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The Oregon Department of Transportation’s Oregon Driver & Motor Vehicle Services this week published a candid seven-page self-evaluation, acknowledging that the mistakes that caused the agency to improperly register 1,561 non-citizens to vote went to the top of the DMV.
Related: Oregon DMV Mistakenly Allowed a Total of 1,259 Noncitizens to be Placed on Voting Rolls
“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 review said.
The review says the agency, helmed by Amy Joyce, didn’t make sure staff understood how to safeguard the voter rolls as it allowed more people to receive driver’s licenses.
“DMV leadership failed to recognize and convey the need for a high level of rigor in this element of a transaction,” it continued. “This includes failing to prioritize accuracy over efficiency in system configuration and failing to ensure staff were receiving training—initially and over time—about the importance of accuracy in this work. It also includes failing to proactively initiate reviews of processes and outcomes regarding DMV’s role in the Oregon Motor Voter system, particularly after the system change in 2020 and the change in the types of documents accepted in 2021.”
The agency identified two key failings. The biggest was input errors dating to 2021, when the Oregon Motor Voter law and the Drivers Licenses for All Act allowed the agency to begin providing driver’s licenses to people who living in Oregon without legal documentation.
The Motor Voter law automatically registers people who are citizens to vote when they obtain or renew driver’s licenses. DMV officials now say that due to input errors, agency personnel mistakenly registered people who were not citizens to vote. That mistake accounted for the first tranche of people wrongly placed on the rolls.
“The 1,259 errors previously transmitted to the secretary of state primarily occurred when staff inadvertently chose the wrong document from a drop-down menu in the new system, choosing a document that would prove U.S. citizenship when that was not accurate,” the review says.
Data analysis showed the vast majority of those errors were caused by an employee incorrectly selecting a U.S. passport from that drop-down menu. Earlier this week, DMV reported it had also wrongly registered one person who exchanged an out-of-state license for an Oregon license.
The agency also revealed a second major source of erroneous registrations: a factual mistake in the manual that it uses to determine who it can register to vote. That mistake, which DMV acknowledged WW brought to its attention, miscategorized some U.S. nationals as U.S. citizens.
Related: Oregon DMV Acknowledges Registering 302 Additional Voters Who Should Not Have Been on the Rolls
“An external inquiry revealed to DMV that since the beginning of Oregon Motor Voter in 2016, DMV has been coding people from the U.S. territory of American Samoa as citizens,” the review says. “However, under federal law, people from American Samoa are U.S. nationals, not U.S. citizens, and do not have the same right to vote.”
DMV determined that it had incorrectly registered 178 people born in American Samoa. The agency said that number may grow because there are some records for people born in American Samoa who may have later gained U.S. citizenship. “Another 249 customer records lacked information to conclusively determine in either direction,” DMV wrote. The agency is checking with those people to ascertain their citizenship status.
DMV says it believes it has now made necessary changes and figured out where its processes went wrong.
“Beyond the individual, direct mitigations, DMV culture around OMV has already changed substantially,” the agency’s review said. “The realization of how we were not applying the necessary rigor to this critical process, and the course correction, has been swift, significant and embedded throughout the organization from the front line to the executive level. This work is among the most important things DMV does—to keep the highest degree of accuracy of voter registration records and the trust of Oregonians.”
State Treasurer Tobias Read, a Democrat who is likely to be elected the next secretary of state, says he’d like to see a more rigorous approach to voter registration, including the Elections Division affirmatively checking registrations that come from DMV, rather than simply accepting them.
“Every data entry system has errors,” Read says. “That’s why people review their credit card statements and bank accounts. It’s hard to understand how anyone could be careless enough to administer a crucial policy like Motor Voter—a major success for Oregon—without strong, reliable controls to prevent and find errors that could damage the program’s credibility.”
Gov. Tina Kotek and Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade have ordered an independent audit to get an outside assessment of what happened and whether DMV has fixed the problem.
In the meantime, Kotek’s spokeswoman says, DMV staff and management will continue in their roles.
“The governor’s office is not directing any personnel changes at this time based on available information,” Shepard says. “The governor believes such changes would disrupt and undermine the critical and ongoing corrective action and data integrity work that the governor has charged the agency with.”