Oh hai, Wikipedia!
No such convenience for Washington, alas.
If you look up voter fraud, most voter fraud cases do seem to involve absentee ballots, which are mailed in.
Yet, there doesn’t seem to be a hue and cry by Republicans against mailed in ballots. Interesting.
I’m in favor of all sorts of policies to make it easier to register and easier to vote. Early voting, mailed ballots, automatic registration. All of them are great. I think we should make voting mandatory (allowing an option to abstain on each issue/position) and make it so easy that everyone’s vote gets counted.
But if someone sees the possibility of jury duty as enough of a downside that they don’t want to participate in democracy, I’m fine with them choosing not to vote. You get rights and responsibilities as a member of a democracy. If you want to opt out, good for you.
I would think that connecting jury duty to voter registration presents a rather huge disincentive to registering. If Smapti called that a “poll tax” I’d actually be inclined to see his point.
This is almost not news. In every state I’ve ever lived in the place to register was the D(or B)MV. Once upon a time it was a separate form. Filling it out gave you something to do if you were going anyway. Then it didn’t even take a form to update just verbally confirm and they’d pull over the new address. If I was in Oregon this might save me 15 seconds at the counter versus my most recent experiences updating registrations. What ever will I do with the extra time? 
For anybody with any kind of decent job, jury duty has the potential to be a financial burden. Jurors get a paid for their service, but it’s almost always a trivial token amount, far smaller than what you would have earned while working. In that sense, connecting jury duty to voting could well be a form of indirect poll tax, since you would be skewing the voter rolls against the working poor, who cannot afford to skip work for possibly several days or longer.
Interesting way to look at it. My job, which seems pretty decent, provides me with paid personal and vacation days. Even if it didn’t, I don’t think I’d consider my burden greater than that of someone working a shitty low-wage job, merely because the jury duty pittance is closer to what they’d have earned at work anyway.
I don’t remember much resistance and can’t find evidence of it online. We’d had permanent absentee for a long time. It had been working in Oregon for several years. The Secretary of State was a Republican and completely for vote by mail. It was going to save a lot of money for the counties, especially the rural (and mostly Republican) counties, so as soon as they had the option to change to all mail, many of them did. It is a good idea on pretty much every front, no one opposed it.
Also, the voting fight at the time was over the primaries (where all of the official parties were on one side and people, regardless of political affiliation, were on the other). No one cared about this at all.
Apparently, Oregon is the only national preserve for the sane and responsible Republican. With some hesitation, I am moved to suggest that they be expelled and forced to emigrate to other states where their presence is sorely needed.
I’m in Washington, and it has happened county by county, not state wide all at once. I’m pretty sure some counties still have polling places, even though anyone can opt in to mail-in ballots anywhere without the traditional need for “absentee” ballots.
Anyway, I don’t recall any Republican opposition. Some complained about the price of a stamp (really), but they have drop off locations for ballots at libraries and such, so no one has to buy a stamp. My county is pretty conservative, I think it was done mostly to save money more than increase participation.
I swear in the voting booth quite often myself.
And “in a free country” is starting to be a code word identifying conservatives.