October 8, 2024 4:00 a.m.
On Monday, Governor Tina Kotek announced a set of actions following an Oregon Driver and Motor Vehicles Services “after-action” report detailing errors within the Oregon Moter Voter Program.
A release said the report was among an initial set of actions the governor directed the Oregon DMV to undertake two weeks ago.
The report showed that the state has found hundreds more people than previously known who were improperly registered to voter under Oregon’s motor voter law. It blamed a “technical error” for causing additional automatic voter registrations which should have been first analyzed.
Based on that report, additional actions include:
*The governor and Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade have jointly called for an independent, external audit of the Oregon Motor Voter Program. The Oregon Department of Administrative Services has been directed to immediately identify an independent, external third-party vendor to conduct the audit.
*The governor has directed the Oregon DMV to pause transmitting Oregon Motor Voter data to the Secretary of State until after completion of the “full-scale data integrity review”, overseen by a panel of external data experts, at the earliest. The review is set for completion by the end of the year. The secretary of state stopped automatically registering voters through Oregon Motor Voter on September 30th.
Kotek said, “Any error that undermines our voting system must be taken incredibly seriously and addressed”. Kotek said the actions taken will ensure that the program can operate “…with integrity and accuracy into the future”.
Secretary Griffin-Valade said, “Thanks to the swift action of elections officials, I have full confidence that these new errors will not impact the 2024 election”.
House Republican Leader Mark Helfrich responded to the governor’s announcement saying, “By agreeing to an external audit, Democrats have conceded that something is systemically wrong with Oregon’s automatic voter registration system”. Helfrich called for all ineligible voters to be removed from the rolls before the November election.