The story led with an assurance, an oddly worded one: “None of the Oregon residents who were automatically registered to vote without demonstrating citizenship voted in an election where they could have cast the deciding ballot, the state’s elections director told lawmakers on Wednesday.”
The Oregon Capital Chronicle assured us that the automatically registered voters who were not eligible to vote participated in elections where, in the number investigated, they couldn’t’ve made a difference.
In Oregon, as in every state except for Arizona, voters only need to swear under penalty of perjury that they’re citizens and eligible to vote when they proactively register to vote. Since 2016, the state has automatically registered people to vote when they obtain or renew driver’s licenses and state-issued identification cards if they present documents that prove citizenship, like a U.S. passport or U.S. birth certificate.
But an audit completed this week found that DMV staff had erroneously marked 1,259 people who didn’t provide those documents as U.S. citizens and forwarded their information to the Secretary of State’s Office, resulting in them being registered to vote. Ten of those individuals voted, though election officials learned that one of those 10 is a citizen who has voted for decades and just didn’t bring documentation to prove citizenship when renewing a license.
Julia Shumway, “Suspect votes didn’t affect election results, state officials say,” September 25, 2024.
A pattern can be observed. They used to tell us that “no illegals vote in our elections, which are pristine.” Now they say “sure some undocumented aliens vote, but their votes do not change elections.”
Next? “Undocumented aliens voting for our candidates ‘saved our democracy.’”
Paul Jacob has been writing about noncitizen voting for some time.