SALEM, Ore. — Oregon lawmakers waded into a voter registration controversy on Wednesday with the first legislative hearing held since the Secretary of State's office and Department of Transportation (ODOT) announced that 1,259 people had been mistakenly added to the voter rolls without providing proof of U.S. citizenship, and ten of them had cast ballots.
ODOT and elections officials appeared apologetic at the hearing, particularly for the timing of the discovery, but insisted that the issue has been corrected. Elections staff also said they've confirmed that the error was not large enough to have affected the outcome of any prior election.
"This issue will have no impact on the 2024 election. We were able to catch the error in time," said Ben Morris, chief of staff at the Oregon Secretary of State's office.
Eligible residents who receive driver licenses or state ID cards are automatically registered to vote in Oregon, but in 2021 the state started allowing noncitizens to obtain driver licenses. According to ODOT, the mistake happened when DMV staff accidentally selected the wrong option on a computer menu when listing applicants' identifying documents.
"This was truly a clerical error. We have a drop-down menu of documents that people can provide to prove their identity and age in DMV transactions, and that menu defaulted to U.S. passport or U.S. birth certificate," said DMV administrator Amy Joyce.
ODOT initially announced on Sept. 13 that it had discovered 306 cases, and then announced Monday that the number had grown to 1,259 after a full review. In an FAQ ahead of the hearing, ODOT said the full review included all licenses and ID cards issued after Jan. 1, 2021, the day the DMV started allowing noncitizens to apply, totaling about 1.4 million records. REAL ID licenses were not included because they go through separate federal verification.
The data entry mistake doesn't necessarily mean that all of the 1,259 people were not U.S. citizens, ODOT added — it just means the documentation they provided at the DMV to obtain a license did not include proof of citizenship, so it shouldn't have been forwarded to the Secretary of State's office to be added to the voter rolls.
ODOT and elections officials previously announced that only 10 of the people had actually submitted a ballot in any election over the past four years, and one of them was subsequently confirmed to have been a U.S. citizen at the time they voted.
At the hearing, elections director Molly Woon said her office is still checking the other nine and she expected to have final results by the end of the day, but added that the office has already confirmed that none of them voted in elections that were close enough that their votes could have affected the outcome. If the elections division finds that any of them were not citizens at the time they cast their ballots, their cases could be referred to the Oregon Department of Justice.
The Secretary of State's office immediately deactivated the voter registration of the first 306 people and has now done the same with all 1,259 cases, Woon said, but added that they will all be notified of the change by the end of this week and given instructions for how to reactivate their voter registration if they can prove their citizenship.
Joyce and ODOT director Kris Strickler said the DMV has already updated its software to display the identification drop-down options in alphabetical order and added a confirmation pop-up if U.S. passport or U.S. birth certificate is selected. A manager in each DMV office is also now double-checking every transaction at the end of each day.
Most of the lawmakers on the committee appeared satisfied with ODOT's remedial measures, with the bulk of the critical questions focused on why the agency didn't detect the clerical error until an outside group intervened.
ODOT previously acknowledged that it began the review after a group called the Institute for Responsive Government reached out over the summer. According to Strickler, the nonprofit didn't discover any improper registrations — it just asked some general questions about how Oregon's voter registration system was working, and the questions prompted ODOT to begin a review.
"Let me state the obvious. Should we have been looking sooner than a few months before the election? Absolutely," Joyce said.
Some lawmakers at the hearing also asked about what the elections office is doing to protect the 1,259 people on the list from harassment or legal consequences, with committee chair Rep. Ben Bowman stressing that none of them asked to be added to the voter rolls, and they were all registered as a result of a government error.
Woon said the notification letter sent to each of them will include instructions for obtaining an official "no-fault letter" that will confirm they were registered by accident and state it shouldn't be held against them in the future. Morris added that his office does not plan to release the list and believes it is exempt from public records law because it contains private voter data.
"We are very sensitive to the fact that this list could put people's lives in danger," he said.