Oregon will finally be purging its voter rolls of “inactive voters”
The state is being sued about this, but that has nothing to do with the actions now being taken to clean up the rolls, says Oregon’s Secretary of State Tobias Read:
That process could lead to the cancellation of as many as 800,000 registrations. That’s the number of voters Read says are currently classified as “inactive” on the voter rolls. To be clear, inactive voters do not receive ballots, but their names remain on the rolls.
Who are these people? “Inactive” merely means the ballot mailed to the voter was returned as undeliverable. It doesn’t mean the voter hasn’t voted in years, it doesn’t mean the voter is dead, it doesn’t mean the voter doesn’t exist, it doesn’t mean the voter isn’t a citizen; it seems that any of those things could be the case and the voter will remain on the rolls and get a ballot in the mail without asking.
Why did this weeding out process take so long?:
Read, a Democrat elected in 2024, says he’s acting not in direct response to any of the lawsuits, but because he wants to increase voter trust in mail elections.
“There are many examples of people seeking to undermine confidence in our elections,” he says. “We want to do whatever we can to remove any reasons for doubt.”
Say, I’ve got an idea I’d like to share with Read: end universal mail-in ballots and have in-person voting, with the old-fashioned absentee ballot request system with its checks on fraud. But funny thing, that’s not even being considered.
In the comments at the link, here’s an interesting response in answer to another commenter’s query about what’s inherently suspicious about universal mail-in ballots:
1. Ballot secrecy.
In the home it is possible for dominant and potentially abusive family members to watch the marking of the ballot. This overlaps with a similar problem in such family environments of dictating the vote, or outright ballot theft.
Then when tallying, it is possible that the signed security envelope that contains the ballot can, as it is opened, be correlated with the ballot. In short, a malevolent actor can record who voted for whom/what. Not saying it happens or is likely, but it is much more possible than under the old ballot box system.
[EDIT: Anyone who is scared of Trump ought to be worried that in the future, with sufficient power, it could be covert policy for such “vote-peeping” to be used to identify his enemies. I’m not a conspiracy sorta guy, but this seems like a glaring threat.]2. Selective release of early results.
Now I’m working from memory and could be wrong, but I believe that the votes are tallied as they arrive, if not tallied, then removed from the security envelopes at least, making it possible to tally early. I think it is unlawful to release the on-going count, nor do I think it has been done, but again, it’s possible where it is not possible with the ballot box method.
Related to this is a weird thing I discovered (or think I did, I could find it with some work) is that when the signed security envelopes come in, your name is marked as having voted. This is fine, but it looks to me like this information is released to both parties and based on the fact that your name is not marked as having voted they will call you and try to get you to vote for their issues/candidates. This OK as it is (although annoying), but the possibility exists that a favored party–depending on which has power–can suppress the information to the opposing party. Not possible in the ballot box method.
3. “Stolen” votes in the household.
This relates to #1. The ballots come to the home and if there is an abusive situation the actual ballot may be taken from the abused person and filled out by the forceful head of house.
Related to this but much less abusive is the situation that happened while my daughter was away at college, out-of-state. For the entire 4 years a ballot came for her to our house that she was never present to fill out. If I had wanted to open it and fill it out, then forge her signature–easy enough since I had examples at home–I have little doubt that I could have gotten away with it.
4. Miscounting.
This has actually happened at least once, and we know this because it was detected, but any undetected instances would pass.
In the old ballot box version, the vast bulk of votes were taken from the precincts to the tallying sites on the same day. There is an old tradition of partisan observers being present when the votes are counted–figuratively looking over the shoulders of the of vote counters. Now, since the votes are counted as they come in (if they are), is much harder for partisan observers to view the entire process, leaving many more of the votes to be tallied with no observers present. It is at such a time when the sole detected cheating was done: a GOP lady who was counting altered at least one ballot and was caught. She shamefacedly admitted to it and was given a light penalty.
There is no excuse for having such a bad system, subject to manipulation. Once it is in place, however, it is almost impossible to go back. The left depends on the system.
I voted in Oregon in 1980 and left the state in 1982. I wonder if I’ve been an inactive voter all this time (residing almost entirely in WA since then)?
