The investigation stems from last fall’s discovery that more than 1,600 people had been wrongly registered to vote while obtaining or renewing driver’s licenses or state-issued identification cards. Oregon has automatically registered voters since 2016 when they provide documents proving citizenship, like a U.S. birth certificate or passport, during interactions at the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services division. But since 2019 the state has allowed people to obtain driver’s licenses without proving they’re citizens or legal residents.
That is, of course, insane. Non-citizens or illegal residents have no business being certified by the state.
A series of errors led to the discovery that more than 1,600 people were registered to vote in error. Oregon has more than 3 million registered voters, and clerical workers both miskeyed foreign passports as U.S. passports and failed to make key distinctions between the passports of U.S. nationals and citizens. People born in the territories of American Samoa and Swains Island can hold U.S. passports, but they are not citizens and cannot vote in elections other than party presidential nominating elections.
That’s not awesome, but it percentage terms it’s relatively small error.
State officials removed those wrongly registered voters from voter rolls ahead of the November 2024 election, though a miniscule percentage ever voted. A total of 38 wrongly registered people voted in various elections in 2022 and 2023, and 30 of those received letters warning of consequences of voting while ineligible. The Secretary of State’s Office in February 2025 referred three cases for criminal investigation to the Oregon Department of Justice.
Seems fine.
Neither the Oregon Department of Justice nor the Secretary of State publicly announced the results of those investigations or a Sept. 23 letter to the Secretary of State’s office, which left the door open for the Secretary of State’s Office to add on more evidence and refer the cases again.
Why would Oregon not publicly announce the results of the investigations? That seems fishy.
In a brief three-page document addressed to Deputy Secretary of State Michael Kaplan, a senior assistant attorney general for the Oregon Department of Justice said that the three individuals voluntarily complied with investigators and that there was enough evidence to conclude they turned in signed ballot envelopes.
But “regardless of whether the evidence would be sufficient to obtain convictions,” attorney Jeffrey A. Howes argued that the way the referral process was executed could have singled out certain defendants based on an “unjustifiable standard.” The three sent to the Department of Justice had obtained lawyers, not responded to letters seeking potentially incriminating information or partially responded to those letters.
That could pose concerns about selective prosecution, when a defendant is able to demonstrate that prosecution is based on a category like race or religion or having exercised a constitutionally protected right, Howes wrote.
“We are not suggesting that the sorting, selection, and referral of these three cases was part of a deliberate process of setting apart these three defendants because they chose to exercise constitutional rights (right to counsel; right against self-incrimination),” Howes wrote to Kaplan.
“But because that appears to have been the practical effect of the referral process, any effort to pursue a criminal prosecution in the current posture would be vulnerable to a claim of selective prosecution, which could result in dismissal of the criminal charges.”
This reeks of woke-ism. If the three people being singled out were targeted on the basis of race, religion, or some other “unjustifiable standard” then somebody in government—whoever pursued this—needs to be fired. If they weren’t, then those three people need to be prosecuted for breaking the law. How Oregon has handled this, once again, is not how things should ever be handled.