Posts published in “Oregon”

A reader reacting to the news of noncitizens being registered to vote in Oregon recently sent me an email, saying: “Oregon does such a great job they register illegals to vote. That’s democracy for sure the Democrat way.”

Wrong registrations did happen: First, state officials reported 306, and then on Monday, they said the number was really 1,259 and that nine people who were not U.S. citizens had voted.

This latest announcement is likely to fuel a bigger political uproar among a number of  Republican legislators. Republican secretary of state candidate Dennis Linthicum said, “It’s no longer a conspiracy that illegal immigrants can successfully register to vote in Oregon. But now they actually have, so our conspiracy theory has turned from hot air to fact.”

The subject of noncitizens voting has national resonance, with Republicans in the U.S. House considering a shutdown of the federal government over the subject of noncitizen voting in elections.

Federal law passed in 1996 specifically bans noncitizens from voting in federal elections, for president or Congress. A few local jurisdictions, mainly in Maryland and Vermont, do allow noncitizen voting in some cases, mainly when property taxes, which may be paid by noncitizens, are at stake. But repeated studies have found that actual illegal voting is rare. One study by the Georgia secretary of state found a total of 1,634 cases of noncitizens “potentially” registering to vote over 25 years – but it found no illegal votes.

The policy in Oregon is clear. According to the Secretary of State’s Office: “Only U.S. citizens may vote in Oregon elections. People must verify and attest they are U.S. citizens when registering to vote, and only voters who have registered in Oregon will have their ballot counted. Providing false information when registering to vote is a felony.???”

So what happened in the case of those 1,259 noncitizens?

Oregon’s voter registration system provides for automatically registering people to vote when they obtain a driver’s license or state identity card. There are exceptions. Some people are not included, including those too young to vote and others who are barred, including noncitizens. The first group is flagged by birth date, and the second by the type of identification people provide – as they must – when they obtain the license.

Since 2021, Oregon officials have accepted a wider range of identity documents at the Driver and Motor Vehicle division, including foreign passports and birth certificates. State officials said in September that the 306 noncitizens registered to vote had presented foreign passports that were marked as U.S. passports. The other 953 people who were wrongly registered to vote had presented foreign birth certificates as proof of ID. The nine people who actually voted were referred to the Department of Justice for investigation.

In the context of Oregon’s 3 million registered voters, this is not a massive mistake. It’s the kind of error a bureaucracy usually can handle, and state elections officials said they’ve change their procedures to prevent more mishaps.

It isn’t a policy decision, either: What happened is actually directly counter to the state’s stated policy.

My email correspondent implied that a mistake was made and that it was intentional. The first suggestion was on target. The second isn’t, and that’s worth bearing in mind when considering how much weight to give in the case of the improper registrations.

 

Oregon has a good track record – one of the strongest among the 50 states – on democracy.

The state makes it relatively easy for Oregonians to participate in elections compared with many other states. But threats to democracy lurk elsewhere – outside the state – and that means Oregon has a special role to play in setting an example.

The 2007 United Nations General Assembly resolution setting up the International Day of Democracy called democracy “a universal value based on the freely expressed will of people to determine their own political, economic, social and cultural systems, and their full participation in all aspects of life.”

Furthering democracy should not only be the work of elected officials but also the public needs to be involved, something that’s good to remember as States Newsroom and other media organizations across the country mark Democracy Day on Sunday.

Oregon has been all over democracy for more than a century.

The sweeping electoral reforms that have been adopted nationally happened early in Oregon, and primarily thanks to a popular movement.

One of its leaders was William U’Ren, a Wisconsin native, came to Oregon looking for work and found it laboring in orchards. He was afire with the idea of politically empowering people like himself. By 1892, he was an activist organization leader, the spark plug behind the state’s Populist Party and the tip of the spear behind Oregon’s initiative, referendum and recall provisions, which are pure popular democracy. And he succeeded because large numbers of Oregonians joined the effort.

