Oregon’s motor voter law may be on pause, but the number of errant voter registrations attributed to the policy continues to tick up.
The state’s Driver and Motor Vehicles division revealed Thursday it has found an additional 56 people who were erroneously added to the voter rolls. That brings the state to a total of 1,617 improper registrations since officials began looking into the motor voter law earlier this year. Oregon has more than 3 million registered voters.
The law, implemented in 2016, automatically registers Oregonians to vote when they obtain or renew a state ID, so long as they offer proof of citizenship.
But Oregon officials discovered earlier this year that human error and a poorly designed computer program led 1,259 people to be registered in cases where they didn’t demonstrate citizenship. The state also discovered DMV officials had improperly registered about 300 people from the U.S. territory of American Samoa to vote, even though they are not technically U.S. citizens.
In response to those findings, Gov. Tina Kotek ordered a pause on automatic voter registrations and directed the DMV to thoroughly review records and processes used to register voters with the Secretary of State’s Office.
The additional 56 errant registrations were revealed in the first in a series of monthly reports DMV plans to release as it scrutinizes the program.
The majority of the new cases came from a “re-review” of 130,000 DMV transactions that the agency had previously scrutinized. Officials discovered 54 additional errors as part of that exercise, the report said. Two other improper registrations were discovered outside of that review.
According to the DMV report, all 56 people registered in error “were inactivated from registration and electronically flagged so that any submitted ballot would be pulled at the local level and not counted in the Nov. 5, 2024, election.”
None of the 56 people have a history of voting in the state, the agency reported.
Copyright 2024 OPB
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
