Oregon mistakenly registered hundreds more voters without proof of citizenship

Officials in Oregon announced Monday that they have identified an additional 302 people on the state's voter rolls who did not provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

The announcement comes just two weeks after officials in the Beaver State said 1,259 potential non-citizens have been registered to vote since 2021, bringing the total number of misregistrations to 1,561.

The errors are due in part to Oregon passing a law in 2019 allowing some non-citizen residents to obtain a driver's license. And the state's so-called “motor voter” law, which went into effect in 2016, automatically registers most people to vote when they apply for a new driver's license or identification card.

Oregon mistakenly registered nearly 1,260 possible non-citizens to vote, DMV admits

Oregon residents cast ballots near the Multnomah County Elections Building in Portland on November 3, 2020. (Ankur Dholakia/AFP via Getty Images)

The incorrect voter registrations are due to clerical errors at the state DMV.

On Monday, the DMV released an “after action report” that identified flaws in its processes that led to the errors. Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade then ordered county election officials to deactivate all 302 voter registrations.

Griffin-Valade and Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, both Democrats, called for an independent, outside audit of the auto-voter system in a joint statement.

“Thanks to election officials’ quick actions, I have full confidence that these new errors will have no impact on the 2024 election,” Griffin-Valade said. “The DMV’s After Action Report raises serious concerns about this important part of our voter registration system. The first step in restoring public trust in Motor Voter is a transparent review by a neutral third party subject to strict government review standards.”

Tina Kotek, then-Democratic gubernatorial candidate, speaks to members of the media before casting her vote in Portland on November 2, 2022. (Getty Images)

DMV Administrator Amy Joyce said the agency believed two weeks ago that it was confident it had understood and reviewed all of the records at risk of error.

“We have since learned that this confidence was misplaced based on the new information presented in this announcement and the supplementary report, and for that we are sorry,” Joyce said in a statement. “DMV will follow the governor’s direction and remain committed to continued learning, corrective action, transparency and accountability.”

According to the statement, Griffin-Valade has directed her office's elections division to immediately hire a new position to oversee motor voters. And she has directed the department to establish a documented process for conducting regular data audits at the DMV and to update administrative rules for the Motor Voter system.

She said the Oregon Elections Division will work with the 36 county election officials to determine whether any of the erroneously registered voters had previously cast a ballot. A ballot is mailed to every registered voter in Oregon, and the state saw a voter turnout of 81.97% in 2020. President Biden clearly defeated former President Trump in the 2020 election, winning the state by more than 380,000 votes.

RNC Criticizes Walz Admin's Failure to Answer How Non-Citizens Made it onto Minnesota's Voter Rolls: 'Not a Hypothesis'

Of the 302 additional cases, 178 were due to people from the U.S. territory of American Samoa being misclassified as U.S. citizens, the DMV report said.

However, under federal law, people from American Samoa are U.S. citizens, not citizens, and do not have equal voting rights. An additional 123 records were due to the previously identified clerical error but were not included in previous reviews due to a newly identified software issue. And one case was caught by the DMV's new quality controls.

Griffin-Valade's office says it is doing everything in its power to prevent the 302 incorrectly registered voters from receiving a ballot, but cannot guarantee that all 302 ballots will be removed before mailing. Your office is implementing a process to ensure those ballots are not opened or counted.

According to the Oregon Secretary of State, of the 1,259 possible non-citizens identified last month, 10 incorrectly registered people voted, even though at least one became a citizen before voting.

State officials announced Monday that they have identified an additional 302 people on the state's voter rolls who did not provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. (Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images)

A DMV audit found that employees may have inadvertently selected “US passport” when presented with a foreign passport or “US birth certificate” when presented with a foreign document, triggering voter registration.

The DMV said its drop-down menu has now been rearranged so that “US passport” is no longer the first default option. Staff must also enter the state and county for all U.S. birth certificates and respond to a prompt when entering passport information to confirm the documentation is accurate.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, about half of all states as well as Washington, DC, have adopted automatic voter registration.

But even in states without automatic enrollment, there have been numerous allegations of improper enrollment.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced in August that officials had removed 1.1 million ineligible names from voter rolls since the 2020 presidential election.

The Ohio Secretary of State referred 138 non-citizens believed to have voted in previous elections to the state's attorney general for possible criminal charges.

And a conservative watchdog group is suing Arizona's Maricopa County for allegedly failing to deport more than 35,000 people who failed to provide proof of citizenship.

Hannah Ray Lambert and Anders Hagstrom of Fox News and The Associated Press contributed to this story.