By Julia Shumway/Oregon Capital Chronicle
Oregon erroneously added more than 1,200 people without documented proof of citizenship to its voter rolls in the past few years and nine of those people voted, state officials announced Monday.
Those numbers, the result of a lengthy review over the past two weeks, are far higher than the Secretary of State’s Office or the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services division of the Oregon Department of Transportation initially acknowledged. However, they’re still a drop in the bucket compared to Oregon’s more than 3 million total registered voters, and state officials stressed that the error will not affect the 2024 general election.
None of the 1,259 wrongly registered voters will receive ballots unless and until they reregister to vote as citizens.
“We really appreciate the work the DMV did to catch this error and correct it, and we did catch it in time. I am pleased to say with certainty this issue will have no impact on the 2024 election,” said Ben Morris, chief of staff to Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade.
The issue stems from errors made by front-desk staff at DMV offices across the state since Jan. 1, 2021, when Oregon began accepting a wider range of identity records, including foreign passports and foreign birth certificates, from people seeking driver’s licenses or state-issued ID cards.
State officials confirmed late Sept. 13 that since 2021, 306 people who presented foreign passports when seeking or renewing their driver’s license had those passports wrongly marked as U.S. passports, held only by citizens. That meant that those noncitizens had their information wrongly sent to the Secretary of State’s Office to process voter registrations.
A subsequent review found another 953 people were wrongly registered to vote since 2021 with foreign birth certificates. Since learning about the errors, the DMV has changed its processes to prevent similar clerical errors, said Amy Joyce, the division’s administrator.
Now, DMV staff will have to enter the state and county of birth when recording a U.S. birth certificate. A dropdown menu has been reordered to make it harder to default to entering a U.S. passport, and in the coming weeks the DMV plans to add separate screens for recording citizen and noncitizen documents.
The DMV also added another daily audit by managers to make sure the document recorded by front-desk staff matches the scanned document in its system before sending information about citizens who obtained or renewed licenses or ID cards to the Secretary of State’s Office.
Nine voted
Ten of the 1,259 wrongly registered voters have cast ballots, though one turned out to have been a U.S. citizen who has a decades-long voting record. Molly Woon, the state’s elections director, said it appears that individual just didn’t bring documentation that would prove citizenship when they applied for a driver’s license.
Woon said county clerks and the state are investigating whether the nine individuals who have cast ballots are eligible to vote, starting by sending letters to all affected people.
“The number could definitely decrease,” she said.
It’s a crime for noncitizens to register to vote or cast a ballot in federal and state elections, though some jurisdictions allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. Voting as a noncitizen can result in prison sentences, fines and deportation.
If the nine people affected don’t indicate they were citizens when they cast their ballots, the Secretary of State’s Office will refer them to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation, Woon said.
The DMV only discovered the errors after receiving a call from the Institute for Responsive Government with a general inquiry about the state’s use of automatic voter registration.
“When we got this inquiry, which was very vague and general, because of the importance of this topic, we started digging in,” Joyce said.
Gov. Tina Kotek on Monday directed the DMV to immediately provide updated training to all staff and complete a comprehensive report detailing the errors, the reason for them and why they won’t happen again.
“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. “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.”
Republican reaction
Republicans have used reports of the errors to call for more restrictions on voter registration. Christine Drazan, Kotek’s 2022 Republican opponent who is now running to return to the state House, called last week for a pause on automatic voter registration. Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, called for a comprehensive audit of all voter registrations, and House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich, R-Hood River, is pushing for a presentation to the Legislature.
Four House Republicans – Ed Diehl of Stayton, E. Werner Reschke of Malin, Anna Scharf of Amity and Dwayne Yunker of Grants Pass – announced last week that they will introduce a bill in 2025 to require individuals registering to vote in Oregon to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or U.S. passport. They didn’t provide a copy of the proposal, but it would have slim chances of passing in a Legislature controlled by Democrats. Its name, the SAVE Act, is the same as a federal bill.
Federal law requires only that people registering to vote swear, under penalty of perjury, that they are citizens. Only one state, Arizona, requires people to provide proof of citizenship when registering. Because that state’s requirements are more stringent than the federal government’s, Arizona now has two voter registration lists, with voters who did not provide proof of citizenship receiving only ballots with federal races for president, U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Arizona discovered an error with driver’s licenses this year that temporarily risked the eligibility of nearly 100,000 people who had held driver’s licenses in the state since before 1996. In that instance, the Arizona Supreme Court directed election officials not to disenfranchise voters.
This story first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