States with mail in ballots are a lost cause. Here in WA, no Republican can win a statewide position. And our legislature is almost as bad as California’s in being Democrat dominated. There used to be some Democrats who believed in fiscal restraint in the WA legislature. No longer.
If the Feds come in and find large amounts of fraud, it might sway a few votes toward the GOP, but the mail in ballots will still keep the Dems in control.
I wish I had some ideas as to how to change the voting system and make it more honest. We sure can’t vote our way out of it.
The obvious solution for those who can is to leave the state. As millions are doing in California, New York, Minnesota, etc.
It’s a tragedy, IMO. Something that was unforeseen by the Founders.
As I recall, once upon a time – before we had computers to help us – the polls closed, the votes were tallied, and we had election results usually in time for the next morning newspapers to give the results.
“It doesn’t mean the voter hasn’t voted in years”
I’m a Chief Election Judge in Montana and have been for 20 years and if you have NOT voted in a Federal Election you are considered “inactive.”
From our Secretary of State:
“Why was I placed on the Inactive List?
1. If you are on the Inactive Voter Registration List it is because
a. you did not vote in a federal general election and you did not respond to two
confirmation mailings sent to you by the county election office, or
b. you had a mail ballot returned to the county election office as undeliverable and
you did not respond to a confirmation mailing sent to you by the county election
office.”
Having said that I will tell you that the elction fraud and voter fraud in the US is totally out of control and virtually nothing is being done about it. I know how election should be run and I can also tell you that the Dmocrats have tried to stop all reforms to stop fraud.
Montana just intitiated a good reform:
On the back of the return absentee envelope in addition to signing your name (and we do check for signatures being identical to the one on record) the voter must now put their date of birth like: March 21, 1965
Got a lot of ballots chucked out in the last election because of that so I am waiting for some crooked Commie judge to try and throw it out because “it is an undue burden” or some other bullshit.
John Galt III:
I am referring to what the Oregon SOS said about the definition of “inactive” voters in Oregon.
Neo,
Yes, in person voting used to work (and still does) in small towns and suburban areas where there are few voters and lots of voting places. The problem is urban areas where there are millions of voters and relatively few voting places. There are people waiting eight to ten hours in line to vote, only to find the polling place closed when it’s finally their turn. It takes a lot longer to count millions of votes than it does to count fifteen or a few hundred or a thousand, leading people to suspect there’s cheating when there’s a long time to count the votes.
The solution could be online voting. Everyone’s increasingly online: we do a lot of previously in person transactions this way, like banking, taxes, sales, library materials, etc.
The voter (let’s say the voter is she, in honor of Neo) would do this: she takes out her phone, tablet, etc., goes to vote.gov, and requests a ballot. Vote.gov sends a temporary security number to her phone, so she enters the security number, verifies the captcha, and logs in. She sees the ballot, registers her choices, does her electronic signiture, and sends her vote in. She’s done in two minutes. The vote is electronically registered and automatically tabulated.
Now, I hear all the contrarians saying “What about vote hacking?” There are ways to safe guard the vote that can be done electronically, from fingerprints to facial recognition. She can run off a paper copy of her vote at home, bring it into the polling place and drop it in the box. If voters don’t have a printer at home, they can get their vote printed at the library, post office, poll station, etc. If all the votes are tabulated and a recount is needed, the ballot box can be opened and the paper ballots counted by hand.
BJ:
It works just fine in large urban areas in Florida and many other states that want it to work. It worked just fine in NYC when I was young and the NY population was 8 million.
California activist organization, ReformCalifornia just gathered enough signatures to almost certainly qualify a ballot initiative to try to clean up the California vote. I say almost certainly because the Democrats will fight this tooth and nail. The first fight will be at the county voter registrars who have to count the ballot signatures. This is not ReformCalifornia’s first rodeo so they have a team of lawyers ready to make sure the signatures are counted correctly.
https://www.reformcalifornia.org/news/ca-voter-id-initiative-surpasses-1-million-signatures—headed-for-november-2026-ballot
CA Voter ID Initiative Surpasses 1 Million Signatures – Headed for November 2026 Ballot
The California Voter ID Initiative is a state constitutional amendment that requires Voter ID for casting a ballot in each election and holds state election officials accountable to verify the citizenship of registered voters and keep accurate voter rolls.
