Earlier this week, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek called for the state Driver and Motor Vehicles Division (DMV) to pause automatic voter registration.
At the latest count, nearly 1,300 people were mistakenly added to Oregon’s voter rolls through the state’s Motor Voter law. State elections officials have said the erroneous registrations have not led to a rush of illegal voting.
FILE - The headquarters of Oregon's Driver and Motor Vehicles Division in Salem, Ore., June 15, 2017. An audit by the DMV found it had mistakenly registered about 1,300 people to vote under the state's Motor Voter law, which automatically registers people who provide proof of citizenship when they obtain an Oregon driver's license or ID.
Andrew Selsky / AP
Amy Joyce is the administrator for the DMV and joined OPB “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic to discuss the error.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Lillian Karabaic: How did this error occur in the first place?
Amy Joyce: So fundamentally, the error occurred for the most part when staff inadvertently selected the wrong kind of document that a person had presented to prove their identity when getting an ID card or a driver’s license in Oregon.
Inadvertently selecting something like “U.S. passport” rather than choosing “foreign passport.” And then that would code into the system as proving citizenship and go over in the OMV or Oregon Motor Voter file that we send daily to the secretary of state’s office.
Karabaic: So why was there a six-week delay between when you first learned about this and when you alerted the secretary of state?
Joyce: It’s a good question. So, there are a couple of reasons. First of all, when we got the initial outreach that caused us to dig in, we had to figure out if there was a problem and then we needed to figure out what was the source of the problem and then the scope of the problem. And that took some time. So, my goal in that time period was to be able to provide actionable information when I brought it forward, which we had on about Sept. 12.
In hindsight, I should have notified people sooner that the problem existed, even if I didn’t have that actionable information yet.
Karabaic: And so you said actionable information, you’ve said you’ve put some safeguards in place, right? What are those?
Joyce: A number of safeguards. We’ve made significant changes to the user interface that our staff sees when they are choosing those documents. So we’ve changed the dropdown menu to make it more difficult to choose a U.S. passport or a U.S. birth certificate. In that system, we are requiring that staff enter the state and county of birth for a birth certificate document in the U.S. and made some other changes like that. In addition to the system changes, we’ve now done intensive training with staff about the mechanics of the entry and also the importance of getting this right every single time. There have been multiple trainings already — and that training is ongoing and will continue to be ongoing into the future.
Karabaic: So the governor previously asked for an after-action report and an outside audit on these data handling practices. What progress have you made with those?
Joyce: The after-action report we submitted on Monday as required and that document is available to the public. And then on Monday the governor ordered an outside audit. So that is going to be handled not by ODOT or DMV, but is going to be coming from the outside. And so we will participate in that in any way that we are requested to do so.
Karabaic: In addition to those previously identified clerical errors, another 178 people from the U.S. territories of American Samoa and Swains Island have been wrongly classified as U.S. citizens. How did that end up happening? Was it the same kind of wrong dropdown menu?
Joyce: No, this was different. From the beginning of Oregon Motor Voter in 2016, DMV had a misinterpretation that people from the U.S. territory of American Samoa were in fact U.S. citizens. And just in the last two weeks, based on an inquiry, we learned that that is not accurate. Therefore, we are going back and we have located the records that you mentioned, the 178, and sent those over to the secretary of state’s office as well for them to take their action where we think we got that wrong.
Karabaic: So with these errors, do you still feel confident in Oregon’s Motor Voter law?
Joyce: Yes, I do. So the changes that we have made have been extensive and fast, and two, I want to stress the culture change that has happened at DMV just in these last, call it one to two months, the recognition that we have not been performing to the level that we needed to be and that this information is critically important and must be correct every time. So both the mechanics have improved significantly.
The system interface, the training, and again, that culture aspect, that intentionality, all of those things have changed to make this a significantly better process today.
Karabaic: Thank you for joining me. That was Amy Joyce, DMV administrator. The secretary of state’s office has said that it has found only seven instances of noncitizens casting a ballot, and that these errors will not impact the upcoming election.