Speaker 1: Tonight, we're talking about election security and the incredible revelation that Oregon registered over 1,200 people in the last three and a half years who were not eligible to vote. Oregon lawmakers held a hearing on the issue today in Salem with some pretty pointed questions. And that is our big story tonight. Now if you're new to this topic, it's incredible, I agree, but true. Oregon's Department of Motor Vehicles discovered earlier this month that clerks had accidentally approved more than 1,200 people for automatic voter registration. It stretches back to 2021 and was apparently going on at DMV offices all over Oregon. There are 59 of those offices. The revelation comes at a time of intense polarization, of course, in our country and conspiracy theories that the voting system is not safe, secure, or accurate. Those theories are false, but this mess up is adding fuel to that fire, which is why we're going to spend some extra time explaining it tonight and also let you follow along for some uncomfortable questions in Salem. We'll start with the director of the Department of Transportation, the DMV, where this originated is part of their bigger organization. Chris Strickler told lawmakers he knows this is important.

Speaker 2: I want to start by saying election integrity and security is extremely important to all of us. And DMV takes that role incredibly seriously and they have implemented swift corrective action already to ensure that the data processing error will not occur again and will not impact the 24 election or in future elections. We clearly know that data security and integrity is important to every Oregonian regardless of where you live and that any errors in the data are serious and we know that they cannot happen again. We regret that we're in this position and that integrity is, frankly, an everyday issue in data entry, data collection, and data storage. We know that. When DMV received a general inquiry about how the automatic voter registration was going, they began their own evaluation. We received many inquiries across the agency, both individuals and groups, and when we do, we consistently and constantly assess what actions may need to be taken.

Speaker 1: That inquiry, by the way, came from a good government group back east. Apparently, they basically asked, how's the process working? How's it going? Signing up someone automatically when they get a license or renew a license. DMV Administrator Amy Joyce explained a first review found that roughly 300 people who were registered to vote should not be because they are not citizens. That led to a bigger review, which found around 900 more, totaling 1,259 people who were registered but should not be. By the way, we don't control the camera in the hearing room in Salem, so you're not going to see her for a bit, but you will hear her. Here we go.

Speaker 3: This was truly a clerical error. We have a drop-down menu of documents that people can provide to prove their identity and their age in a DMV transaction, and that list defaulted to U.S. passport or U.S. birth certificate. The error happened in driver license and ID card transactions when staff entered into the system the type of document presented to prove identity and birth. What happens at the counter is that a staff verifies the source document given by the customer that it's legitimate, not fraudulent. They fill out a form indicating the type of document that's presented, and then they go and get a second check with a coworker to verify that that document, again, is legitimate, not fraudulent, and that that form's filled out correctly. Then that first employee goes back to the system to enter the type of document, and that is where the mistake can occur. If they inadvertently choose the wrong document, that can put a code into the system indicating citizenship. This is no longer our screen, but this is the former screen that you can see. We had U.S. birth certificate and U.S. passport as sort of default options.

Speaker 1: And so, she said, it appears that sometimes the staff at the counter would click the U.S. passport accidentally, which would send the person off to be automatically registered under Motor Voter. Administrator Joyce said once the agency found the first batch of errors, it dug in.

Speaker 3: So we resolved to review records to ferret out any errors that we'd made. We knew the election was coming, and that voter registration integrity is critically important. So while the error is bad and the timing is awful, we knew we had to do this immediately. And here is the scope of what we looked at. We only looked at records, obviously, that had U.S. citizenship indicated, because those are the only ones that go over in the Oregon Motor Voter file. Then we looked at records from January 21 forward. Why that time period? Federal reasons. That's when DMV added a lot of foreign documents to the drop-down menu as options, and that created more potential for error. Also, prior to that, we didn't have drop-down menus at all as of the middle of 2020. We had an old mainframe green screen user interface that required staff to key in the document type. So there was no drop-down menu. We were also verifying documents through federal systems, and importantly, at that time, we had a daily manual reconciliation of records, ensuring that people with legal immigration status did not mistakenly include a citizen indicator in the system.

Speaker 1: Okay, so that's a lot of information, and I've asked the DMV and ODOT to explain what exactly made those 1,259 records stand out. How did they know those were the errors? They're not answering me. They just keep pointing me back to their statement that an error was identified. Great. How? In the meantime, state Republicans at the hearing asked pointed questions of their own. Representative Kim Wallin from the Medford area wanted to know why DMV did not launch similar reviews earlier when she was asking if the system was secure.

Speaker 4: This is really interesting this morning because I personally, and I know Representative Scharf, have asked in the past in rules committees of the Secretary of State's office, how can we be sure that only citizens are registered to vote? I've asked that question multiple times, which I would consider to be a general inquiry, but now I'm being told that, in fact, I was so disturbed by the non-answers that I got because I usually got the answer, it's fine, we check. We know that people are not being registered if they're not citizens. I, this summer, had been thinking about it, and I was actually going to ask for a presentation having the screenshots that you actually did produce today. This is precisely what I wanted to see, so I'm sorry that it took this to get those, but it sort of makes my point that we didn't really have systems in place. We certainly didn't have checks, as has been already testified to today. What I really want to know is, it seems like it mattered who asked, who made this general inquiry? So, who was it that made this general inquiry, and why did you respond to that differently than you did when we asked that question?

