What in the actual heck??
Judicial watch sued in 2025 to clean up Oregon's voter rolls.
Confirmed by Portland's Willamette Week, Secretary of State Tobias Read is now cleaning up those records, and the scope of the clean-up is HUGE.
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.
There's nuance here. Essentially, because these voters haven't cast a ballot in a certain number of years, they no longer get a handy-dandy mail-in ballot sent directly to their home.
That doesn't mean, however, that they can't vote, or that they haven't been involved in some level of electoral shenanigans.
There are reportedly 167,000 people who haven't voted since 2017 and will be taken off the rolls beginning this month. Another 640,000 are classified as inactive and will be reviewed after that.
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.
The speed and competence of bureaucracy makes fraud really easy. If it takes a year just to set up a process to review the rolls, what kind of fraud is still years away from actually being detected??
Let's talk numbers.
The population of Oregon is only 4.3 million.
2.2 million of those residents voted in the 2024 presidential election.
There were an additional 800,000 "inactive" voters who still received a ballot in the mail despite the fact that the state did not know if they were still eligible. They might have moved to a different state, or perhaps they died and someone else was receiving their ballot on their behalf, or they might have changed their name and duplicates were being sent out.
The possibilities are endless ... and they don't even include people who are ineligible to vote but are listed as "active" by the state!!
Consider this testimony from the 2024 election:
When you have this many unknown variables involving a list of people representing almost 20% of the population of your state and 36% of all voters, you can't guarantee your elections are secure.
But since the purpose of a system is what it does, and the Democrats who rule Oregon created an endlessly-complex system where accountability and order are impossible, perhaps insecurity is the point!
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