The Oregon DMV said Monday it mistakenly registered an additional 302 individuals to vote who did not provide proof of U.S. citizenship.
Non-citizens are prohibited from voting in local or national elections. But the DMV acknowledged in September that it found 1,259 instances in which employees mistakenly coded individuals who presented foreign passports or birth certificates when applying for a driver’s license or ID as having a U.S. passport or birth certificate.
A DMV report released Monday revealed two new errors that led to an additional 302 individuals being registered to vote without providing proof of citizenship, bringing the total number to 1,561.
“Two weeks ago, we believed we had all of the information to project confidence that we understood and had reviewed all records at risk of error,” DMV Administrator Amy Joyce said in a press release. “We have since learned this confidence was misplaced based on new information outlined in this announcement and after-action report and for this, we are sorry.”
The agency is still determining how many of those individuals voted and how many were or became U.S. citizens. In September, the DMV reported that it knew of 10 non-citizens that had cast ballots, but clarified on Monday that five of those individuals were, in fact, U.S. citizens who voted legally.
The Secretary of State’s Office “is reviewing these documents to determine if any of these individuals have a voting history,” the press release states. “These records contained evidence of clerical errors regarding citizenship status but that does not necessarily mean they belong to non-citizens.”
Gov. Tina Kotek said Monday she has directed the DMV to stop automatically registering voters until an external audit is complete. The governor and Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade also directed the agency to undergo an audit from an external party, though it is unclear who will conduct the review.
For nearly a decade, Oregon’s motor voter law has automatically registered to vote anyone who obtains or updates a driver’s license or state ID and isn’t already a voter. In 2021, after Oregon lawmakers authorized driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, the DMV instituted a system to make sure only citizens’ information got sent to the state elections division to be registered to vote.
The DMV discovered 178 of the new errant registrations after Willamette Week sent an inquiry to the Oregon Department of Transportation asking if the DMV had automatically registered individuals from American Samoa to vote.
Individuals from American Samoa are classified as U.S. nationals, meaning they can obtain a U.S. passport but are not eligible to vote. People born in other U.S. territories are classified as American citizens.
“Based on that inquiry, DMV determined that since the beginning of (Oregon Motor Voter) in 2016, DMV has been coding people who present a birth certificate or U.S. passport from the territory of American Samoa as citizens,” the press release states.
The agency has since implemented an additional review of source documents to prevent this error and is “working toward a better, longer-term solution,” the press release states.
The DMV discovered 123 of the other errant registrations from a technical issue that kept some “rare transactions” in a different file than the records that the agency reviewed last month.
The agency said the errors occurred at 49 of its 59 field offices and directly involved nearly 400 employees across the state.
“All of these issues taken together reveal the root cause of the errors is at a higher level than individual staff in field offices,” the report states. “DMV leadership failed to recognize and convey the need for a high level of rigor in this element of a transaction.”
The Secretary of State’s Office and DMV has taken several actions to prevent these errors in the future. The department now requires staff to enter a state and country for all U.S. birth certificates. It also now requires DMV managers to verify that documents submitted for identification match their entries in the department’s system at the end of each day.
The agency has committed to making several more changes. The Oregon Department of Transportation said Monday it will hire a voter registration integrity manager to oversee the agency’s voter registration processes. The agency also said it will add information to its training materials for new staff regarding the state’s voter registration process and methods to analyze identification documents.
“Thanks to the swift action of elections officials, I have full confidence that these new errors will not impact the 2024 election,” Griffin-Valade said in a press release. “The first step in restoring the public’s trust in Oregon Motor Voter is a transparent review by a neutral third party operating under strict government auditing standards.”
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