The Oregon DMV reported Friday it mistakenly allowed 118 people who were almost certainly non-citizens to register to vote, bringing the total number of errant registrations discovered in the last year to more than 1,700.
Only one of those errors occurred since the DMV implemented new guardrails on its automatic voter registration system last fall, and it was corrected the same month it occurred, the report stated. But because the rest occurred prior to last year and went undetected until recently, at least 13 of these individuals were able to and did vote in at least one election, according to the report.
The Secretary of State’s Office is reviewing these individuals’ voting records to determine if they voted illegally or if they had become a citizen after being mistakenly registered and before they voted. Under law, non-citizens are prohibited from voting in national or local elections.
The DMV picked up on its mistake because 116 of the people it had registered to vote subsequently showed the agency proof of identity such as a foreign passport or a green card that indicated they were not citizens.
None of those individuals will receive ballots for upcoming local elections, according to the Association of Oregon County Clerks.
Most of the errors occurred because DMV’s software used between 2010 and 2020 allowed staff to manually select whether an I.D. or driver’s license applicant was a permanent resident, citizen or neither. That led to some staff mistakenly categorizing more than 100 individuals as citizens, automatically allowing them to register to vote through Oregon’s motor voter system.
Last fall, the agency discovered that more than 1,600 individuals who did not provide proof of citizenship at the DMV had been wrongly registered to vote through various flaws in the agency’s processes. Of those, just 17 had a voting history, several of whom voted legally because they became citizens prior to casting a ballot.
The errors prompted Gov. Tina Kotek in October to pause Oregon’s motor voter system, which automatically registers Oregonians to vote when they renew or apply for a driver’s license or state I.D. The governor allowed the program to resume in February after an external review of DMV processes was conducted and the agency found no additional errors in several monthly reviews.
“The governor stands by her decision to restart the Oregon Motor Voter program,” Lucas Bezerra, spokesperson for Kotek, said in a statement Friday. “The governor believes that this is what ongoing accountability looks like.”
The Secretary of State’s Office and DMV have taken numerous actions since the fall to prevent similar errors. The DMV now requires staff to enter a state and county for all U.S. birth certificates. It now requires managers to verify that documents submitted for identification match their entries in the department’s system at the end of each day.
The DMV also reviews a random sample of automatic voter registration records every month and has implemented a daily check in with the Secretary of State’s office.
The agency is now awaiting the results of an external audit of Oregon’s motor voter system, which is due at the end of April.
“We will continue to remain proactive in searching for any outstanding inaccuracies; this report provides another layer of defense to ensure errors are captured automatically and corrected,” DMV spokesperson Chris Crabb said in an email.
In response to the report, four Oregon House Republicans announced their plans to introduce legislation early next week to reassign automatic voter registration from the DMV to the secretary of state.
It’s unclear how logistically difficult that process would be.
“The Secretary of State’s office is working to improve the integrity and accuracy of the data that comes to us via automatic voter registration,” Tess Seger, spokesperson for Secretary of State Tobias Read, said in a statement. “We are working with DMV to ensure they live up to the responsibility of being a national voter registration entity.”
And such legislation would likely face resistance from Democrats, who have long described Oregon’s voting system as secure and said the DMV has taken the proper steps to address any issues.
“Supervising elections across Oregon’s 36 counties is one of the primary functions of the secretary of state,” Republican Reps. Vikki Breese Iverson of Prineville, Kim Wallan of Medford, Greg Smith of Heppner and Emily McIntire of Eagle Point said in a statement. “Elections should be housed entirely in one office overseen by an elected official, not unaccountable bureaucrats.”
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