FILE - Ballots move through the signature verification machine at the Washington County Elections Office in Hillsboro, Ore., May 21, 2024. A review found more than 1,200 noncitizens were mistakenly added to Oregon's voter rolls since 2021.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
Oregon erroneously added 1,259 people who didn’t provide proof of U.S. citizenship to the state’s voter rolls since 2021, Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade announced Monday, a far higher number than previously known.
In addition, 10 of those people who were improperly registered subsequently voted, though at least one had become a U.S. citizen by the time they cast a ballot.
According to the state’s Driver and Motor Vehicles Division, those numbers — determined after an extensive and time-consuming review — represent the total extent of a problem revealed earlier this month.
On Sept. 13, the state announced that at least 306 noncitizens had been added to the voter rolls because of clerical errors on the part of DMV staff, and that two had voted. The new figure is more than four times what was reported 10 days ago.
Elections officials stressed that the issue will not be a factor in the November election. Griffin-Valade on Monday ordered that the 953 newly identified erroneous registrations be inactivated by county-level election officials.
“Election integrity and security is of vital importance to us, and the DMV and the Secretary of State take the issue incredibly seriously,” Kris Strickler, director of the Oregon Department of Transportation, told reporters on Monday. The agencies “have continued to implement swift corrective action to ensure that this data processing error will not impact the 2024 election or future elections.”
Under Oregon’s 2016 motor voter law, people who obtain or renew a driver’s license are automatically registered to vote if they submit proof of U.S. citizenship. The state now says that a poorly laid out dropdown menu in a DMV computer program led workers to mistakenly indicate that noncitizens had presented U.S. passports or birth certificates when they had not.
Strickler and DMV Administrator Amy Joyce say the errors had roots in a law passed by Democratic lawmakers that in 2021 allowed people to obtain a driver’s license in Oregon without showing proof they are in the country legally. The law was aimed at allowing undocumented immigrants to legally drive, but the two transportation officials said Monday it led to the DMV processes that created opportunity for error.
Oregon has long issued driver’s licenses to noncitizens holding valid green cards, which allow noncitizens to live and work in the U.S. legally. But Joyce and Strickler insisted Monday there was no opportunity for those people to be inappropriately registered to vote prior to the 2021 law change. It’s not clear whether any green hard holders were included in the errant registrations.
The state has already revised the dropdown menu and included new safeguards to ensure the problems don’t continue, Joyce said. That includes requiring that DMV workers enter an applicant’s state of birth, and having office managers review transactions to ensure they were entered correctly.
“There are currently three million registered voters in Oregon, so we’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent,” said Ben Morris, Griffin-Valade’s chief of staff. “Automatic voter registration at the DMV remains the most trusted and secure way for engaging more eligible voters in our democracy.”
Gov. Tina Kotek also announced Monday she was directing the DMV to take several steps to “protect the integrity of Oregon’s motor voter program.”
Those include providing updated staff training, completing a “comprehensive after action report,” and launching an external review of the DMV’s data by the end of the year.
“The integrity of election systems is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy, and any error that can undermine our voting system must be taken seriously and addressed immediately,” Kotek said in a statement. “Following round-the-clock corrective action on the part of Oregon DMV to address the known errors and ensure they will not impact the 2024 general election, I am now directing the agency to go above and beyond to ensure errors like this will not happen again.”
Oregon Democrats have faced pressure to act since news of the improper registrations emerged.
House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich, R-Hood River, has called for a legislative hearing as lawmakers meet in Salem this week. Democrats have so far declined to call one.
And Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, sent a letter to Kotek last week urging her to order more thorough scrutiny of the state’s voter rolls. Such actions have been a priority for Republicans across the country this year, but Kotek does not have primary authority for overseeing the state’s elections system. That falls to Griffin-Valade.
Democrats, too, have voiced displeasure — particularly those running for office this year. State. Rep. Janelle Bynum, a Clackamas Democrat running for Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, called for an investigation by the state’s Department of Justice.
And Tobias Read, the Democratic nominee for secretary of state, said again Monday he is “appalled” at the errors.
“While it appears that these errors were made at the DMV, at the end of the day the responsibility for our voter registration system lies with the Secretary of State,” Read said in a statement. “There should have been a ‘fail safe’ system in place at the SOS to ensure the integrity of data coming into our election system. That should be instituted immediately.”
