Rebuffing top Trump administration lawyers, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read refused to turn over detailed information about each of the state’s voters, saying nothing in federal or state law gives the federal government the right to obtain that “personal data of Oregonians.”
But he also informed the lawyers in President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice that they, like “any person,” can simply fill out an online request form, pay $500 and get an electronic copy of public records showing the name, year of birth, address, political party and voting history of every registered Oregon voter along with data on many Oregonians whose voter registrations have lapsed.
The key difference: Those readily available public records do not include any Oregonian’s full date of birth, driver’s license number or partial Social Security number – all of which the Department of Justice lawyers demanded because they are used to help determine a person’s eligibility to vote.
In his letter Thursday refusing the administration’s demand for voter information, Read wrote that none of the three federal laws the Trump lawyers cited “compels production” of the full information they directed Oregon to turn over, so he won’t do it. He accused the Trump team of trying to carry out “anti-voter goals.”
Read did, however, offer “to securely produce the publicly available portions of its statewide voter-registration list” that it routinely provides to any person or entity who pays for it. The Oregonian/OregonLive routinely pays to receive that data set for news-gathering purposes.
“There is no exception for the federal government” to get the data without paying the $500, Read noted in his letter.
The federal lawyers, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael E. Gates and Maureen Riordan, acting chief of the agency’s voting section, also directed Read to provide the names, addresses and voting history of any voters removed from Oregon’s voter rolls since 2022 because they were found not to be citizens.
Officials at the DMV and Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged last year that the state inadvertently registered more than 1,500 non-citizens, including people from American Samoa who are not automatically U.S. citizens, to vote through its automatic “motor voter” registration system.
Read, however, refused to provide information about those Oregonians, writing without further elaboration that doing so “would both exceed my obligations under federal law and almost certainly violate state law.”
State officials have said only about five of those people voted in an election when they were not genuinely eligible to do so.
In his letter, Read also obliquely acknowledged the federal government likely has genuine questions about Oregon’s past conduct to remove dead or otherwise ineligible voters from its rolls, given responses the Secretary of State’s Office has provided in the past to the federal Election Assistance Commission Election Administration and Voting Survey. That survey, which is conducted every two years, includes questions about how many active voters are on the rolls in each U.S. county and how many have been removed from the rolls over time.
Oregon’s most recent survey response, from 2024, showed election 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, the Trump lawyers wrote, was “by far” the lowest number of voters removed for that reason of any state that answered the survey.
Read noted that he took office in January 2025 and since then has been working to improve and standardize how county election officials, who are the ones who register voters and maintain county-level voter rolls, enter data into a state system.
“Historically, this created challenges for statewide data reporting and analysis, including in connection with the Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and Voting Survey,” often shorthanded as EAVS, he wrote.
Laura Kerns, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, said Friday the data Oregon reported to the feds may not have been accurate, in part because the phrasing of questions on the federal survey does not line up with how Oregon has collected data from county elections offices.
“Each county in Oregon uses its own ballot status” and codes to explain why voters are removed from the rolls, Kerns wrote in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive. And, she wrote, previous Oregon secretaries of state “opted not to require counties report their data in a standard format. Under Secretary Read’s leadership, we are actively working to develop uniform data entry standards to avoid this issue.”
The changes Read’s team is instituting “will improve the quality, consistency, and transparency of the data, allowing Oregon to produce more detailed statewide reports moving forward,” he wrote. “That process will necessarily improve the quality of our EAVS data. I look forward to contributing more thorough and detailed information to future EAVS reports.”
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