Oregon elections officials refer cases of possible noncitizen voting to state DOJ

By DIRK VANDERHART/Oregon Public Broadcasting

Several people who were added to Oregon’s voter rolls because of errors by state employees could face prosecution for voting despite not being U.S. citizens.

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read’s office last week forwarded three cases of suspected voting by noncitizens to the state’s Department of Justice for further investigation. Elections officials are still looking into seven additional people who might have voted illegally after they were registered to vote in error, the office said Monday.

It’s illegal for people who aren’t U.S. citizens to vote in Oregon. And voting despite knowing you’re not allowed is punishable by up to a year in jail.

“I instructed my administration to submit these three cases to the Oregon Department of Justice because we must protect the integrity of our elections,” Read said in a statement to OPB on Monday. “The public needs to be able to trust that our laws are being followed. Only U.S. citizens are permitted to vote in our elections.”

The Oregon DOJ confirmed it had received a letter from Read’s office on Friday, but said it hasn’t determined whether to open investigations.

The potential prosecutions are the latest development in a story that has roiled the state’s elections system since last summer. Beginning in September, officials at the state’s Driver and Motor Vehicles division revealed that staff error had led to more than 1,600 people being registered to vote in Oregon when they shouldn’t have been.

But DMV officials said last year that some people had erroneously been registered despite showing foreign passports or birth certificates. State workers also mistakenly registered people born in American Samoa, though they aren’t automatically U.S. citizens.

The problem surfaced under Oregon’s previous secretary of state, LaVonne Griffin-Valade, whose office stressed that the number of possible noncitizens who ultimately voted after being registered in error was vanishingly small, and could not have swayed the outcome of an election.

But the errors have ramped up scrutiny of the state’s voter registration system. That’s particularly true of Republican lawmakers, who are floating bills that could change or dismantle the motor voter law.

Read, too, has been highly critical. Since taking office last month he has promised to build new safeguards into the system, but to date has not offered any details about changes he’ll enact.

The specter of prosecuting people who were registered to vote through no fault of their own has troubled some Democrats. In a hearing last year, lawmakers like House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, D-Tigard, worried that people could be prosecuted or have their path to citizenship blocked because of the state’s mistake.

“Those folks did not ask to be registered. They did not ask to have a ballot mailed to them,” Bowman said. “What is being done to ensure that those individuals are not harmed because of actions taken by the government, not by them?”

Oregon’s former elections director, Molly Woon, told lawmakers at the time that her office would provide letters of “no fault” upon request, verifying errant registrations were the state’s responsibility alone.

• This story originally appeared Feb. 10, 2025 on Oregon Public Broadcasting.