Ever since, Oregon has been among the most active states with ballot initiatives backed by signatures – though the Legislature refers measures to the ballot, too – and it has above average participation in elections generally. The state has been aggressive in making voting easy, through the Motor Voter law and adopting mail balloss along with other efforts that other states often have replicated.

Not all states have these tools: Oregon is among 24 that allow initiatives on the ballot.

Oregon and California were the first to adopt automatic voter registration through the Department of Motor Vehicles. In 2016, Oregon expanded th “Motor Voter” law to make voter registration automatic unless the person opts out of registration. That eliminates the need to fill out a voter registration card. Today, Oregon is one of 24 states with some form of automatic voter registration.

All this may matter more in Oregon as a factor in politics than in some states in part because the election margins often are close. Landslide wins are less common in Oregon than in many states, and really close elections are not unusual. Two and maybe three of Oregon’s congressional races this year are expected to be close, which would reflect what happened two years ago.

How many people participate in democracy by voting and in other ways affects the results, and not everyone is in favor of strong voting. Some other states, like Ohio, Arizona and Idaho have faced efforts against widening voter access and allowing public initiatives, reserving that power for  legislatures.

Such efforts easily could arise in Oregon.

There are also political arguments, such as Utah’s U.S. Sen. Mike Lee’s well-known 2020 tweet, “We’re not a democracy,” arguing that the U.S. is a republic, with the implicit assumption that self-government is not a positive idea. The Heritage Foundation, which is operating as a central planning arm for a prospective second Trump administration, has argued likewise.

The common rebuttal to statements like Lee’s is that the U.S. is both a democracy and a republic – the latter being the mechanism through which the former works. But this has not sunk in in all quarters.

Anti-democratic ideas like those from Lee and the Heritage Foundation may find less interest in Oregon than in some places. But that doesn’t mean democracy isn’t under threat nationally and internationally.

That means Oregon has a chance to make its longstanding perspective felt in what is increasingly becoming a political debate.

When the United Nations set up the International Day of Democracy, it was intended partly to celebrate self-government but also to “review the state of democracy in the world.”

Americans generally, and Oregonians specifically, need to weigh in on the state of democracy. Oregon’s long history with democratic activism gives it special cachet in pushing for an easier process for the public.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

Political prognosticators for months have talked about the nation’s battleground states, and Oregon has not been included in the mix.

That’s because Oregonians almost certainly will vote in November for Democrat Kamala Harris for president, judging from recent election history.

Oregon was once a Republican bastion in presidential elections, but no Republican presidential candidate has taken the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Most of Oregon’s presidential elections have not been especially close since then, either. Donald Trump only pulled in 39% of the vote in 2016 and 40% in 2020, giving a landslide to Democrats. Other Republican presidential candidates in the last three decades haven’t done much better.

Presidential victories often help lower-ballot candidates from the same party, which could matter in Oregon where several key races are competitive.

The highest-profile race is in the 5th Congressional District between incumbent Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Democrat Janelle Bynum. The 6th District rematch contest, between incumbent Democrat Andrea Salinas and Republican challenger Mike Erickson, could feel the ripple effects, too, and so might a few legislative races.

But the local record of top candidates helping lower-ballot contenders win by riding on their coattails is mixed, and even nationally, research has been inconclusive.

The statistics-oriented 538 website cited studies finding an advantage from a fifth to half of a percentage point for a down-ballot candidates if their party’s candidate for president is ahead by 1 point, with the advantage growing as the lead increases. Those amounts might not be large enough to matter in most cases, but if the local race is close – as it was in the Oregon 5th and 6th districts in 2022 – it can be decisive.

After evaluating numbers from 1992 to 2016, the 538 site reported, “We found a strong correlation (0.655) between the national margins for presidential and House races.” Earlier studies have found that popular presidential candidates tend to add to the number of U.S. House seats their party wins, though results can vary depending on the local conditions.

