No wonder Oregon officials have been hiding their dirty voter rolls for all these years and fighting off every attempt to clean them up.
Oregon, Washington, California, and several other states are facing lawsuits and scrutiny for their failure to let the feds get a look at their dirty voter rolls. The Justice Department Civil Rights Department Chief Harmeet Dhillon has hounded these states. Judicial Watch, a privately funded organization, has also made Oregon and its dirty mail-in ballot voter rolls a target of its legal arrows.
And now Oregon, at long last, is lowering the veil and removing a gasp-inducing 800,000 illegal, fake, dead, and inactive voters from the list.
Oregon's dirty voter rolls have garnered a lot of attention.
#fakenews pic.twitter.com/ip8CH8iVbZ
— Tobias Read (@TobiasRead) January 14, 2026
No, the problem is actually worse, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read.
Eight hundred thousand. In a state with 3,069,000 voters, 800,000 represents 26% of the total number of voters. That's a dirty voter list, anyway you look at it.
Last June, Judicial Watch sued the state of Oregon to purge names of people who are inactive, ineligible, dead, or phony voters. Under federal law, states are required to clean out their voter rolls routinely. Democrats used to pay a lot of lip service to the Help America Vote Act and other federal voting laws, but having so many names on the voting rolls in a mail-in state makes it quite easy to impersonate voters.
We don't know the extent to which this may have happened in Oregon, but let's just put it this way: Since Oregon began the vote-by-mail experiment, only one Republican has won a state-wide race. One. And that had more to do with the dirty Democrat running against Dennis Richardson. Richardson, one of the finest SOSs the state had ever seen, was stricken with cancer and couldn't finish out his term.
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It's not as if Oregon has had an appetite to clean its voter rolls. Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton says that 29 of Oregon's 36 counties removed "few or no registrations as required by federal election law," so there's no institutional muscle memory to rely on there.
A new rule at the end of 2025 made providing social security numbers a requirement to register to vote, but Joe Biden gave social security numbers to more than two million out of the tens of millions of illegal aliens who poured over the border. Social security numbers aren't what they used to be.
Fitton and the Constitution Party's lawsuit in Oregon detailed that Oregon voter rolls were so dirty that 35 of the 36 counties had "overall registration rates exceeding 100%." In addition, they argued, Oregon voter rolls "had the highest known inactive registration rate of any state in the nation." This is an invitation to voter fraud and impersonation.
"Dirty voter rolls can mean dirty elections," Fitton said. "Oregon... has some of the worst voting rolls in America."
Oregon has been in the crosshairs of the Trump Administration for a long time. Here's the way the Willamette Week characterized the state-of-play:
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.
It's nice that Read would like to instill trust in Oregon elections. I suppose if he really wanted to accomplish that, he'd get rid of exclusive mail-in elections. He says that ineligible voters do not receive ballots, but with 800,000 phony voters on the rolls, someone could, if they chose to, use one of those names to re-up a registration, become "active," and vote in an election. That's called voter impersonation. Nobody in Multnomah County, for example, would likely question a suddenly active voter. Would they question this person? They don't ask for voter ID, so how are they going to check signature verification?
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Read has given himself the ability to slow-roll the purge of phony voters. There are reportedly 160,000 "low hanging fruit" voter names that can easily be purged, but the rest of the 640,000 will take longer. Probably much longer.
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. [emphasis added]
They don't have a process? How is that possible?
My old Latin American History prof at UW often spoke of voter fraud. He would hold his arms out wide and dramatically intone, "Entire cemeteries would be resurrected to vote in elections!"
His voice is in my head every time I think of how those phony voters will somehow come back to life.
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