A years-old lawsuit accusing Oregon of failing to proactively remove people from the state’s voter rolls is over after state elections officials signaled they would update their practices and agreed to regularly share information with a conservative activist group.
Under a settlement finalized last week, Secretary of State Tobias Read committed to send data annually for five years to the plaintiffs of the lawsuit: the national group Judicial Watch, the Constitution Party of Oregon and two individual plaintiffs. In exchange, the parties have dropped their suit.
“We go after low-hanging fruit, and Oregon was low-hanging fruit,” Robert Popper, an attorney with Judicial Watch, told OPB. “That being said, I applaud what Tobias Read has done.”
The data that Read has agreed to share with Popper’s group largely concern how county election officials deal with voters they suspect may have moved, but who have not confirmed as much.
Such voters are labeled “inactive” in the state’s voter database and don’t receive ballots. But under federal law, elections officials are required to cancel them from state voter rolls if they don’t respond to a notice that they have been switched to inactive status, and don’t vote in two subsequent federal elections.
Judicial Watch and others sued the state in 2024, arguing Oregon was not actually removing voters as required by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
The lawsuit pointed to a 2023 report that showed 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 suit read. “Yet they reported removing a combined total of 36 registrations in the last two-year reporting period.”
Read, a Democrat, has not said he agrees the state was failing to comply with federal law. But earlier this year, the secretary announced he was taking steps to better scrub the voter rolls as Judicial Watch and its allies argue is necessary.
In January, Read revealed that roughly 800,000 voters were labeled inactive in the state’s system – and that some had been so for nearly a decade or longer. Oregon has roughly three million active registered voters.
The reason for the high number of inactive registrants, Read said, was that Oregon in 2017 altered the language on notices that are sent to voters when election officials have reason to believe their registrations are not correct, often because of a move.
That tweak was instituted under former Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, a Republican.
It eliminated language alerting voters that their registrations would be canceled if they did not respond or vote in upcoming federal elections. Read says that, without offering that notice, Oregon couldn’t legally remove people from its rolls.
“This type of list maintenance is standard practice across the country and was part of Oregon’s normal process until July 20, 2017,” a release from the Secretary of State’s Office said.
In his January action, Read required county election officials to cancel the registrations of roughly 160,000 people who’d been sitting inactive since 2017. He also directed officials to alter the language of notices sent to inactive voters in a way that will allow the remaining 640,000 voters with inactive designations to be removed in the future.
Tess Seger, a spokesperson for Read, said Wednesday the office did not know why Richardson’s office changed the language of notices to voters in 2017. She added that Read would have taken action even without a lawsuit.
“Cleaning the backlog of inactive, unused voter data was a priority for Secretary Read and [Elections Director Dena Dawson] well before they took on their roles,” Seger said in an email.
The state decided to settle the lawsuit, she said, because “our office did not want to waste further taxpayer time and money when the issue was resolved.”
Popper said Tuesday the changes announced in January went a long way toward assuaging his group’s concerns, but that Judicial Watch will continue to monitor data that Oregon shares as part of the settlement.
“If we have to sue, we’ll sue,” he said.
Based in Washington, D.C., Judicial Watch has been suing states to force stricter maintenance of voter rolls for more than a decade. It’s secured settlements in lawsuits against Colorado, Maryland and others.
The group is sometimes accused of fearmongering by suggesting that voters who are left as inactive on state rolls – and therefore not sent ballots – could be a source of voter fraud. That was the case with the Oregon settlement, which prompted Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton to say in a release: “Dirty voter rolls mean dirty elections.”
But Popper acknowledged Tuesday that the group had no proof of widespread voter fraud – in Oregon or elsewhere. He said that was no reason for Oregon and other states not to maintain their voter lists as required.
“We just want compliance,” he said.
The changes made by Read in how Oregon updates its voter rolls are just the latest in a string of notable developments for the state’s election system.
In 2024, state officials learned that flaws in the state’s “motor voter” program, which automatically registers voters who get driver’s licenses, had led to noncitizens being added to the voter rolls. Oregon has since altered its process for those automatic voter registrations.
President Donald Trump, who frequently claims without evidence that mail voting leads to mass fraud, issued an executive order in March that would upend how mail voting is conducted around the country. Oregon and other states have challenged that order in court.
But even if Trump’s attempt is ultimately blocked, at least one change appears to be coming from the federal level. The U.S. Supreme Court strongly suggested earlier this year that it might end the practice, in Oregon and elsewhere, of states accepting mailed ballots that arrive after Election Day.
