Ever since we learned that some people in Russia tried to mess with our last presidential election, election security has been a big topic of concern in America. A handful of state election systems were targeted, including Oregon's.
Trout says $5 million from the federal government for election security improvement will go towards building redundancy in Oregon's current systems.
"To make sure that if something were to happen, we've got backup systems, and we could just flip a switch, or actually have it flip over automatically, so that ... people could still register online, check their ballots, check their registrations, get results," Trout said.
And Oregon's vote-by-mail system is also inherently safer than other systems, according to Trout.
"Actually I think vote by mail provides a lot of security advantages. In a lot of the other states there's concerns about polling places and access to voting machines there, electronic poll books that could go down, or get tampered with, and we don't have to worry about any of those."
Hear Trout in conversation with OPB's Geoff Norcross by clicking play in the audio player at the top of this story.