Oregon Governor Shuts Downs DMV Loopholes After Voters’ Roll Errors
Oregon Governor Tina Kotek is shutting down Driver and Motor Vehicle (DMV) loopholes that inadvertently added non-citizens to the voters’ roll.
Calling for stricter measures, Kotek said in a statement that the DMV must ‘go above and beyond to ensure errors like this will not happen again.’
Kotek was reacting to a data processing error in records sent to the Secretary of State (SoS) in which 306 potentially ineligible voters were identified. They were registered without proving citizenship.
The SoS has ordered the inactivation of another 953 voters, excluding the 306 inactivated voters on September 13.
SoS Confirms that 1,259 Ineligible Voters Could Have Voted in the Upcoming Election
The SoS office has confirmed that the 1,259 people inadvertently added to the voters’ roll will not receive ballot papers for the upcoming November 5 election. If any of these people are eligible to vote – have obtained citizenship in the interim – they have time to reregister as voters for the 2024 elections, says the SoS.
In a statement, Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade assures Oregonians that the 2024 elections will not be compromised by the DMV error in any way. She says the occurrence of noncitizens voting in Oregon is rare, as it is nationwide, and says that automatic voter registration enables eligible citizens to exercise the right to vote.
The Oregon DMV administrator, Amy Joyce, says they have identified ‘a rare but important anomaly’ that has been rectified. The following statistics were released by the SoS:
766,756 people have been registered to vote by the DMV.
The 1,259 people found to be ineligible represent only 0.1% of the total number of records transferred by the DMV.
The correction process required the review of 1.4 million records.
Tighter Control Measures
In a statement, the governor says that ‘the integrity of election systems is the cornerstone of a functioning democracy,’ adding that any undermining error will be immediately addressed. Kotek has instructed the DMV as follows:
Provide immediate and updated staff training to deal with ‘corrective actions.’
Complete a comprehensive report within 14 days documenting how the errors occurred, the corrective measures taken, and explain why the errors will not reoccur.
Improve data management by the end of 2024 by initiating a data integrity review overseen by external experts.
Coordinate a data quality control calendar with the SoS ‘to ensure due diligence ahead of the elections.’
The review of the 1.4 million records affected documents added after January 1, 2021, the operative date that foreign passports and birth certificates were included in the system.
Corrective actions by the DMV include changing the database drop-down menu into alphabetical order so that American passports are not the first default document, reducing the risk of selecting an incorrect document.
DMV staff must enter the state and county of all U.S. birth certificates, reducing the chance of a foreign birth certificate misidentified as that of an American.
The DMV has added a third step to the document verification process. The third step requires that the manager compares all system codes of transactions entered daily to verify that it matches the relevant document. This will stop the possibility of a document, like a foreign passport, being entered as a U.S. passport.