More than 300 noncitizens have been added to Oregon’s voter rolls over the last three years, after lawmakers passed a bill allowing people to obtain drivers licenses in the state without proving citizenship, according to a recent review by the state’s Driver and Motor Vehicle Services division.
And state officials could not say Friday how much larger that number — 306 — might grow in coming days, as the DMV continues to look at people it’s registered to vote automatically via the state’s Motor Voter Law.
“It’s moving along very quickly. We’re throwing a lot of resource at looking at this,” Amy Joyce, the state’s DMV administrator, said in a call with reporters. “But I can’t tell you right now where we are in the process.”
Just two of the people identified so far have actually voted, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade said in a release Friday.
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Voting as a noncitizen is a crime in Oregon, but elections officials said Friday they would look into whether the people in question had become citizens before they voted.
Officials were also emphatic that the errant registrations would not impact this year’s election, saying noncitizens found to have been registered would be notified that they would need to submit proof of citizenship before being mailed a ballot next month.
Even so, the discovery of the unintended registrations — attributed by Joyce to human error and lax processes at the DMV — is likely to become a matter of interest less than two months before a presidential election. It comes at a time national Republicans have been increasingly raising claims about noncitizens voting.
“The Secretary of State’s Office was made aware of the issue late on September 12 and acted within 24 hours,” a press release from the secretary of state’s office said. “Residents impacted by this issue were noncitizens at the time they were erroneously registered. They will be notified by mail that they will not receive a ballot unless they demonstrate that they are eligible to vote.”
FILE - Ballots are processed at the Washington County Elections Office in Hillsboro, Ore., May 21, 2024.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
So far, state officials have identified 306 non-voters who made their way onto voter rolls due entirely to state error. Willamette Week first reported on the discovery.
The problem has roots in the the intersection of two relatively recent state laws. The first — Oregon’s pioneering motor voter law — automatically registers people to vote when they receive or renew a driver’s license in the state. The law has been hailed for expanding Oregon’s voter base since going into effect in 2016.
The second is a 2019 bill that allowed people to obtain driving privileges in the state without first showing proof of citizenship. That law, passed almost entirely along party lines, went into place in 2021.
But registrants were not supposed to be included in automatic voter registration. Joyce said Friday that the issue was caused by “human error in marking the kind of document that’s being presented” when people apply to receive or renew a driver’s license. She said DMV has added additional safeguards to ensure the problem doesn’t continue, and said the agency has not detected any patterns in the error or identified individual employees for discipline.
“While this error is regrettable, the Secretary and the Elections Division stand by automatic voter registration and its many benefits,” the secretary of state’s office said in its press release. “For the vast majority of eligible Oregonians who were registered through Oregon Motor Voter, this has increased access to our democracy. Oregon elections officials are firmly committed to ensuring eligible voters have the opportunity to exercise their right to vote.”
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State Treasurer Tobias Read, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state in the November election, issued a statement Friday saying he was “appalled” by the discovery.
“The responsibility for managing our election system lies with the Secretary of State’s office,” Read said in a statement. “No voters should be added to the registration rolls until the Secretary of State has been able to independently verify that the data it receives from any source is accurate and complete. I hope that the current Secretary of State will work quickly to protect the integrity of our system.”
State Sen. Dennis Linthicum, the Republican nominee for secretary of state this year, did not immediately respond to an inquiry.
Meanwhile, state Rep. Janelle Bynum, a Democrat and candidate in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, called on the state’s Department of Justice to investigate.
“Voter registration and election integrity is incredibly important to the DMV and we’re instrumental in that process,” said Joyce. “Therefore, if it’s appropriate for someone to come in and look at our processes and our work, then that’s what should happen.”
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The issue of noncitizen voting has been a political hot button this year, with former President Donald Trump repeatedly pressing lawmakers in his party to take action on the matter.
“Noncitizen Illegal Migrants are getting the right to vote, being pushed by crooked Democrat Politicians who are not being stopped by an equally dishonest Justice Department,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in July, according to CNN.
At Trump’s insistence, Republicans are considering tying a bill to require voters provide proof of citizenship to a spending bill that would avert a government shutdown at the end of the month.
“There are a number of states who have shown they have noncitizens on their voter rolls. That is enough to create chaos in the election. And we have to stop it,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told CNN recently.
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Earlier this year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, announced that routine reviews by elections officials over the last three years had removed more than 6,500 “potential noncitizens” from that state’s voter rolls. More than 1,900 of those people had a voter history, according to Abbott’s release.
In Ohio, a recent review found 597 people who’d registered to vote despite not being active citizens. According to Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, that included 138 people “who appear to have cast a ballot in an Ohio election during the time state and federal records show they lacked citizenship status.”
Despite those anomalies, there is not evidence that non citizens are voting in massive numbers, as some Republican officials allege.