Source: Oregon Secretary of State website
In case you missed it, the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles and the state’s Elections Division admitted at least 306 non-citizens had been registered to vote in Oregon, with at least two of them having voted, since 2021. The news was broken by Willamette Week in a story published at 3:54 pm Friday. Non-citizens are not allowed to register to vote, or to vote, in Oregon.
The agencies say the problem arose when DMV workers failed to designate driver’s license holders who had not proven legal U.S. residence as ineligible to register to vote. The DMV spokesperson told The Oregonian the failure was a “data entry issue.”
The unlawful registration of non-citizens was discovered, the agencies say, in an “initial analysis” by DMV. The analysis is ongoing and “will likely find more instances of the DMV allowing non-citizens to register to vote,” DMV administrator Amy Joyce told The Oregonian.
The Friday afternoon disclosure/dump has since garnered national media attention and intense interest in Oregon among Republicans who have long warned of the risk that non-citizens may end up voting because of the interplay between Oregon laws allowing non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses and automatically registering most new driver’s license holders as voters.
How did those laws come to be? Here’s a timeline for how we got here:
Pre-2013 law – People living in Oregon must produce evidence of legal presence in the U.S. to obtain a driver’s license. People registering for a driver’s license at the DMV are provided the option to fill out a voter registration card.
2013 – Democrats and some Republicans pass, and Governor John Kitzhaber signs, Senate Bill 833, creating “driver cards,” distinct from driver’s licenses, available to non-citizens who can prove one year of residence in Oregon.
2014 – Voters repeal SB 833 by a 32-point margin, 66-34, in Ballot Measure 88, reinstating pre-2013 law and eliminating the “driver card” option.
2015 – Legislature passes, and Governor signs Oregon’s current motor voter law, which automatically registers to vote any person who demonstrates legal residence in the U.S. when the person obtains an Oregon driver’s license. Affected drivers are registered to vote unless they opt out by returning a card provided by the Elections Division. The bill, HB 2177, was introduced at the request of Secretary of State Kate Brown, and signed into law by Governor Kate Brown, who succeeded Kitzhaber as governor on February 18, 2015.
2019 – Legislature passes and Brown signs into law HB 2015, which allows people to obtain an Oregon driver’s license without proof of legal residence in the U.S. No material changes are made to the 2015 motor voter law.
2023 – DMV suffers major data breach affecting 3.5 million Oregon driver’s licensees. Hackers got the data by attacking software the DMV uses to transfer driver’s license data to the Elections Division to comply with the 2019 motor voter law.
4:30 pm Sept 12, 2024 – Elections Division director Molly Woon told Willamette Week this is the moment she learned Oregon had improperly registered at least 306 non-citizen voters since 2021, at least two of whom had actually voted.
3:43 pm Friday, Sept. 13, 2024 – Willamette Week publishes its exclusive story breaking the news of the non-citizen voter registration and voting.
The agencies say DMV’s “data entry issue” failed to mark non-citizens who obtain a driver’s license as ineligible for voter registration. A “data entry issue” can be an accident or intentional. The agencies, obviously, want to convey that this was simply a mistake.
Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t. Some Democrats in Oregon support giving non-citizens the right to vote. A ballot measure to do just that in Multnomah County failed narrowly in 2022.
But Democrats are very aware that most of the statewide public does not want non-citizens to vote. When asked about the ballot measure during the governor’s race that same year, Tina Kotek dodged, saying she hadn’t read the measure but it sounded “really costly and complicated.”
Janelle Bynum, who cosponsored the 2019 non-citizen driver’s license bill and now is in a tight congressional race where illegal immigration is a top issue, was front and center in Willamette Week’s exclusive expressing alarm, and calling for the Attorney General investigation into how any of this happened, which sounds serious unless you read Oregon Roundup regularly.
The most that we can say for sure now is that non-citizens were registered to vote because Oregon has laws that (a) allow non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses, and (b) automatically register as voters most people who obtain a driver’s license.
As for the rest, I’m on it.
Jeff Eager writes the Oregon Roundup about things that going on in Oregon from a conservative or classical liberal perspective while avoiding partisanship. oregonroundup.substack.com