Thanks to pressure from the Trump administration, as well as other plaintiffs like Judicial Watch, Oregon is finally taking steps to clean its outdated voter rolls.
Late last week, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read published a press release revealing the launch of “two new directives for local elections officials to restart routine cleanup of outdated, inactive voter registration records.”
“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 in a statement.
“From day one, our goal was clear: run elections that are secure, fair, and accurate. This move will strengthen our voter rolls and reinforce public trust in our elections,” he added.
HUGE: After @JudicialWatch lawsuit, Oregon Secretary of State just announced removal of 800,000 dirty names from voter rolls! So now it looks like Judicial Watch lawsuits will clean 5.8 MILLION names from the voter rolls nationally. We also have federal lawsuits to clean millions… pic.twitter.com/XH87w61TOI
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) January 12, 2026
The first directive calls for election officials to cancel longtime “inactive voter registrations” that were deemed inactive before 2017. These are individuals whom election officials have long been unable to reach by postal mail.
The second directive calls for election officials to make it clear to voters that their voter registration cards will be cancelled “if individuals do not act” to confirm their voting status “before two general federal elections have occurred.”
This about-face comes nearly a decade after Oregon paused inactive voter removals in 2017.
According to Read’s press release, there are now a whopping 800,000 inactive voter records in Oregon, compared to the state’s three million active voter records.
Hold on. Oregon’s population is only 4.25M…. 20% of their registered voters were fake? https://t.co/rnCFEcI41P
— Upstate Federalist (@upstatefederlst) January 12, 2026
So far, 160,000 inactive records automatically meet removal requirements and will therefore be eliminated.
As for the remaining 640,000, they “currently do not meet the federal and state standards for cancellation,” according to Read.
But he stressed in the press release that “none of the individuals associated with these records will receive ballots, and these inactive records have no impact on Oregon elections.”
Still, none of this would be a problem if Oregon, a bastion of far-left extremism, just acted like a normal state.
The Oregonian notes that normal states automatically “remove inactive voters who fail to vote in two consecutive federal general elections from its voter rolls.”
Oregon instead labels them “inactive voters,” meaning they get kicked off the official voting list and don’t receive a ballot — but they can easily reacquire their active voting status again by just updating the state.
Jason Snead, the executive director of the Honest Elections Project, is a major critic of how Oregon does things.
“First of all, 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,” he told Fox News, adding that voter rolls become bloated and outdated when states don’t do their job.
According to Snead, this is especially problematic in states like Oregon that allow for mail-in voting.
“He argues that automatically mailing ballots while failing to routinely clean voter rolls makes it more likely that ballots will be sent to people who are no longer eligible, including those who have moved or died,” Fox News notes.
“Even if state officials say inactive voters don’t receive ballots, Snead says Oregon’s recent administrative failures, including the suspension of its automatic voter registration program in 2024 after non-citizens were mistakenly registered, justify skepticism about whether safeguards are consistently working as claimed,” the reporting continues.
Though first estimated to be at over 300 incidents, Oregon election officials have now admitted that nearly 1,300 people were automatically registered to vote even though they had not shown they were citizens.
Leftists and liberals have long claimed that noncitizens being… https://t.co/JwTMkkPuZl pic.twitter.com/RPsG8LpiXa
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) September 24, 2024
“I think there’s clearly a degree of skepticism that’s warranted, and I think that it really speaks to the need to always be focused on the basics of election administration,” Snead said.
“Cleaning of the vote rolls is really one of the most foundational, important things that a secretary of state should be doing,” he concluded.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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