Speaker 3: Chair Bowman and Representative Wallin, I don't think it matters who asked. The entity that asked is, I may get the name wrong, I think it's called the Institute for Responsive Government. We don't have any contracts with them or anything like that. I think there's sort of a good government, kind of a, perhaps, non-profit. I think when the questions were, you know, again, vaguely, sort of, how's it going, and are you seeing any errors, I think that's what keyed us off to say, well, let's go see.

Speaker 1: The leader of the Oregon House Republicans, Representative Jeff Helfrich from Hood River, asked a question that pointed out an uncomfortable truth, which the officials did not want to answer.

Speaker 5: Is it true that this wouldn't have been discovered if it wouldn't have been about the outside group's inquiry?

Speaker 2: Chair Bowman, Vice Chair Helfrich, I'll let Ms. Joyce speak to the inquiry itself, but I will say that clearly we were notified by way of a general question. But the decision to actually dive further into that issue really was a decision within DMV to say this is something, because of its importance, that's worth diving further into. I wasn't party to the initial conversation, but clearly there was an identification of a potential issue.

Speaker 3: Chair Bowman and Vice Chair Helfrich, again, Amy Joyce, the DMV administrator. So the inquiry was very general. How is automatic voter registration going? Are you seeing any errors? And this was posed not even to DMV, but to our information services branch. When we learned of that, we decided that's a key that we need to start digging in. Now let me state the obvious. Should we have been looking sooner than a few months before the election? Absolutely. But I think what's critical here is that when we were posed with the question on such an important issue and with the election coming very soon, we knew we had to dig in and that's what we did. And when we found something, obviously we didn't bury it. We brought it forward and we immediately went to work.

Speaker 1: Now that is some good spinning by those two. They did not answer his question. The DMV says they fixed the issue by making it harder to choose U.S. passports as an option when indicating what type of ID someone has brought to the counter. And they are doing lots of staff retraining. And now at the end of the day, a manager at each of the 59 DMV offices is checking to make sure that anyone who was registered to vote was supposed to be registered. All right. We also want to answer some of your questions that came up following our coverage of this issue last night. There's a lot of interest in this issue, of course. So the more we can clear up, the better for all of us. Janet wrote in to us to say, was the voter problem registered as Democrats or Republicans? The answer to that, it's a bit unclear thus far. It is quite possible that the answer is neither. And that's because of the process that plays out between DMV and the Secretary of State's office, which was explained earlier this week. And the video may get choppy here. It's not your TV. It's people having bad connections to the virtual call.

Speaker 6: The way that the voter registration interplay works for automatic voter registration or Oregon voter voter, as we call it, is that DMV completes the process and verifies citizenship. And then they send us the record. And the record is considered a complete voter registration card. Once it gets to the Secretary of State's office, and we then send that record to the right county where they reside, and they are registered to vote automatically. The automatic process also includes a three-week window where they get, so they get a piece of mail that says you've been automatically registered to vote. You have three options. You can do nothing, and you will become automatically registered. You can write back and say, no, please opt me out. I don't want to be registered. The third option is that they can write back and select a political party. So once we get the record from DMV, we're just processing the record and getting it to the counties so that they can be registered, that those folks can be registered to vote.

Speaker 1: So whether or not any of the 1,259 people actually registered with one party or the other kind of depends on if they followed up after receiving that letter. On to our next question. This one from Wayne. I'm curious to know where were these unqualified registrants placed on the voter roll? Was it widespread or isolated to only a few offices or maybe even one DMV office? That's a great question. The answer is widespread. At least that's what they're telling us. They said that today, reaffirming what they also said on Monday.

Speaker 3: What we saw so far is that there's, these are spread across the state. We're not seeing any patterns in particular, but we will be continuing to look at that.

Speaker 6: I mean, some counties have no voters. Some counties have, I think the largest number was in the mid nineties.

Speaker 3: In terms of mistakes made by staff, again, we didn't do the analysis yet on this second batch of folks in terms of where they are geographically or particular offices or even particular staff. We will be doing that analysis. It continues to be our understanding that it is a mere clerical error, but we'll be looking at the data to see if there's anything there.

Speaker 1: Governor Kotech has demanded a full report in two weeks. We'll have to see what that full analysis shows exactly about these mistakes happening with the voter registration. Finally, there's this question from Fernando. Will the individuals who were ineligible to vote see any consequences for voting? They are supposed to pay a fine and see jail time. Well, that question came up Monday as well. So here's what the state says will happen next with those nine people.

Speaker 6: First of all, the are going to look at all of those nine people that are left and see if there is anything in our voter registration records that would indicate that, yes, they should be registered, either their citizenship status changed since 2021 or they were registered prior and for whatever reason, like the gentleman we were talking about, they decided not to bring that documentation when they applied for their driver's card. So that number may shrink based on that preliminary work that our clerks do. Once the clerks do that, if they do that, they find out there's still nothing in our records that would indicate that this person is eligible to vote. We will send a letter to the individual saying, did this happen in error? Can you provide us any evidence? And then if depending on what we get back, if there's still indication that they voted when they were not eligible to do so, that is a criminal offense and it will be referred to the Department of Justice.

Speaker 1: For an investigation, she said, so that's the latest on this debacle, but there will certainly be more to say about this when that final report comes out, you can bet we'll be watching very closely.