about the security of voting simply do not apply in our state,” according to the Lane County Elections website. It lists several preventative procedures conducted by the Oregon elections office to limit fraud, including testing the voting system for accuracy and ballot auditing.

Additionally, counties track every ballot and compare all ballot signatures to those in the voter registration database, according to Oregon’s Elections Director Steve Trout.

“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigations have confirmed that no vote tally systems in Oregon, or anywhere else in the country, have been hacked,” according to Lane County Elections.