Oregonians getting a new driver’s license will once again be automatically registered to vote beginning Wednesday, ending a nearly five-month pause over concerns that because of the law, DMV employees were erroneously registering noncitizens to vote.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek in January. On Wednesday, Kotek ended a pause to automatic voter registrations in the state.
Kathryn Styer Martínez / OPB
The Oregon Department of Transportation on Wednesday released a long-awaited review of the state’s Motor Voter program, the 2016 law that adds residents to the voter rolls unless they proactively decline.
Gov. Tina Kotek ordered the data review in September, following revelations that hundreds of people had been automatically registered to vote in error after interacting with the DMV. The agency is supposed to register people via Motor Voter only if they show proof of citizenship, but staffers forwarded some people to elections officials who had offered no such documentation — or even showed foreign passports.
The report, produced by the consulting firm Deloitte, finds DMV officials have taken steps “that provide adequate confidence” errors will be eliminated, ensuring only eligible voters are registered — though it notes the fixes might not be sustainable. The findings prompted Kotek to lift a pause on automatic registrations she instituted in October.
“Oregon’s electoral system is one of the most secure, effective, and accessible in the nation. Even so, any error that undermines that system or Oregonians’ confidence in that system must be taken incredibly seriously and urgently addressed,” Kotek said in a statement. “After reforms at the DMV and multiple months showing a good bill of data health, it is time to restart Oregon’s Motor Voter program.”
Alongside Kotek’s announcement, Secretary of State Tobias Read announced steps he plans to take to prevent Motor Voter errors going forward. They include directing ODOT to double-check a sample of new registrations each month to ensure they are accurate and creating a new review panel that will scrutinize the DMV’s registration process at least once a year.
“The new protections we are adding today will help us catch and fix government data entry errors faster,” said Read, who took office in January. “These are first steps, focused on getting the fundamentals right. I will continue to dig into the system and take action whenever I can to strengthen our voter rolls and prevent future mistakes.”
The Motor Voter errors have been a black eye on an innovative law that Oregon’s majority Democrats have often regarded with pride. The state was the first in the nation to enact automatic voter registration, and other states have since followed suit.
State elections officials have insisted that a tiny fraction of those registered in error ultimately voted in an election, and that those votes could not have swayed any outcomes. Read’s office said earlier this month it had identified up to 10 people who might have voted as noncitizens, compared to more than 3 million registered voters in the state.
The Oregon Department of Justice is currently investigating three people who may have voted illegally after the state registered them in error.
As the scope of the problem continued to expand last year — from hundreds of errant registrations initially to more than 1,600 by the time a more comprehensive review was done — Kotek eventually ordered ODOT to pause the Motor Voter program, saying she’d resume the practice once a data integrity report was finished.
A preliminary version of that report was released in December. It found that DMV appeared to have taken steps to correct problems with errant registrations — including building new safeguards into a DMV computer program and requiring that staff work be double-checked by supervisors. But the report raised concerns that the fixes might not be lasting.
“These manual measures appear to be taxing on field operations personnel, do not have a long history of performance and testability, and may not be sustainable over the long term,” the report found. The findings remained unchanged in the final draft of the report.
With Motor Voter resuming, state and county elections officials have a little less than three months to update voter rolls before special elections scheduled for May 20.
The governor, along with then-Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade, also called for an external audit of the Motor Voter Program last year. That work is underway.
ODOT has been conducting its own studies, pulling records of recent DMV transactions to verify they were recorded accurately.
Monthly reports on those efforts show no new errors but do detail instances where DMV staff have come across residents whose citizenship status is incorrect in the state system. In the most recent report, the agency uncovered six such errors.
Republican lawmakers, long suspicious of automatic voter registration, have called for more oversight. Several bills introduced this year would nix the Motor Voter law entirely, or establish new safeguards to ensure accuracy.
Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, called for a comprehensive independent audit of the state’s entire voter registration system on Wednesday.
“The mistakes uncovered last year should never have happened in the first place,” Bonham said in a statement. “Moving forward, the state must commit to full transparency and accountability to prevent similar errors from occurring again.”