If you want to find out who all of Oregon’s registered voters are, where they live, the party if any they’re associated with, which recent elections they voted in, and more, you can easily get that information. All you have to do is send a request and pay a fee — the amounts are not extravagant — to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office.
Usually within a few days they will send that data, generally in the form of emailed spreadsheet. It’s an easy process, long has been available in Oregon (as it is in most states), and has been used by individuals, candidates and organizations for many years. Helping years ago with a local political campaign, I obtained the list for one county, spending as I recall about $40.
If the Trump administration wants the records of who has been registered and voting in Oregon, that information is available. Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read has told the U.S. Department of Justice he’s agreeable to providing it, in return for the usual fee. Or, the Trump administration probably could get one free from the state’s Republican Party. Most political organizations have their own copies.
This public information isn’t, however, what the administration is after in its recent set of demands to the state of Oregon, including a September lawsuit. Therein lies the issue.
Or at least a significant piece of it.
This conflict started with a July 10 email to Read from the U.S. Department of Justice “a potential information-sharing agreement that would provide the U.S. Department of Justice with information on, among other things, individuals who have registered to vote or have voted in your state despite being ineligible to vote, who may have committed other forms of election fraud, who may have provided false information to state authorities on voter registration or other election forms, or who may otherwise have engaged in unlawful conduct relevant to the election process.”
Read replied a few days later that his office had reviewed election security, found no such cases in Oregon and so had no violations to report.
But clearly that wasn’t the point. Justice replied on Aug. 14 that it was demanding all voter registration records which “must include the registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license number or the last four digits of the registrant’s social security number.” The name, birth year (not date) and residential address are public, but the rest are not.
Read told the feds that the federal right to some enforcement action under national election law “does not create a corollary right to the personal data of Oregonians. … the statute does not entitle the Attorney General to obtain a state’s entire current voter-registration list, especially one that includes sensitive personal data.”
The Oregon response to this has been like many of those elsewhere. While more than half the states have received demands like those sent to Oregon, most have provided either only public records or no data at all, and that includes Republican secretaries of state in Alaska, Florida, Kansas, New Hampshire and Utah.
All of this is happening in the context of the administration’s attack on mail voting (pioneered at scale in Oregon) and the prospective arrival of federal troops to wander the streets of an until-now generally peaceful Portland.
Read seemed to have some of this in mind when he shot back to DOJ on July 23:
“At best, I do not trust that this current administration is capable of protecting Oregonians’ personal data, given the recent, high-profile leaks of state secrets and reckless gutting of federal agencies. … At worst, I am concerned that this administration will use any data we provide to unlawfully and unjustly violate Oregonians’ rights. I have no interest in collaborating with an administration that is engaged in the illegal detention and deportation of both non-citizens and U.S. citizens alike. I will not provide information that could lead to parents being separated from their children. I have no interest in sharing data with an administration that is willfully violating judicial orders and trampling on constitutional rights and responsibilities. Nor do I wish to share data with an administration that appears to take glee in snatching people off the streets without requiring its agents to properly identify themselves or provide arrest warrants, or with an administration whose agents wait outside of daycare centers, school yards, and courthouses to improperly detain and deport Oregonians.”
Shorter version: I don’t trust you.
This collection of federal actions clearly have nothing to do with election security or public safety. Oregon’s response so far has a larger context too.
This column first appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.