Not all voters respond the same way. Columbia University Professor Robert Erikson has noted the impact of “balancing” when voters choose candidates across party lines – such as a president from one party and a member of Congress from another – to keep each party in check.

And, of course, different states and regions have different records. In Oregon, there’s very limited evidence of a coattail effect in congressional races. For example, in the last four general elections, Republicans continued to win by landslides in the heavily Republican 2nd Congressional District in eastern Oregon in both the 2016 presidential year and in the 2022 midyear election. Democratic wins in other congressional races also showed no coattail effect in presidential years compared with midterm elections.

And presidential races have not appeared to have much of an impact on the Legislature. From the election of 2006 to present, each general election has yielded between 22 and 30 Republican House members. The Republican high spot came with the midterm elections of 2010 and 2006, which would indicate a little advantage for the party in nonpresidential years. The Republican low spots fell in the midterm of 2018 and the presidential of 2020. Overall, the shifts have been minor and subtle over the last dozen years.

In a looser sense, if one of the parties has significantly more energy and enthusiasm – which may derive in part from national politics – that can filter down to local candidates and party organizations. Oregon Democrats may be feeling some of that with Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential candidacy in recent weeks.

But a true presidential coattail effect is likely to be short, if anything, in Oregon.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

 

Oregon’s public defender problems have been getting much better and much worse at the same time.

Finding a solution that makes sense doesn’t involve doing what most people have long argued: spending more money on legal services. The answer lies in how the money is managed and spent, and how the workload is organized.

In all, it resembles any of several serious Oregon problems – drug abuse and homelessness among them – where the willingness to do the right thing, and the ability to pay for it, are not the bottleneck. The problem lies in smartly managing the problem-solving.

The problems with the public defense of people charged with a crime who cannot afford an attorney but have the right to one is not new, and legislators and the state executive branch actively have been working on it for years.

The Oregon Legislature has responded. The Oregon Public Defense Commission, which is assigned to manage and deliver public attorneys for at-need defendants, has been given a massive infusion of new money, its budget more than doubling in the past seven years.

The larger picture in defense caseloads looks better than even a couple of years ago. In January 2022, the American Bar Association produced a report called The Oregon Project: An Analysis of the Oregon Public Defense System and Attorney Workloads Standards, which found that Oregon had fewer than a third of the attorneys, or more exactly attorney work-hours, needed to meet the the demand and  and ought to have the full-time equivalent of about 1,300 more attorneys.

Since then, other states have studied exactly how much attorney time is needed in public defense, and when variations in the types of cases are factored in – a simple misdemeanor versus a knot of complex felonies, for example – it turns out Oregon’s need is far smaller than estimated by the bar association. Those studies indicate it needs about 600 attorneys.

But the problem is more complicated than that.

There’s been more focus on providing counsel for in-custody defendants, but the problem seems to have worsened among the larger group of out-of-custody defendants, with the lack of counsel problem worsening overall.

Their ranks have swelled after a federal judge last October ordered that any inmate not assigned an attorney within a week had to be released from county jails. (The legal debate about the judge’s action is ongoing.)

On top of that, the average time an out-of-custody felony defendant now is without counsel is running upward of 100 days.

This has been happening even at a time when the numbers of Oregon crimes, notably property crime, have been trending downward.

Under terms of the state-attorney contracts awarded in June 2022, the defense attorneys are limited in the number of cases they can accept. By April of 2023, however, many attorneys already had hit those ceilings and could not take on new clients as new defendants entered the system. In Multnomah County, private lawyers overall reported hitting 122% of the maximum caseload in recent months. So in the spring of 2023, the state throttled back the number of cases defense attorneys could take.

There have also been serious problems with billing by the commission. The amount of time elapsed for payment to attorneys has grown from just over a week in 2016 to more than 45 days this year – a situation bound to become unacceptable to many attorneys and other contractors, such as private investigators.

