Oregon Governor Instructs DMV to Pause Data Transfers Following Erroneous Entries of Non-Citizens on the Voter’s Roll

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek called for an immediate pause on further data transfers and an independent external audit of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) following the erroneous registration of yet another 302 non-citizens on the voter’s roll.

Clerical Technical and Policy Errors Caused Mistake

The governor’s call came shortly after the release of a report-back by the DMV stating that a total of 1,561 DMV records were erroneously sent to the Secretary of State’s office due to clerical, technical, and policy errors.

Read: Lax Processing and Human Error Added 306 Oregon Noncitizens to the Voters Roll

Explaining her decision, Kotek said any error undermining the voter system had to be taken and addressed very seriously. Kotek said an external audit and an immediate pause on data transfers from the DMV to the Secretary of State’s office were imperative to ensure that the program ‘can operate accurately and with integrity in future.’

According to the report-back, the DMV is continuing to identify remedies to circumvent non-citizens from registration on the voter’s roll.

The DMV has confirmed that non-citizens were mistakenly registered as voters in 49 of its 59 field officers, involving 387 staff members, and impacting customers in 29 of the 36 offices in the state.

See also: Oregon County Election Officials Removing Noncitizens Improperly Listed On Voter Rolls

DMV Registration Methodology Has Been Changed

According to the report, 1,259 incorrect voter registrations occurred when the wrong document was mistakenly selected from a drop-down menu. The data entry system has since been changed.

Another problem was the incorrect coding of 178 people from American Samoa and Swains Island as U.S. citizens.

The DMV has introduced a new computer interface that offers only two options – documents that prove U.S. citizenship and documents that don’t – after which another drop-down menu will pop up featuring documents matching the input.

According to the report, the user interface will call for a country of origin to be entered, and the transaction will be blocked from advancing if the country selected does not match the document.

The governor has also called for a DMV data integrity review by the end of 2024 and recommendations for improved data management.

Oregon Secretary of State (SoS), LaVonne Griffin-Valade said the DMV’s report raised serious concerns about the voter registration system. The SoS said the first step to restore public trust ‘is a transparent review by a neutral third party operating under strict government auditing standards.’

The Oregon Motor Voter Law registers residents to vote when they obtain a driver’s license or a state ID, provided they have proof of citizenship like a U.S. birth certificate or passport.