Oregon Keeps Telling Us Its Elections Are Fine
Yet the Beaver State seldom audits voter roll failures and almost never makes the answers public.
Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read spent the months before the midterms assuring voters that the state's vote-by-mail system works.
"We have run safe, accurate, fair elections by mail for nearly 30 years," he told a local National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, KLCC, in September.
Voters in red and swing states hear that Oregon is a model to copy. They should look at the record behind Read's claim first.
Oregon's problems go back further, but social media has made it easier for voters to compare notes and speak up. Let's start with 2017, the year the state rewrote its voter notices. The latest entry came last week, when the state exposed a test version of its election results website to search engines nine days before the election.
2017–2020: The First Warnings
In 2017, then-Secretary of State Dennis Richardson’s office rewrote the notices it sends inactive voters, dropping a warning that the state would cancel their registrations. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to cancel a registration after the voter ignores that notice and skips two federal elections. Without the warning, the state said, it could not legally remove anyone. According to KLCC, Read’s office now says it does not know why the language changed.
The voter rolls swelled. A 2023 report from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found 19 of Oregon's 36 counties removed no voters from November 2020 to November 2022. By January of this year, the state carried roughly 800,000 inactive registrations.
On Election Day 2018, canvassers for Defend Oregon—the campaign arm of Our Oregon, an advocacy group bankrolled by public-employee unions—collected ballots from Multnomah County voters and promised to deliver them. The next morning, someone found a box of 97 of those ballots at the Service Employees International Union Local 503 office. Ninety-six of those votes never counted.
Richardson's office proposed a $94,750 fine, the second-largest election penalty in state history. A month later, the state ruled it an honest mistake and suspended $71,025, leaving Defend Oregon to pay $23,725. No one faced criminal charges.
Oregon’s primary elections are closed, meaning voters must register with a political party to vote in that party’s primary. In the May 2020 primary, hundreds and possibly thousands of Oregon voters, most of them Republicans, said they opened their ballots and found only nonpartisan races. Then-state Rep. Mike Nearman said his office fielded hundreds of calls. A Facebook group called My Party Was Changed Oregon drew nearly 2,000 members, many saying they had belonged to one party for years.
I was one of them. I registered as a Republican in 1988, had voted in recent elections, and had not updated anything at the DMV. My registration suddenly showed nonaffiliated, though I never changed it. I had to go online and switch it back.
Then-Secretary of State Bev Clarno called the claims “false.” Her office suggested many of those voters came in through Motor Voter, which automatically registers people as nonaffiliated when they obtain a driver’s license or state ID. That explanation did not fit voters like me, who chose a party decades before Motor Voter existed.
2021–2023: Looser Rules, Sloppy Counties
In 2021, the Democrat-controlled state Legislature loosened the ballot deadline with House Bill 3291. As of 2022, counties count mailed ballots that arrive up to seven days after Election Day—if they carry an Election Day or earlier postmark.
The House passed the bill 39–21, with Republican state Reps. Greg Smith and Ron Noble joining the Democrats, including then-House Speaker Tina Kotek, who is now governor. The Senate passed it 16–13, with no Republican votes. The same bill, notes The Federalist, also appears to have dropped a rule that the address on an emailed ballot's waiver must match the voter's overseas ballot request.
County offices have also struggled with the basics. In the May 2022 primary, a printing error blurred the barcodes on tens of thousands of Clackamas County ballots, and machines rejected them. The East Oregonian reported that workers had to copy about two-thirds of the roughly 116,000 returned ballots onto fresh ones by hand. County Clerk Sherry Hall knew about the blurry barcodes weeks before Election Day. The county did not certify results until June 14. A state audit later found the count accurate. Voters removed Hall, a Republican who had run the county's elections for 20 years, that November.
In June 2023, hackers breached the Oregon DMV through a flaw in the MOVEit file-transfer software and reached the records of about 3.5 million Oregonians, roughly 90 percent of license and ID holders. The same agency runs Motor Voter.
