FILE - Voters at the Multnomah County Elections Division in Portland, Ore., Nov. 8, 2022. Oregon voters can vote by mail-in ballot, drop ballots at secure sites, or vote in-person
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
Oregon elections officials said Wednesday that votes by non-U.S. citizens could not have influenced the outcome of any state race in the past four years.
“There was no contest in which their participation could have had an impact on the outcome of the race,” Ben Morris, chief of staff to Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade, told a legislative committee.
That finding – the result of an analysis of races in which potential noncitizens voted — was one of the only new pieces of information to emerge as lawmakers probed into revelations Oregon has mistakenly registered 1,259 people to vote since 2021 without securing proof of their citizenship.
According to results of an audit released Monday, as many as nine people might have voted since early 2021 even though they were not citizens. Officials have stressed that none of those registered improperly actively sought to deceive the government. State elections leaders have blamed the problem on a clerical error within the DMV.
Related: Updated findings show nearly 1,260 possible noncitizens were registered to vote in Oregon since 2021
Wednesday’s hearing before the House Rules Committee came at a sensitive time: weeks before a high-stakes presidential election and as unsubstantiated claims about mass noncitizen voting are a common talking point for former President Donald Trump. House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, D-Tigard, the committee’s chair, warned his fellow lawmakers to keep overt politics in check.
“This is an oversight hearing,” he said at the beginning of the one-hour hearing. “Oversight should be bipartisan and productive and that will be the goal of this hearing… There’s no question that the errors identified by the DMV and secretary of state are absolutely unacceptable.”
Bowman called the hearing on Tuesday, after more than a week of urging by Republican lawmakers eager to ask questions of officials who they feel have snubbed their questions about voting integrity in the past.
“I have asked, ‘How can we be sure that only citizens are registered to vote?’” said state Rep. Kim Wallan, R-Medford, a member of the committee. “I’ve asked that question multiple times. I’ve usually gotten the answer: ‘It’s fine. We check.’”
But Wallan said the findings of recent weeks suggest otherwise.
“We didn’t have systems in place,” she said. “We certainly didn’t check.”
Related: Local elections officials are removing noncitizens from Oregon voter rolls, as controversy swirls
Data entry errors
According to state officials, the errant registrations were the result of both staff inattention and a poorly laid out computer program. For nearly a decade, Oregon has automatically registered people to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license, a policy known as Oregon Motor Voter. But the DMV is only supposed to forward a person’s information to elections officials if they provide proof they are a U.S. citizen.
The DMV first disclosed Sept. 13 it had discovered in an audit that some clerks had entered people into the system as providing a U.S. passport or birth certificate, when in fact they had provided documents from other countries.
DMV Administrator Amy Joyce has blamed a computer program that defaulted to a U.S. document as workers were entering data into the system. She said the agency has since changed the layout of the program and taken other steps, making it virtually impossible for staff to mistakenly signal a person has proved citizenship.
For instance, when a DMV staffer indicates a person has provided a U.S. passport, a dialogue box now pops up on their computer ensuring they meant to select that option, Joyce said. If staff selects U.S. birth certificate, they are now required to enter the state and county it came from.
DMV has said it began looking into the integrity of its data entry after a relatively vague inquiry from a think tank called the Institute for Responsive Government, which asked if the state had seen any errors in its pioneering Motor Voter Law.
“When we learned of that, we decided then that’s a key that we need to start digging in,” Joyce told lawmakers. “Now let me state the obvious: Should we have been looking sooner than a few months before the election? I think what’s critical here is that when we were posed with the question — on such an important issue and with the election coming very soon — we knew we had to dig in.”
Related: Hundreds of noncitizens were registered to vote in Oregon through state error
State elections officials are still trying to determine how many of the people improperly added to voter rolls returned a ballot illegally. Reviews by county officials already showed that one person had become a citizen by the time they voted, said state Elections Director Molly Woon.
County elections officials were working to determine Wednesday whether others also might have done so. The state plans to send out letters to any voter whose citizenship status remains unclear, Woon said. The secretary of state will forward any suspected incidences of noncitizens voting to the Oregon Department of Justice.
Democratic lawmakers have suggested they would oppose attempts to prosecute people for voting illegally, or to penalize them in any way for the state’s mistake. Some have worried people seeking citizenship could have that effort derailed because of Oregon’s errors.
“Those folks did not ask to be registered. They did not ask to have a ballot mailed to them,” Bowman said. “What is being done to ensure that those individuals are not harmed because of actions taken by the government, not by them?”
Woon, the elections director, said her office would provide letters of “no fault” upon request, verifying errant registrations were the state’s responsibility alone.
Related: Oregon secretary of state race heats up with news of noncitizens being added to state voter rolls
State Rep. Anna Scharf, R-Amity, asked officials whether people registered in error were assigned a political party, or designated as non-affiliated voters as would normally happen. Woon said she hadn’t analyzed that.
Scharf also asked if the federal government had signaled it would investigate the state for the errors. State officials said they’d not gotten wind of any investigation.
Closing out the hearing, House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich, R-Hood River, noted there are still two days left for lawmakers to submit bills to be drafted for the 2025 session. He asked if the Oregon Department of Transportation wanted him to put in a bill on its behalf to help correct the errors it had found.
ODOT Director Kris Strickler declined, saying the agency was conducting increased training and would commission an external review of its data handling processes.
Even so, Republicans made clear they will push legislation next year aimed at the matter. Helfrich, Scharf and Wallan issued a release Wednesday saying they’ll introduce legislation requiring the Secretary of State to audit voter rolls, and to independently verify the eligibility of anyone registered to vote via the DMV.
“While we appreciate the steps the state has taken to prevent problems in the future, more must be done to ensure that Oregon’s elections are safe, secure and accurate,” the lawmakers said in a statement. “Only Americans should vote in American elections, and Republicans will always defend the integrity of our elections.”