SALEM, Ore., Oregon will finally start scrubbing roughly 800,000 inactive voter registrations from its rolls after letting them pile up since 2017, Secretary of State Tobias Read announced Friday.
Read, a Democrat, issued two directives to restart what he called “routine cleanup.” The state quietly stopped removing outdated registrations almost nine years ago and never got around to picking it back up.
About 160,000 of those records already met every legal requirement for removal before 2017. Election mail came back undeliverable. Voters never responded to official notices. They sat out multiple federal elections. Counties are now ordered to cancel those registrations immediately.
“These directives are about cleaning up old data that’s no longer in use so Oregonians can be confident that our voter records are up-to-date,” Read said.
The second directive rewrites the language on confirmation cards sent to inactive voters, making it clear their registrations will be canceled if they don’t respond or show up to vote. State officials say this restores a process that’s been frozen for years.
Those 800,000 inactive records make up about a fifth of Oregon’s entire voter file. Officials went out of their way to note, multiple times, that inactive voters aren’t receiving ballots right now.
Jason Snead with the Honest Elections Project wasn’t buying it.
“It’s astounding that they haven’t been removing anybody from the voter force in almost a decade because this is very basic 101 level election administration,” Snead told Fox News Digital.
He said the risk is worse in Oregon than most places because the state runs all its elections by mail. When you’re automatically sending ballots to every address on file and you haven’t cleaned that file since Obama’s second term, ballots end up going to people who moved away or died. Snead also brought up the state’s 2024 embarrassment, when Oregon had to suspend its automatic voter registration program after non-citizens got added to the rolls by mistake.
“I think there’s clearly a degree of skepticism that’s warranted,” he said.
The announcement lands while Oregon is getting sued from multiple directions. Judicial Watch filed suit. So did the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Trump’s Department of Justice piled on too. Snead figures the lawsuits had something to do with the timing.
“They call it voter purge, and they say that this is going to disenfranchise voters. But then when you actually bring litigation over this, sometimes that forces their hand.”
A spokesperson for Read’s office told Fox News they can’t comment on the pending cases but insisted the secretary made this a priority before taking office. “He took this step because it’s the right thing to do.”
On the DOJ lawsuit specifically, the spokesperson pushed back: “That’s not related. It’s about whether we have to hand over Oregonians’ private voter data. Which we have no intent of doing.”
RNC press secretary Kiersten Pels went after Read directly, saying he “has presided over one of the most bloated voter rolls in the country.” She added that Democratic states “have allowed their voter rolls to spiral out of control, especially in mail-in voting systems like Oregon’s.”
The DNC’s Albert Fujii fired back that Democrats “support normal list maintenance” but accused Republicans of “pushing aggressive voter purges to systematically disenfranchise eligible voters across the country, especially voters of color.”
Oregon heads into the 2026 midterms as one of several states facing federal and private legal challenges over whether their voter rolls are accurate enough to run a clean election.
