Oregon DMV discovers dozens more voter registrations of non-U.S. citizens though none has voted

By Lynne Terry, Oregon Capital Chronicle

The Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicle Division has discovered several dozen more voter registrations of non-U.S. citizens in its system as part of reviews ordered by Gov. Tina Kotek in late September.

The division announced in a status report published Thursday it had discovered that 56 more people had been misidentified as U.S. citizens and wrongly registered to vote. They join 1,561 similar cases identified in early October, bringing the current total of the number of people wrongly registered to vote to 1,617.

The report said that none of the 56 people had a voting history and that their registrations had been inactivated and electronically flagged so that if any submitted ballots in Tuesday’s election, they would not be counted.

To date, the Secretary of State’s Office said that 10 people who were wrongly registered to vote as U.S. citizens had voted, but it later determined that five were actually citizens when they cast ballots. It has not provided any details about the remaining five people, and the agency did not respond to a request for details sent late Thursday.

In October, the DMV changed “user interface controls” on screens used by employees and how they input data, according to Chris Crabb, an Oregon Department of Transportation spokesperson. 

“These errors primarily occurred when staff inadvertently chose the wrong document from a drop-down menu in the system, choosing a document that would prove U.S. citizenship when that was not accurate,” Crabb said.

The report said the changes are expected to prevent any errors going forward. One of the latest non-citizens registered to vote dates to mid-September before the controls were put in place.

The latest 56 wrong voter registrations were discovered as part of a rereview of 130,000 records that DMV employees had “manually” checked for errors between Sept. 5 to 22 for its “after action” report from October. All but two were categorized by staff as having proved they were U.S. citizens. Another case was discovered when the person was renewing a document at a field office. That person had been mistakenly identified as a U.S. citizen based on a foreign birth certificate.

“They were missed the first time but found in the re-review, which was done as a quality check after system changes were put in place,” Crabb said in an email. 

The status report also said employees checked 600 other records dating from the second half of October and had found no errors. 

Division employees will continue to manually review new DMV records to verify their accuracy and correct any errors, the report said, pulling samples of at least 500 records at a time. The report said staff will “oversample” records that establish citizenship based on U.S. passports. The division has found that many — more than 70% in the current batch of errors — misidentifications of non-citizens as U.S. citizens stemmed from employees wrongly recording a foreign passport as an American one.

On Oct. 7, Kotek directed the DMV to pause sending new records to the Secretary of State’s Office to register to vote. That’s been the norm since Motor Voter went into effect in 2016 and is one reason behind a jump in Oregon voter registrations, particularly of nonaffiliated voters. People registered through the DMV are not assigned to a party.

The status report said the DMV is on track to finish reviewing past records on Dec. 1 but will continue sampling new records to check for errors through 2025.