A student delivers their ballot to an official ballot drop box in front of the EMU on the University of Oregon campus on Election Day, Nov. 6, 2018. (Sarah Northrop/Emerald)
On Sept. 24, the Oregon Secretary of State’s office and the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles announced that they had identified a total of 1,259 possible non-citizens that had been mistakenly registered to vote.
This comes nearly two weeks after the Oregon Secretary of State’s office announced that they had identified 306 people who had been similarly improperly registered. The state said that these people had been improperly registered due to clerical errors by DMV staff.
Ever since January of 2016, US-Citizens who are also Oregon residents have been automatically registered to vote in the state upon being issued a driver’s license — this was known as the Oregon Motor Voter law.
In 2021, Democratic lawmakers passed a law that permitted undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver’s license without proof of legal residence. It is suspected that DMV staff mistakenly registered foreign passports and birth certificates as U.S. identification, thus allowing for the error to take place.
State officials said that the 2021 law created an opportunity in the system for non-citizens to become registered voters.
35 of the non-citizens registered to vote were eligible to vote in Lane County. After an audit, Lane County Elections confirmed that one mistakenly registered non-citizen voted in Lane County.
The DMV and Oregon Secretary of State’s office are taking action to fix the error. They have deactivated all of the identified improperly registered voters and alerted them of the error. The DMV will now require a more thorough identification process be completed when applying for a driver’s license in addition to other process changes aimed at preventing future errors.
Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade said that the error will have no impact on the 2024 general election.
