Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced late Friday he will pare back Oregon’s voter rolls to exclude some people who have moved and not updated their address and who therefore have not been sent ballots or voted in years.
He did so as a court hearing nears on Trump administration efforts to force Read and his elections division to better explain how they ensure accuracy of the state’s voter rolls – and turn over highly personal information about every registered Oregon voter.
The practical effect of the change will be minimal.
Unlike most states, Oregon does not remove inactive voters who fail to vote in two consecutive federal general elections from its voter rolls. Instead, it designates most of them as “inactive voters.” That designation has largely the same effect as removing them from the voter list, however: Elections officials no longer send those people ballots.
But those voters whose registration is out of date do retain one advantage: They can notify their county election office up until Election Day of their new address and still be issued a ballot. People who have never registered to vote in Oregon, by contrast, have to register at least 21 days before an election to obtain a ballot.
Oregon currently has about 3 million active voters plus about 800,000 inactive ones. Removing out-of-date records “will reinforce public trust in our elections,” Read said in a Friday afternoon press release. His office said it would begin by removing 160,000 inactive voters who clearly aren’t eligible from the rolls.
Oregon’s failure to pare back its voter rolls started in 2017 after then-Secretary of State Dennis Richardson removed the warning from Oregon voter confirmation cards that those inactive voters would be disenfranchised if they failed to vote in two federal general elections, Read’s office said Friday.
The upshot, his office said, was that state and county elections offices lost the power to remove those individuals from the voter rolls. That in turn caught the attention of the Trump administration as well as a national group that suspects voter fraud is widespread. The latter group, Judicial Watch, lost its legal challenge to Oregon’s voting system last year.
A federal Election Assistance Commission Election Administration and Voting Survey, which is conducted every two years, brought to light Oregon’s outlier status.
The state’s most recent survey response, from 2024, showed Oregon officials removed only 3.6% of voters from its rolls over two years, compared to a national average of 9.1%, and that only 4,417 of them were removed for failing to respond to a confirmation notice mailed to them after they failed to vote in two federal elections. That, Trump lawyers wrote, was “by far” the lowest number of voters removed for that reason of any state that answered the survey.
The president has long given oxygen to claims, without evidence, that vote by mail systems like Oregon’s are subject to voter fraud.
In response to the Trump challenge, Read acknowledged last summer that Oregon needed to standardize how county elections officials, who maintain the state’s voter rolls, enter their data into the state system. He took office in January 2025 and since then has been working to improve the system, he said in August.
Read said Friday he is directing county elections officials to remove from voter rolls any voters who registration was inactivated before July, 20, 2017 and who did not take action to reactive their registrations.
He said he will also work with county election officials to update their voter confirmation cards to add a notice to voters that their registration will be canceled if they do not vote in two successive presidential elections.
Update: This article has been updated to clarify the criteria that leads to someone becoming an inactive voter and to explain which inactive voters the secretary of state is removing from voter rolls.
©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