2024: The Problems Pile Up
In May 2024, Multnomah County, according to a release, mailed about 9,300 voters in East County—an area of Multnomah County—primary ballots that left off a Metro zoo measure.
That September, the state disclosed that the same DMV's Motor Voter system had registered people who never proved their U.S. citizenship. The count rose from 306 to 1,617 within two months. Questions from a left-leaning group, not the state's own checks, exposed the error, reported The Federalist. A July 2025 audit found that one in 35 sampled Motor Voter records listed a person as a citizen with nothing to back it up. The auditors concluded the number of ineligible registrants was likely too small to swing an election.
The state later found that 38 of the people Motor Voter wrongly registered had voted. In February 2025, Read's office sent three cases to the Oregon Department of Justice. A state lawyer warned the cases were vulnerable to claims of selective prosecution, and the two agencies (i.e., Oregon’s Departments of State and Justice) shelved them. Neither announced the decision. It surfaced that November only after the Oregon Capital Chronicle asked.
In October 2024, Oregon resident Cara Tapken showed The Federalist how the state's MyVote portal opened any voter's record with just a name and birth date. From there, she said, a user could claim overseas status, mark the ballot, and email it to the county. A state spokeswoman said the office had seen no misuse but did not explain how it confirms a voter lives overseas. I found no sign the state has fixed the portal since.
Tapken said she found the problem in 2020. She said she took it to two governors, then-Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade, and about 50 others, and none of them acted. By then, the DMV breach had already exposed the kind of personal data a fraudster would need to get into the portal.
That month, Judicial Watch, the Constitution Party of Oregon, and two voters sued the state in federal court over its voter rolls. In June 2025, the U.S. Justice Department backed the suit, telling the court Oregon must make "a reasonable effort to remove" ineligible registrations.
Early on October 28, 2024, a suspect attached an incendiary device to the ballot drop box outside the Multnomah County elections office in Portland. Fire suppression contained the damage to three ballots.
Within the hour, a device set off a fire in a drop box across the Columbia River in Vancouver, Washington, damaging hundreds of ballots, reported ABC-affiliate KATU. The devices bore the words "Free Gaza," a law enforcement official told the Associated Press. The FBI later said the bomber used thermite. KGW, an NBC-affiliate, reported the bureau offered a $25,000 reward for information. Two years later, investigators have arrested no one.
2026: New Election, Same Problems
In January, Read announced a cleanup. About 160,000 of the state's roughly 800,000 inactive registrations already met the standard for removal. The state settled the Judicial Watch suit in April. Read agreed to hand the plaintiffs voter roll data every year for five years. Read's office said he would have acted without the lawsuit.
Oregon also fought the federal government over those rolls. The U.S. Justice Department sued the state in 2025 for its full, unredacted voter list. State officials argued the data was private and questioned how federal officials would use it. A federal judge dismissed the suit in January.
In the May primary, counties rejected 7,314 ballots that arrived during the grace week with late postmarks, up 35 percent from the 2022 primary, according to a release. Kotek and Read blamed Postal Service cuts and told voters to use drop boxes—the same kind of box a bomber targeted two years earlier.
Then, in the last week of October, a test version of the secretary of state's election results site turned up in Google searches. The state had put the site online with no firewall in front of it, open to anyone. A spokesman blamed a system update and called it a mistake. He said the numbers were test data and warned the error could feed false claims about election integrity. I reported on the exposure.
There has been no audit, so no one outside the secretary of state's office knows how long the site sat exposed, who visited it, or what they could have done with the data.
Every secretary of state in Oregon since 2017 has handled these failures the same way. The office acknowledges a problem once an outsider forces it out into the open, then moves on. Voters rarely learn what happened or whether anyone fixed it. The office seldom audits these failures and almost never makes the answers public. Oregon voters are left to take its word that the system works, from an office that has given them little reason to.
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