The Trump administration is asking Oregon to turn over elections data — some of it sensitive — and to prove the state is doing enough to ensure ineligible people don’t vote.
In a pair of requests sent to Secretary of State Tobias Read in July, the U.S. Department of Justice asked for a wide range of information, from details of people who’ve been deemed ineligible to vote to a roster of state elections officials.
The inquiries are the latest sign of federal interest in how Oregon elections are carried out. They came as the Trump administration made similar demands in states across the country, in what federal officials described as an effort to battle voter fraud.
The overtures haven’t been well received in Oregon. Read, a Democrat who is the state’s top elections official, has already rejected one of the requests, noting the state — not the federal government — is charged with administering elections.
Read expects to respond to another in coming days. He said in an interview Wednesday he’s not inclined to offer up any more information than is legally required.
“I find it very hard to take these requests as sincere,” Read said. “I think they all fit into the effort that I see from the Trump administration to justify their attempts to intrude in state elections. To justify conspiracy theories that they’ve been peddling and their supporters have been peddling.”
Among those conspiracy theories are Trump’s false claims that voter fraud allowed Democrat Joe Biden to steal the 2020 presidential election.
Read has received requests from two different sections of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The first, on July 10, was an invitation from a DOJ criminal attorney to discuss a possible agreement where Read would share information with federal authorities about people who voted illegally or committed other election crimes.
“With your cooperation, we plan to use this information to enforce Federal election laws and protect the integrity of federal elections,” read the email from Paul Hayden, a senior attorney in the DOJ’s criminal division.
Read shot the suggestion down in blunt fashion.
“At best, I do not trust that this current administration is capable of protecting Oregonians’ personal data, given the recent, high-profile leaks of state secrets and reckless gutting of federal agencies,” he wrote in a July 23 response. “At worst, I am concerned that this administration will use any data we provide to unlawfully and unjustly violate Oregonians’ rights. I have no interest in collaborating with an administration that is engaged in the illegal detention and deportation of both non-citizens and U.S. citizens alike.”
The second request was more involved. In a three-page letter dated July 16, a lawyer in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division asked Read to provide a broad range of information: from a list of elections officials and registered voters in the state, to detailed explanations of how the state polices its own voter rolls, to the names and voting history of people who’d been deemed ineligible to vote.
The letter requested a response within two weeks. Read said Wednesday his office is still developing one.
“We’re going to respond soon where we will assert our rights,” he said. “We will follow the law and the Constitution.”
Oregon’s ability to make sure ineligible people don’t vote has come under the microscope recently for a couple of reasons.
The first is the revelation last year that the state had registered hundreds people to vote who are not U.S. citizens because of data-entry errors at Oregon’s Driver and Motor Vehicle Services office. Under state law, qualified citizens are automatically registered to vote when they obtain a driver’s license, but that policy is not supposed to extend to noncitizens.
State officials say a small fraction of those registered in error actually voted. But the errors have only energized calls by Republicans for more robust policing of state registrations. Read’s office has instituted new safeguards it says have addressed the problem.
A lawsuit filed last year by conservatives has also piqued the Trump administration’s interest. The suit contends that a 2023 federal report, the Election Administration and Voting Survey, showed Oregon is lax about ensuring its voter list is up to date.
According to the suit, 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 data request from the U.S. DOJ’s civil rights division hit on some of the same trends, suggesting Oregon has removed far fewer voters from its rolls than most states.
It notes, for instance, that Oregon removed 3.6% of registered voters from its rolls between 2022 and 2025 — well under the national average of 9.1%.
Over the same time period, the state removed 4,417 voters from the rolls because they had failed to vote in two elections and also did not respond to an inquiry confirming their voter status. “Oregon, by far, has reported the lowest numbers of removals for this category” of all reporting states, the federal inquiry said.
Read said Wednesday those trends aren’t cause for concern, though he noted Oregon has work to do in standardizing voter data across its 36 counties.
“I don’t think being an outlier is necessarily a bad thing,” he said. “We were the first state in the country to have mail-in voting. We have the highest turnout in the country. Those are things to be proud of.”
A former state treasurer and lawmaker, Read won election to his post last year in a race that partly hinged on voter integrity in Oregon. His Republican opponent, former state Sen. Dennis Linthicum, had claimed the state’s vote-by-mail system was susceptible to fraud. Read won the race with nearly 55% of the vote to Linthicum’s 42%.
Oregon is far from alone in getting federal attention. The DOJ has sent inquiries to elections officials throughout the country in the last month, a development that some worry represents a shift toward meddling in state elections processes.
“These requests are not going out out of a desire to make elections stronger, but in an effort to justify the kinds of claims they’ve been making over time about elections,” Read said. “It doesn’t hold up to evidence.”
