Oregon election officials have determined that the votes cast by nine people who did not prove their citizenship have not affected any election results in Oregon. (Ron Cooper/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
None of the Oregon residents who were automatically registered to vote without demonstrating citizenship voted in an election where they could have cast the deciding ballot, the state’s elections director told lawmakers on Wednesday.
That was the biggest news out of an hourlong hearing of the House Rules Committee, in which staff from the Secretary of State’s Office, the director of the Oregon Department of Transportation and the administrator of the department’s Driver and Motor Vehicle Services division explained how 1,259 people were automatically registered to vote despite not providing documents that proved citizenship when they interacted with the DMV.
In Oregon, as in every state except for Arizona, voters only need to swear under penalty of perjury that they’re citizens and eligible to vote when they proactively register to vote. Since 2016, the state has automatically registered people to vote when they obtain or renew driver’s licenses and state-issued identification cards if they present documents that prove citizenship, like a U.S. passport or U.S. birth certificate.
But an audit completed this week found that DMV staff had erroneously marked 1,259 people who didn’t provide those documents as U.S. citizens and forwarded their information to the Secretary of State’s Office, resulting in them being registered to vote. Ten of those individuals voted, though election officials learned that one of those 10 is a citizen who has voted for decades and just didn’t bring documentation to prove citizenship when renewing a license.
State Elections Director Molly Woon said county clerks are expected to finish reviewing the other nine individuals by the end of Wednesday to determine whether they were citizens at the time they voted. It’s a state and federal crime for noncitizens to vote in an election.
State elections staff did determine that none of the nine voted in close elections where their vote could have been a deciding factor.
“We looked at the nine individuals who were potentially registered in error that have a voting record, looked at the elections that they voted in, because we are able to see that,” Woon said. “And there are no races that were on their ballots in those elections that were within the margin of one or two votes, which is what we’re talking about with this group of nine.”
Local elections can sometimes be decided by just a few votes. One member of the House Rules Committee, Republican Rep. Anna Scharf of Amity, lost a school board election in 2019 by three votes. And former state Rep. Jack Zika, R-Redmond, won his 2018 primary by two votes.
Republicans called for hearing
Scharf and other House Republicans had called for a legislative hearing since state officials first confirmed on Sept. 13 that they had found 306 cases of erroneously registered voters. That number increased to 1,259 after DMV employees reviewed 1.4 million records.
The DMV is still reviewing which offices produced the errors, but DMV Administrator Amy Joyce said an initial review indicated they’re spread throughout the state, with more errors in more highly populated areas. The Secretary of State’s Office has not determined whether the voters registered in error were nonaffiliated voters, the default, or whether any took steps to choose a political party.
State officials publicly confirmed the errors about a week before lawmakers released agendas for legislative days, the three days of back-to-back committee hearings the Legislature holds about every eight weeks when not in session. Legislative Democrats did not respond to the Republican requests for a hearing for more than 10 days, but instead scheduled one after the DMV completed its audit.
“I felt it was important for us to get the information from them in their review prior to making a decision,” House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, D-Tigard and the committee chair, told the Capital Chronicle. “Obviously, they’ve changed a lot from the first batch to the second.”
Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade did not attend the hearing, instead going to what her spokeswoman described as a previously scheduled security briefing in Portland.
Bowman began Wednesday’s hearing by saying that it wasn’t for “scoring political points” and that he wouldn’t tolerate any “attacks or accusations against election staff” or comments “that could incite any violence of any kind against any immigrants or any communities in the state.”
The hearing was free of disruptions, despite a woman waiting outside ahead of the meeting who accosted Scharf, who serves on the committee, as well as Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis, R-Albany and Sen. Rob Wagner, D-Lake Oswego, who do not. She told Scharf not to fail this time and made comments to Wagner and Boshart Davis about “illegals voting.”
Inquiry prompts review
Joyce, with the DMV, said her employees are the face of government for most people, and that in her view one of the division’s most important responsibilities is helping eligible Oregonians register to vote. The division has assisted with voter registration for about 30 years, since the federal Motor Voter Act allowed citizens to register to vote when they receive driver’s licenses. Oregon’s automatic voter registration system took effect in 2016.
Joyce said the division started looking for issues after receiving a general inquiry from the Institute for Responsive Government, a left-wing think tank based in Chicago, that asked how automatic voter registration was going and if there were any issues.
“We resolved to review records to ferret out any errors that we’ve made,” Joyce said. “We knew the election was coming, and that voter registration integrity is critically important. So while the error is bad and the timing is awful, we knew we had to do this immediately.”
Registering to vote or voting as a noncitizen is illegal, and doing so can complicate immigration proceedings. Woon, with the secretary of state’s office, said the office is working with immigration lawyers to provide letters to people who were automatically registered detailing that it was an error by the state of Oregon and not the individual’s fault.
The state also won’t release the names of the 1,259 people affected, citing exemptions to public records law related to immigration status, DMV records and the risk of violence. If election officials determine that anyone voted illegally, that information will be sent to the state Department of Justice for a criminal investigation and prosecution.
‘A government mistake’
Democratic committee members, including Bowman, expressed sympathy for the people who were wrongly registered to vote.
“Of those nine individuals who voted, they voted as a result of a government mistake,” he said. “They didn’t ask to be registered to vote, but they were by their government. Their government sent them ballots, we all talked about the importance of voting, and then they voted.”
House Republicans, meanwhile, reiterated their longstanding complaints about automatic voter registration in a joint statement from House Minority Leader Jeff Helfrich of Hood River, Scharf and Kim Wallan of Medford.
“The majority dismissed our concerns and assured us that safeguards were in place to protect the integrity of our registration process,” they said. “Testimony today indicated that those safeguards, in fact, were not in place and the problem would not have been caught without an inquiry from an outside entity. While we appreciate the steps the state has taken to prevent problems in the future, more must be done to ensure that Oregon’s elections are safe, secure and accurate.”
They did not elaborate on what more needed to be done, though Helfrich asked during the hearing if the Department of Transportation would like him to introduce a bill in January to “strengthen this process.” ODOT Director Kris Strickler said he was confident after the additional scrutiny and review that the DMV had fully addressed the errors.
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