Oregon Secretary Of State Defends Law Automatically Registering Hundreds Of Noncitizens To Vote
Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade, a Democrat, defended the state’s “motor voter” law after it allowed the state to register hundreds of noncitizens to vote.
“Automatic voter registration has been hugely beneficial for thousands of eligible Oregon voters to ensure access to our democracy,” Griffin-Valade said in a press release. “I am also personally calling on the DMV to take immediate action to improve its processes to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Griffin-Valade’s office said in the press release that it found out about this issue on Sept. 12. Communications Director Laura Kerns told The Federalist these errors led to 306 improper registrations, and the secretary’s office does not have the number of improperly registered voters affiliated with each political party. The Associated Press reported the state has registered these residents since 2021.
When The Federalist asked other questions, like whether this would affect November’s election and if there could be more noncitizens on Oregon’s voter rolls, Kerns pointed to the press release.
Griffin-Valade’s office said in the release that while the “error is regrettable,” the secretary supports the Oregon Motor Voter program for enabling “access to our democracy.”
Under this program, Oregon residents older than 16 who apply for a state permit, driver’s license, or ID and provide documents proving U.S. citizenship are automatically registered to vote, according to a statement provided to The Federalist from Oregon DMV Administrator Amy Joyce. Oregon’s automatic voter registration includes a “two-step review” process to verify identity and residence to confirm voting eligibility.
“While proactively analyzing this system in advance of the 2024 election, DMV identified possible, though unlikely, causes for error,” Joyce said in the statement.
Workers at the Oregon DMV made errors recording the forms of identification provided, leading the system to automatically register noncitizens to vote. One possible cause was DMV staff recording foreign passports as U.S. passports, and another was staff recording foreign birth certificates as U.S. birth certificates.
The DMV analyzed the passport-based registrations as they were “subject to the biggest risk for error,” after which it found the incorrect registrations composed 0.01 percent of total registered voters.
“Because having a U.S. version of either of those documents means a person is a citizen, the system included them in the file DMV sent to the Elections Division for the next step in the voter registration process,” Joyce said in the statement.
Griffin-Valade’s office said in its press release that the registrants at issue “were noncitizens at the time they were erroneously registered.” Her office also said it will notify the noncitizens by mail that they “will not receive a ballot” unless they prove they are eligible to vote.
Federal law requires states to ask people to certify their citizenship and eligibility before registering them to vote. It is a federal crime to knowingly lie about one’s noncitizen status to register to vote in federal, state, or local elections.
The secretary’s office claimed just two of these individuals had voted, and “their citizenship status at the time they voted is unknown.” Joyce said in her statement that they “failed to provide proof of citizenship to DMV.” Noncitizen voting in federal elections is a federal crime.
To prevent further errors, the Oregon DMV has added a prompt to the data entry screen to ensure proper recording of citizenship information, according to Joyce. It has also adopted “daily auditing of all transactions” before sending registrations to the secretary’s office for processing.
“Efforts to verify the birth certificate based registrations remain ongoing and will likely take up to two weeks to complete,” Joyce said in the statement. “This analysis will be completed well before ballots are sent in Oregon.”
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
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