Trump administration joins ongoing legal challenge over Oregon’s management of voter rolls

By DIRK VANDERHART/Oregon Public Broadcasting

The Trump administration is wading into a court fight over whether Oregon does enough to scrub its voter rolls of ineligible voters.

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it would file a “statement of interest” in an ongoing suit between a number of conservative plaintiffs and the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office. The agency says it is watching the case closely for signs Oregon violated the National Voter Registration Act.

“Accurate voter registration rolls are critical to ensure that elections in Oregon are conducted fairly, accurately, and without fraud,” U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said in a statement. “States have specific obligations under the list maintenance provisions of the NVRA, and the Department of Justice will vigorously enforce those requirements.”

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read declined to comment on the filing Friday, citing ongoing litigation.

“What I can say is that we take our responsibility to maintain secure, accurate voter rolls seriously,” Read said in a statement. “Oregonians want and deserve fair and free elections, and we must do everything in our power to deliver.”

The Oregon Department of Justice said it was researching the matter.

At issue is a lawsuit filed in October by the national conservative group Judicial Watch, along with the Constitution Party of Oregon and two individual Oregonians, Suni Danforth and Hannah Shipman.

That claim is based, in part, on a 2023 report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. According to the suit, that report showed, 19 of Oregon’s 36 counties had not removed any voters from November 2020 to November 2022, and that 10 other counties had removed 11 or fewer people in that time.

“In all, these 29 counties reported a combined total of 2,404,849 voter registrations as of November 2022,” the complaint read. “Yet they reported removing a combined total of 36 registrations in the last two-year reporting period.”

The second claim had to do with a public records dispute. The plaintiffs say they requested documents that detail notices the state sent to voters, requesting that they verify their voter registration information. Under the federal law, those are supposed to be kept for two years and freely inspectable to the public.

But the plaintiffs say former Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade’s office told them their request would take roughly 5,000 hours to complete, because different counties kept the records in different ways.

The suit contends that is a violation of federal law, and it’s this question that the U.S. DOJ is most interested in.

“States cannot insulate themselves from those responsibilities by delegating them to counties or local authorities, even if subdivisions of the state have some role in carrying out tasks in furtherance of NVRA responsibilities,” the Trump administration wrote in its filing with the federal court.

The federal interest comes at a potentially pivotal moment in the Judicial Watch-led lawsuit.

Attorneys with the Oregon Department of Justice have asked U.S. District Court Judge Michael McShane to dismiss the lawsuit. They argue that the conservative plaintiffs don’t have standing to bring the case, and that they didn’t give the state legally required notice of the alleged public records violation.

Oral arguments in the matter are set for June 18.

Trump has made election security a focus of his second term in office. In March, he issued a sweeping executive order that would, among other things, require submitting a proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. That order is caught up in ongoing legal challenges.

• This story originally appeared June 6, 2025 on Oregon Public Broadcasting.