Wrongly registered voters were a mistake, not a policy decision

No ballots are going out to the nearly 1,260 people who were wrongly registered to vote, state officials said Monday. (Getty Images)

A reader reacting to the news of noncitizens being registered to vote in Oregon recently sent me an email, saying: “Oregon does such a great job they register illegals to vote. That’s democracy for sure the Democrat way.”

Wrong registrations did happen: First, state officials reported 306, and then on Monday, they said the number was really 1,259 and that nine people who were not U.S. citizens had voted.

This latest announcement is likely to fuel a bigger political uproar among a number of  Republican legislators. Republican secretary of state candidate Dennis Linthicum said, “It’s no longer a conspiracy that illegal immigrants can successfully register to vote in Oregon. But now they actually have, so our conspiracy theory has turned from hot air to fact.” 

The subject of noncitizens voting has national resonance, with Republicans in the U.S. House considering a shutdown of the federal government over the subject of noncitizen voting in elections. 

Federal law passed in 1996 specifically bans noncitizens from voting in federal elections, for president or Congress. A few local jurisdictions, mainly in Maryland and Vermont, do allow noncitizen voting in some cases, mainly when property taxes, which may be paid by noncitizens, are at stake. But repeated studies have found that actual illegal voting is rare. One study by the Georgia secretary of state found a total of 1,634 cases of noncitizens “potentially” registering to vote over 25 years – but it found no illegal votes. 

The policy in Oregon is clear. According to the Secretary of State’s Office: “Only U.S. citizens may vote in Oregon elections. People must verify and attest they are U.S. citizens when registering to vote, and only voters who have registered in Oregon will have their ballot counted. Providing false information when registering to vote is a felony.​​​” 

So what happened in the case of those 1,259 noncitizens?

Oregon’s voter registration system provides for automatically registering people to vote when they obtain a driver’s license or state identity card. There are exceptions. Some people are not included, including those too young to vote and others who are barred, including noncitizens. The first group is flagged by birth date, and the second by the type of identification people provide – as they must – when they obtain the license. 

Since 2021, Oregon officials have accepted a wider range of identity documents at the Driver and Motor Vehicle division, including foreign passports and birth certificates. State officials said in September that the 306 noncitizens registered to vote had presented foreign passports that were marked as U.S. passports. The other 953 people who were wrongly registered to vote had presented foreign birth certificates as proof of ID. The nine people who actually voted were referred to the Department of Justice for investigation. 

In the context of Oregon’s 3 million registered voters, this is not a massive mistake. It’s the kind of error a bureaucracy usually can handle, and state elections officials said they’ve change their procedures to prevent more mishaps. 

It isn’t a policy decision, either: What happened is actually directly counter to the state’s stated policy.  

My email correspondent implied that a mistake was made and that it was intentional. The first suggestion was on target. The second isn’t, and that’s worth bearing in mind when considering how much weight to give in the case of the improper registrations.