House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R- Canby, says errors unearthed last year show that more safeguards need to be built into Oregon elections.
Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
Last summer, state officials revealed that more than 1,500 potential noncitizens had been mistakenly registered to vote in Oregon. Now a group of Republican lawmakers wants to either change the law that allowed those errors, or scrap it entirely.
One bill introduced by House Republican Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, this week would require the Oregon Secretary of State to verify the citizenship of people who are automatically registered to vote after obtaining a driver’s license or state ID.
Another would simply do away with such automatic voter registrations – a point of pride for some since Oregon helped pioneer the practice nearly a decade ago.
The future of the bills, and others focused on the state’s election system, are unclear. Democrats who control the Legislature have largely defended Oregon’s pioneering Motor Voter law and other efforts to make voting easy and accessible.
But Drazan told OPB Wednesday that without new safeguards like she’s proposing, voter confidence in the state’s election system is at risk. “We need to consider as many additional checks and balances as we possibly can at this time to ensure that we restore trust and, frankly, that our system itself doesn’t have gaping holes in it,” she said.
Under the motor voter law, anyone who presents proof of citizenship when interacting with the state’s Driver and Motor Vehicles division is registered to vote unless they explicitly decline that option. The law, instituted in 2016, is credited by its fans as helping registrations surge, leading to a more diverse pool of voters.
But a concerning flaw emerged last year. The DMV announced in August that staff errors had allowed more than 1,600 people to be registered even though they’d produced no proof of citizenship.
In some cases, Oregon residents had been forwarded to the Secretary of State for registration even though they submitted a foreign passport when obtaining an ID, officials said. DMV workers also registered people who were born in American Samoa, even though they are not automatically U.S. citizens.
State elections officials have said that few, if any, noncitizens actually voted, and that their participation could not have influenced the outcome of any state or local election. DMV officials have said they’ve fixed the problem via better staff training and adding new layers of scrutiny before a person is registered.
But for Republicans who had questioned the system’s integrity, the breach provided evidence that not everything is as secure as their Democratic counterparts have often insisted.
“I have asked, ‘How can we be sure that only citizens are registered to vote?’” state Rep. Kim Wallan, R-Medford, said in a legislative hearing about the problems in September. “I’ve asked that question multiple times. I’ve usually gotten the answer: ‘It’s fine. We check.’”
In October, after revelations that errant registrations were more widespread than initially thought, Gov. Tina Kotek ordered a pause to the motor voter process. It’s still on hold as the state carries out an audit.
Republicans, who hold super-minorities in the House and Senate, are now calling for legislative action.
House Bill 3470 would require Secretary of State Tobias Read’s office to examine any document that DMV staff relied on to confirm a person is a U.S. citizen. Only then could the Secretary of State’s office forward the individual’s information to a county clerk’s office to be added to voter rolls.
The bill would require any voter registrations forwarded by the Oregon Health Authority to undergo the same scrutiny. In 2023, lawmakers agreed to extend automatic voter registration to people signing up for the Oregon Health Plan. But such a step needs federal approval that has not been granted, and OHA does not currently register voters.
Read was running for secretary of state when the voter registration lapse emerged last year, and was highly critical of the errors.
“Oregonians deserve a thorough investigation of the automatic voter registration program’s implementation, as well as accountability at both the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Secretary of State’s Office,” he said in October, as then-Secretary LaVonne Griffin-Valade announced an external audit of the program. “If that is not achieved by this investigation, I can assure you I will provide it if I am the next Secretary of State.”
A spokesperson for Read said Wednesday that the office has not worked out how feasible HB 3470 would be to implement.
“Regardless of what happens with this bill or others or the results from the independent audit, we will be putting in place better controls and processes to minimize the risk of error,” the spokesperson, Tess Seger, said.
HB 3470 isn’t the only possible change on deck this year.
Another bill filed by Drazan and several other House Republicans, House Bill 3473, would scrap automatic voter registration entirely. That’s a step that Democrats have offered no sign they’d support, and that groups that support the Motor Voter law would be sure to fight.
“Oregon’s voter registration law is sound,” said Kate Titus, executive director of the group Common Cause Oregon. “The problem we saw last fall was not a failure of policy. It was a failure of process. It’s not clear that either of these bills is necessary or useful. Certainly, we don’t want to sabotage Oregon’s exemplary voter registration policy.”
There are also Republican bills to order the state’s Department of Administrative Services to conduct an in-depth study of state voter registration, to prohibit the practice of “ballot harvesting” where groups turn in ballots on behalf of voters, and to require that anyone registering to vote for the first time in Oregon prove their citizenship. While it’s illegal for someone to vote as a noncitizen, proving citizenship is not necessary to register to vote.
“We are not going to get to perfection, but I think that we should be vigilant,” Drazan said. “We should chase down all of these issues that are of concern.”
House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, D-Tigard, chair of the House committee that deals with election law, did not immediately respond to an inquiry on Wednesday.
