Local elections officials are removing noncitizens from Oregon voter rolls, as controversy swirls

County election officials around Oregon said Monday they’d removed non-U.S. citizens from their voter rolls, after revelations last week that the state had mistakenly registered at least 306 noncitizens since 2021.

Meanwhile, fallout over the discovery continued to reverberate in Oregon politics, with Republicans saying they’ve argued for years that the state’s election laws were too lax, and arguing the errors proved them right.

“This is a deeply troubling development, and I fear it could be just the tip of the iceberg,” Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, wrote in a Monday letter urging Gov. Tina Kotek to enact stricter policies for maintaining voter rolls. “If such errors are occurring, it calls into question the accuracy of our voter rolls and the security of our elections. The integrity of the entire system could be at risk if we fail to act now to prevent further issues.”

House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich, R-Hood River, called for a hearing on the matter when lawmakers convene in Salem next week for interim committee meetings.

“Explain exactly what this is,” Helfrich said Monday, when asked what he wanted to achieve with a hearing. “We need to have answers to what’s going on and be able to get this resolved because we have 50 days left before the election.”

Elected Democrats have also registered concern at the news — for a variety of reasons.

U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, a first-term lawmaker from Tigard who is in a competitive race for reelection, called the errant registrations “total malpractice” by the state’s Driver and Motor Vehicles division, which took responsibility last week for what it characterized as clerical errors that led to improper registrations.

State Rep. Janelle Bynum, vying for Congress in one of the country’s most tightly divided districts, last week called on the Oregon Department of Justice to investigate the matter.

Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, a Democrat, would not say Monday whether she would launch an investigation, saying in a statement that the Secretary of State would have to decide whether to refer the matter to her office. Kotek’s office did not say whether the governor would support an inquiry.

The Secretary of State’s office didn’t provide a breakdown of where people mistakenly registered to vote live, but county clerks in some places issued statements Monday signaling they’d removed noncitizens from their active voter rolls.

Klamath County said it had been alerted to one such person. Lane County said it had found 11. Clackamas County: 18. Deschutes County: 12.

In Multnomah County, the state’s most populous, 58 people had been removed from voter rolls, according to Elections Director Tim Scott. In Washington County, Elections Manager Dan Forester said state elections officials sent 95 names, and that his office could not verify citizenship for 94 of them. “The Elections Division is reaching out to gather more information on their citizenship status,” Forester said.

None of those identified in any of the six counties had voted, officials said.

Oregon’s woes are the result of the intersection of two laws. In 2016, the state launched a pioneering “motor voter” law that automatically registers people to vote when they receive or renew a driver’s license.

Then, in 2019 — after years of wrestling over the issue — Oregon Democrats opted to allow noncitizens to receive driver’s licenses, passing the policy on a near-party-line vote. But people who cannot offer proof of citizenship while applying for a license are not supposed to be registered to vote.

The DMV said Friday an audit of registrations since noncitizen licenses began being issued in 2021 turned up 306 people who’d been registered to vote improperly — two of whom have voted. The agency said it was still reviewing records, with more than 100 people working over the weekend, and that the numbers might grow. Oregon has more than 3 million registered voters.

It’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in state or federal elections, and election officials emphasized last week that none of those mistakenly registered had asked to be added to voter lists. The state is looking into whether the two people found to have voted first obtained U.S. citizenship before doing so.

“These folks were registered by no fault of their own, they didn’t do anything wrong,” Molly Woon, the state’s election director, told reporters Friday. “That will weigh heavily in any decisions that are made.”

Indeed, the prospect that noncitizens who had not asked to receive a ballot could be prosecuted for voting posed a problem for some.

“Mistakes like this not only compromise the integrity and trust in our voting system, but they also place innocent individuals in jeopardy, potentially affecting their legal pathways to U.S. citizenship,” state Rep. Ricki Ruiz, D-Gresham, said in a statement on the social media platform X on Saturday. “I share the concerns of our community and stand committed to ensuring that our voter registration process is accurate, secure and fair for everyone involved.”

State officials stressed last week that the registration errors would not impact this year’s election and that no noncitizen would receive a ballot. But that was not enough to keep the issue out of the national limelight, at a time Republicans have been playing up the threat of widespread voting by noncitizens.

Frank LaRose, the Republican secretary of state of Ohio who has actively purged voters from the state’s rolls, told Fox News over the weekend that Oregon’s situation served as a cautionary tale.

“This is why we have resisted so-called automatic voter registration in Ohio,” LaRose told the outlet. “We have multiple really convenient ways to register in Ohio, but there are people who should not be registered…” While instances of noncitizens being registered to vote have cropped up in states around the country, there is no evidence that they have voted in massive numbers.

Even so, former President Donald Trump and top national Republicans have pressed the issue all year. Congressional Republicans are currently considering making a spending bill to avert a government shutdown contingent on the passage of another bill that would require voters to provide proof of citizenship.