Top officials responsible for the state鈥檚 Motor Voter law appeared before lawmakers Monday with a message: As Oregon resumes automatically registering residents to vote, they have corrected errors that led to more than 1,600 possible noncitizens being added to voter rolls.
鈥淚 want to be clear: We are not going to take our eye off the ball,鈥� Travis Brouwer, an assistant director at the Oregon Department of Transportation, told lawmakers on the House Rules Committee.
鈥淲e are going to be redoubling our efforts.鈥�
Not everyone was convinced.
Republican lawmakers are still skeptical of the Motor Voter Program, which automatically registers people to vote when they get a new driver鈥檚 license. In recent months they have argued the program should receive far more oversight or be scrapped altogether.
鈥淚 think there needs to be a little less of this, 鈥楾rust us,鈥欌�� said House Minority Leader Christine Drazan, R-Canby, who has 鈥淚鈥檓 not loving this idea that things are just moving ahead and, while you鈥檝e made some modest progress, people are supposed to say, 鈥楾hat鈥檚 good enough.鈥欌��
The hearing 鈥� which also featured DMV director Amy Joyce, state Elections Director Dena Dawson and Deputy Secretary of State Michael Kaplan 鈥� was the latest opportunity for lawmakers to ask tough questions about an issue that has threatened to sap voter trust.
Gov. Tina Kotek last week she鈥檇 placed on the Motor Voter Program in the wake of news that staff error and lax oversight had led DMV workers to register hundreds of people to vote in error.
Under state law, such automatic registrations are only supposed to proceed if a person offers proof of U.S. citizenship while getting a license. But a review that began last year found that didn鈥檛 always happen. In some cases, people were registered without their knowledge after they showed a foreign passport.
The scope of the mistaken registrations is small in the context of Oregon鈥檚 more than 3 million voters, and elections officials have said that of those registered in error actually voted. But Democratic policymakers who have typically touted the benefits of the motor voter system have also rushed to demonstrate they don鈥檛 take the problem lightly.
鈥淗aving a hearing is an indication that we are taking this seriously and that we want to make sure, from an oversight perspective, that DMV is doing what they need to do,鈥� House Speaker Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, said Monday.
Attorney General Dan Rayfield鈥檚 office is investigating three people who may have voted as noncitizens after being registered through no fault of their own.
And DMV officials say they took several steps to ensure such staff errors won鈥檛 happen. They include altering an agency computer program to make it far more difficult to mistakenly indicate a person offered proof of U.S. citizenship and a requirement that supervisors double check the work of employees.
ODOT has been analyzing samples of new DMV transactions monthly, and recent reports have shown no new errors after those protocols were put in place.
But while officials believe they have corrected the issue, they acknowledge they need to win public trust in the system.
Under skeptical questioning from Drazan, Kaplan said Monday he could not argue that people should just take officials at their word.
鈥淭hat is what a trust deficit creates,鈥� Kaplan said. 鈥淭hat is an earned burden. We know that we have to fix that and over time that is our intent.鈥�
Part of that public relations campaign has officials venturing into potentially unfriendly territory.
On Friday, Secretary of State Tobias Read conservative host Lars Larson鈥檚 radio show in an attempt to persuade listeners he was taking the issue seriously.
Read faced tough questions from Larson on why the state hasn鈥檛 analyzed all voter records to determine the scope of the problem.
鈥淵ou checked 1.4 million voters, but the state has 3.4 million voters,鈥� said Larson, overstating the state鈥檚 actual . 鈥淲hat about the other 2 million and why not check them?鈥�
Read answered by concentrating on things officials planned to do to ensure registrations are correct moving forward. DMV officials have argued the voter registration errors are a recent issue and don鈥檛 require vetting the entire voter roll.
鈥淲e are checking things all the time,鈥� Read said. 鈥淲e are adding to the processes to make sure that that information is there. The thing that bothers me the most about how we got here is the fundamental errors that were present.鈥�
In concert with Kotek announcing the resumption of automatic voter registration last week, Read announced steps he will take to ensure new voters forwarded by the DMV are valid. They include sampling a subset of those registrations every month to detect errors, ensuring that election officials received the same number of registrations as DMV officials send on a daily basis, and creating a new commission to vet the DMV鈥檚 work at least once a year.
On Larson鈥檚 show, Read called the recently discovered errors a 鈥渢otal government error falling down on implementation.鈥�
鈥淲e have to be clear about how we are going to catch and fix those errors faster,鈥� he said.