Yes, in person voting used to work (and still does) in small towns and suburban areas where there are few voters and lots of voting places. The problem is urban areas where there are millions of voters and relatively few voting places. There are people waiting eight to ten hours in line to vote, only to find the polling place closed when it’s finally their turn. It takes a lot longer to count millions of votes than it does to count fifteen or a few hundred or a thousand, leading people to suspect there’s cheating when there’s a long time to count the votes.
==
Thanks for the exercise in learned helplessness.
==
The solution could be online voting.
==
If you wish to eliminate ballot security entirely.
==
When I was involved in local politics (1984-90), there was in my (metropolitan) county one precinct per 1,000 residents. The core city had a population of 240,000 and 219 precincts. The county had 702,000 residents and 705 precincts. The national mean is, btw, one precinct per 3,000 residents, so we could be doing better.
==
Now, if you have 3,000 residents, you have about 2,000 who are eligible to vote of whom you can expect about 1,250 to cast ballots at a high turnout election. Posit 13% qualify for a postal ballot, and you have 1,100 people voting in person. You have polls open for 15 hours, and you have about 75 persons per hour and perhaps 175 per hour at peak times. New York used lever machines up until 2009 and allowed people three minutes to make their choices in the booth. Showing your ID and signing the register takes less than a minute. So, 700 man-minutes is required to process the voters at peak times. Virginia has paper ballots people fill out at library carrels. A set of twelve seats will allow you to grant ample time to 175 persons at your peak hour. The current retail price for a one seat library carrel is about $155 plus tax, so it amounts to a one-time purchase of $2,000 per precinct. NB, about half the population of the United States lives in counties with a population over 430,000 and half with a population lower than that. A county with that population will have about 133 precincts, so we are talking about a one-time purchase of about $270,000 out of the county budget to implement this.
==
Two other things can be done: one is to rejigger the electoral calendar so you have a modest and predictable run of offices contested at a particular election. Another is to shift the times precincts are open to four hours on Friday evening, five hours Saturday morning, and six hours Saturday afternoon. The queues close down at 6:00 pm Saturday evening and you clear the queue within the hour and begin tabulating. For only about 12% of the adult population is Saturday a regular work day, so you do not have clots at commuting times though you might at the end have a collection of procrastinators.
==
As for staffing the precincts, we could have registered Republicans and registered Democrats enter online bids to staff particular shifts at particular precincts. Anyone properly registered could bid for any shift at any precinct, with the qualification that you can only be awarded back-to-back shifts if both are at the same precinct. Your bid would consist of a ranked-list of the precincts you’d like to work at a given shift and what you’d accept to work at each. We could also have a set of contingent shifts on which to bid for recounts and tabulating ranked-choice contests. If you’re called in, you’re paid 100% of what you bid on the contingent shift and if you’re not you’re paid 20%.
==
Postal ballots could be subject to signature checks as they arrive at the board of elections and then sorted into pigeonholes in cabinets with two locks, one opened by the Republican commissioner or election and one by the Democratic commissioner. Documentation is retained of the arrival time of each returned ballot, and the mailers with the identifying information are retained in this cabinet while the individual ballots are housed in an envelope which is blank except for the precinct printed on it. You have signature checks six days a week with the last occurring the Friday morning before the polls open. Ballots arriving later are deemed invalid, locked in a separate box, and eventually returned to sender. Ballots rejected are also locked away and a postcard eventually sent to the voter informing him that the ballot failed the signature check. The postal ballots can all be tabulated Saturday afternoon, so you have those results complete before the polls close.
Please note that the state governments can build databases against which employees of the board of elections can check new registrations and the extant voter roll as well. The Secretary of State, the Commissioner of Corrections, and the Commissioner of Revenue can build and maintain these databases. One might be of death certificates filed, another of civil commitment orders and guardianships imposed; another of those incarcerated, on probation, or on parole; and another of state income tax returns filed and the names and addresses of those so filing. People who fail the database checks are sent a postcard informing them that they have been removed from the active roll or that their attempt at registering has failed. If the voter is reachable and is motivated, they can take corrective action.
