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Less than two months after Gov. Tina Kotek told the Oregon Driver & Motor Vehicle Services division it could resume automatic voter registration, the agency has disclosed it has discovered an additional 118 noncitizens were placed on the voter rolls.
In a report released this morning, DMV said all but one of the new discoveries were people who were erroneously put into the voter registration system between 2010 and 2023.
The new discoveries are in effect “legacy” errors.
DMV, which is part of the Oregon Department of Transportation, is responsible under Oregon’s 2016 Motor Voter law for sending to elections officials the names of people who renew or newly obtain either a driver’s permit or license or a state identification card. Elections officials then add those names to the voter rolls—but under Oregon law, individuals must be U.S. citizens to vote.
Of the 118 newly discovered erroneously registered voters disclosed today, elections officials say at least 13 appear to have voted. (Some of them may have gained citizenship after they were originally improperly registered.)
The new disclosure includes a substantially higher percentage of illegal votes than the ratio officials previously identified.
Willamette Week first reported in September that DMV had mistakenly sent the names of noncitizens to the Elections Division for voter registration.
Related: Oregon DMV May Have Mistakenly Registered More Than 300 Non-Citizens to Vote
DMV eventually identified a total of 1,619 people whose information it had erroneously sent to the Elections Division to be added to voter rolls. Of that group, 17 voted, according to elections officials.
As Oregon Public Broadcasting reported, elections officials referred three of those people to the Oregon Department of Justice for possible prosecution.
Today’s admission is embarrassing for DMV because the agency told the public and the governor in February that it had analyzed and fixed its processes.
The agency noted that it had brought in three outside consulting firms to help evaluate and improve the agency’s systems.
“We took swift action to correct the immediate source of the errors upon their discovery,” DMV said in a statement Feb. 26.
“We have since put controls and processes in place to minimize the risk of error, including hiring a voter registration integrity analyst. We have extensively trained our staff and collected months of data that found no new errors in the Oregon Motor Voter file. We are confident in the thoroughness of our review.”
With that assurance from DMV, Kotek ordered the agency in February to restart the automatic voter registration process she’d told the agency to halt in October.
DMV spokeswoman Chris Crabb said today, however, the agency has always expected to continue to find legacy errors from the 2010 to 2023 period because it has not verified the registration of everyone who registered in that period.
The agency discovered 116 of the 118 errors disclosed today when people who held licenses or identification cards contacted DMV to exchange their credentials for Real ID cards ahead of the May deadline.
“This continued identification of past errors is happening as we predicted in our public reports going back to October,” Crabb said in an email.
Crabb added that the agency is confident in its process for new registrations but cautions that there may be other legacy errors yet to be discovered.
“Since DMV put significant mitigations in place starting in September 2024, DMV continues to identify and correct past errors and inform the Secretary of State. We will continue to remain proactive in searching for any outstanding inaccuracies.”
After today’s announcement, four Republican state representatives—Vikki Breese Iverson (Prineville), Emily McIntire (Eagle Point), Greg Smith (Heppner) and Kim Wallan (Medford)—said they were drafting legislation that would reassign DMV’s current responsibilities for voter registration to the secretary of state.
“DMV and ODOT have failed to address errors in Oregon’s Motor Voter system,” the representatives said in a joint statement. “ODOT does not have the expertise to run our primary voter registration program, and they either cannot or will not prioritize getting it right.”
But a spokesman for Kotek, who oversees ODOT and DMV, says the governor is confident the agency is now doing what it needs to do to ensure the integrity of the voter registration system.
”The governor stands by her decision to restart the Oregon Motor Voter program," spokesman Lucas Bezerra says.
“To ensure that DMV is capturing and correcting as many of these past errors as possible, DMV recently developed a report that automates the error detection process,” Bezerra adds. “This provides another way to catch errors rather than relying solely on field office employees to notice an error and escalate it. The governor believes that this is what ongoing accountability looks like.
Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read says he remains confident in the Motor Voter and vote-by-mail systems but is “disappointed” that DMV is still finding errors. He wants to see better performance.
“Whenever humans and data interact, there will be errors, but we must catch and fix these errors faster,“ Read says. ”These government mistakes undermine public trust and cause harm to Oregon communities."
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering Oregon.