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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.
As Oregon kicks off a general election year, Secretary of State Tobias Read is taking what he says is the overdue step of cleaning up the state’s voter rolls.
That process could lead to the cancellation of as many as 800,000 registrations. That’s the number of voters Read says are currently classified as “inactive” on the voter rolls. To be clear, inactive voters do not receive ballots, but their names remain on the rolls.
The cleanup comes as Oregon’s first-in-the-nation vote-by-mail system is under intense scrutiny. President Donald Trump, who blamed mail-in ballots, among other bogeymen, for his defeat in 2020, has amplified historical criticism of Oregon’s system.
Trump’s Department of Justice has sued Read’s office, seeking information about Oregon voters (that litigation is pending in U.S. District Court in Eugene). Judicial Watch, a conservative Washington, D.C., foundation, sued Read’s predecessor, LaVonne Griffin-Valade, in 2024, seeking a cleanup of voter rolls (that litigation is also pending). And currently, a group seeking to end vote by mail at the ballot is suing to overturn results of a transit district election in Douglas County and hoping to use that case to discredit mail ballots.
Read, a Democrat elected in 2024, says he’s acting not in direct response to any of the lawsuits, but because he wants to increase voter trust in mail elections.
“There are many examples of people seeking to undermine confidence in our elections,” he says. “We want to do whatever we can to remove any reasons for doubt.”
The way Read plans to do that is by systemically weeding out inactive voters.
Oregon currently has 3,063,747 registered, active voters. About 800,000 more voters’ registration status is inactive because their mail, including ballots or official notices, from county elections offices has been returned undelivered.
Active voters get ballots; inactive voters, Read emphasizes, do not.
In a conference call with all 36 county elections clerks earlier this month, Read’s elections director, Dena Dawson, told the clerks Read wants to begin the cleanup by canceling the registrations of those people who have been inactive the longest. (The Oregon Journalism Project first learned about the coming purge of inactive voters after that call.)
In an interview with OJP, Read said Oregon’s county elections officials have lacked a consistent protocol for canceling the registration of long-inactive voters since July 20, 2017. Read says he’s not sure why previous elections officials stopped canceling inactive registrations, but he notes there have been eight Oregon secretaries of state in the past decade, leading to heavy staff turnover.
Elections officials will begin by picking the low-hanging fruit. About 160,000 voters have been classified as inactive since 2017. Beginning later this month, their registrations will be canceled.
The Oregon Elections Division and county clerks will subsequently work out a process for notifying the other roughly 640,000 inactive voters that their registrations will be canceled unless they take affirmative steps to reactivate their registrations.
Read says cleaning up the voter rolls has been a priority since he took office a year ago, but it has taken that much time to get his staff in order to develop a process for removing inactive voters that complies with state and federal law and is workable for the 36 county clerks.
“In my mind, all of this has really raised the importance of people making sure their registration is up to date,” Read says. “They can check to make sure their registrations are in order on the Elections Division’s website.”
