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The Oregon Driver & Motor Vehicle Services division announced today it will resume automatically registering Oregonians to vote when they obtain or renew a driver’s license, permit or state I.D. card.
In October, Gov. Tina Kotek ordered Oregon DMV to pause automatic voter registration after the agency discovered it had erroneously registered more than 1,600 people to vote who had not presented evidence of U.S. citizenship. (To register to vote in Oregon, a person must be a U.S. citizen, over 16, and a resident of the state.)
Since then, state officials have reviewed and updated DMV’s processes and commissioned an outside review by the consulting firm Deloitte.
Since Willamette Week originally reported on the erroneous registrations, state officials have determined that 17 people who were improperly registered actually voted. Some were subsequently determined to be citizens, officials said. Last week, as OPB reported, the Oregon Department of Justice opened criminal investigations into three people who allegedly voted improperly.
Kotek says she’s confident that DMV has corrected its processes and is in a position to resume sending names of registrants to the secretary of state’s Elections Division to be placed on the voter rolls.
“Oregon’s electoral system is one of the most secure, effective, and accessible in the nation. Even so, any error that undermines that system or Oregonians’ confidence in that system must be taken incredibly seriously and urgently addressed,” Kotek said.
“Last fall, I called for a series of actions to address data errors in the Oregon Motor Voter program, which the Oregon DMV has, and will continue, to implement. After reforms at the DMV and multiple months showing a good bill of data health, it is time to restart Oregon’s Motor Voter program.”
Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read released FAQs about the situation and says the Elections Division has, as part of restarting automatic registration, added three levels of controls to prevent such errors in the future: daily checks to ensure the files DMV sends to the Elections Division match; regular, random sampling to make sure the files DMV sends to the division are accurate; and a yearly review by elections officials, county clerks and IT experts to ensure the registration process is accurate and robust.
“The new protections we are adding today will help us catch and fix government data entry errors faster,“ Read said. “These are first steps, focused on getting the fundamentals right. I will continue to dig into the system and take action whenever I can to strengthen our voter rolls and prevent future mistakes. Our highest priority is—and must always be—protecting the integrity of Oregonians’ fair, secure, and accessible elections.”
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering rural Oregon.