More flexible rules for attorney contracting could help, along with a sharper focus on problem-solving and less on rule-making. But there’s a larger systemic block getting in the way of solving many state problems that both agency directors and the governor, and the Legislature, should start to consider more broadly.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.

On May 21, Oregon’s Democratic-registered voters made their choice for their nominee for president. It was not close: 87% of them – about 362,500 voters – weighed in for the incumbent, President Joe Biden.

Oregon has been Biden country for some time. In the 2020 election, Biden won Oregon’s vote by 16 percentage points, well above his national average.

In all, Oregon will have 78 delegates at the 2024 national convention, 12 of which are “superdelegates” who can vote as they choose but cannot vote during the first round and will only cast votes if a candidate doesn’t receive majority support in the first round. The other 66 were chosen based on the primary election results, and Biden has been slated to receive the votes of all of them. State law requires delegates to sign a pledge to continue supporting their candidate through the first two rounds of balloting unless the candidate releases them from that pledge or receives less than 35% of the nominating votes.

Now that Biden is no longer running for president, and has thrown his backing to Vice President Kamala Harris, he has effectively released them to do as they will.

In a strict sense, the delegates, including Oregon’s, have the power. No longer bound to vote for Biden, they can choose to support at the convention anyone they like.

The old political adage in presidential politics was that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. Will Oregon’s Democrats turn that on its head this year?

Probably. Delegates around the country could react in different ways, but there’s reason to think Oregon’s delegates are likely – barring any new unforeseen developments – to join the Harris campaign.

In many states, Democrats are scattered, geographically and organizationally. In Oregon, they’re relatively organized, reflecting the organized labor structure that has helped them to so many wins. In some states, many delegates may be atomized, with little outreach from other nearby party members. In Oregon, that’s less likely to happen.

And what have the leaders been saying?

Some had not yet weighed in on the nomination question in the hours after Biden announced he was withdrawing. They confined themselves to praise for his leadership. Like other state party organizations, Oregon’s is  supposed to avoid weighing in on candidates for a nomination until the question is settled.

But by Monday, many of Democratic leaders in Oregon, who are also superdelegates, had voiced support for Harris. The big name is Sen. Ron Wyden, probably Oregon’s leading Democrat, who declared, “I’m all in to support Vice President Harris with all my energy.” Oregon’s other senator, Jeff Merkley, also voiced support for Harris as did Oregon’s Democratic House members, Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Suzanne Bonamici, Val Hoyle, and Andrea Salinas.

Gov. Tina Kotek, another superdelegate, also backed Harris on Monday, releasing a statement through her campaign that said she was “proud” to endorse the vice president.

“She’s tough, she’s smart and she’s ready to unite the country. Kamala Harris should be our next president,” Kotek said.

Some individual party officials expressed support for Harris as well. At least one convention delegate from Oregon, Kevin Stine of Medford, said he would vote for Harris.

Matt Keating, a member of the Democratic National Committee from Oregon who is also a member of the Eugene City Council, signed a letter including scores of names of Democratic officials around the county, declaring support for Harris.

Many delegates and party officials have not made a formal or public statement so far, but when they do, those who have are likely to play a visible role in the discussions and possibly help set its course. Some states – Tennessee and South Carolina are two – already have held Democratic delegate meet-ups, either in person or virtually, to discuss options, and Oregon could and probably will do something similar.

The Harris campaign has a solid beachhead in Oregon’s Democratic organization, and it probably will grow swiftly over the next week or two. There’s been no apparent pushback either from other prospective candidates or even from the alternative suggestion of arranging a competitive battle – a gladiatorial “thunderdome” approach.

Oregon’s role in deciding the nomination is not among the largest – bigger states have many more delegates – but it could be on the front end of deciding on a nominee. That might make Oregon a more important state in the Democratic presidential nominating process than anyone would have thought early this year, or even when the party’s primary voters were casting their ballots.

This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.