==
You have a Republican and a Democratic clerk checking each newly arrived form against a gazetteer and the aforementioned databases and you check the whole database on a biennial cycle, with particular letters of the alphabet checked at particular times in the cycle. You should have the bulk of the relict entries scraped off.
States with mail in ballots are a lost cause.
==
Latin America has been cleaning up its elections the last 50 years. So did this country during the early 20th century.
That answer regarding #2 (selective release of early results) appears to me to be pretty confused. It appears to be conflating early voting with absentee voting, either excused or non-excused (Kentucky terminology for the reason an absentee ballot is requested, and in the ultimate oxymoron early voting at polling places here is officially termed ‘in-person non-excused absentee voting’.)
Different states have different rules. Some states do no processing of mailed/absentee ballots before election day, others count them completely, others may do prep work such as verification and separation of the ballot from the mailer but don’t actually count the votes. There’s also a lot of shorthand that goes into public reports that often aren’t entirely clear about what the numbers are. Numbers of mail ballots requested or received can be reported using partisan figures. The fact that you voted either by mail or at a polling place is not a secret, something that your respondent doesn’t seem to understand, even if your specific ballot marking should be. These reports of early voting are often reported in horse race style like vote tallies but really aren’t.
Art Deco, thank you very much. It’s helpful to see issues translated into concrete policies and procedures.
Mail in ballots automatically make the secret ballot more likely to be violated.
J.J. at 6:09 pm wrote “It’s [the dishonest voting system in WA] a tragedy, IMO. Something that was unforeseen by the Founders.”
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
— John Adams
— BJ
In person voting can work in megacities, too. It simply requires organizational skill and being prepared to have plenty of people employed in the task. Yes, hours long waits are destructive, but that could be dealt with too by extending voting hours and having more polling places. You could even reasonably make a rule that as long as you’re in line by the deadline, you get to vote. I would also support making e-day a national and state holiday.
Florida is not a tiny rural State anymore, but deSantis had the vote count ready in 2024 in a few hours.
Or we could go all-paper, which is what we should do, and take the Internet out of the equation entirely. Which is a good idea because the Internet is inherently insecure. it was designed to be insecure, and changing that would require a radical change to its structure and design.
Again, in-person voting is entirely practical. It just needs proper organization and preparation. The reason it’s been dropped in so many places is precisely to make shenanigans easier. No other reason.
— Art Deco
True. It’s almost impossible to fix this in the short term, but electoral cheating and shenanigans have been tamed before, both in America and overseas. Over time, this can be fixed.
Blue, ( read that as Marxist) states have no reason to change the fraud they baked into the voting cake. Their life depends on that
There is an excuse for such a bad system, voting manipulation,i.e., fraud
The demokrats will move heaven and earth to maintain illegal voting.
This alone reveals that the demokrats do not believe in our Constitutional Republic, and the idea that US CITIZENS should cast ONE vote each, for the candidates of their choice, is anathema to the demonkrats.
The demonkrats will do anything and everything – lawful or unlawful – to achieve and maintain power. They do not care about the will of the people; they do not care about adhering to any laws.
In this regard, the demonkrats are no different than the Iranian mullahs or Maduro. So far, the only difference is the level of force , coercion and murder employed to achieve and maintain power.
Under Biden, the federal govt mobilized to imprison “enemies of the state” and there was no shortage of individuals enthusiastically following orders to make arrests and indict these “enemies. ”
Yep, they were just “following orders.”
Jeez, why does that sound familiar ??
@HC68: Again, in-person voting is entirely practical.
Yes, to everyone who says this!
France, for all its faults, manages its voting in one day, in-person, with paper ballots, local hand counts and centralized rules. The results are usually known that night with little litigiousness.
They also schedule voting on a Sunday, which seems an obvious good idea, rather than cramming it into a working day, which causes crowded polls morning and evening.
@BJ
Mate, your last major series of posts here was trying to blame the ICE Agent hit by the Minneapolis driver by claiming he and the others should have shot out the tires. In doing so you not only displayed absolutely zero idea what a horrible idea this would be (going directly against the reasons given for it) but also cited TV shows. And midway through you stopped responding or for all I know looking.
Maybe consider some prudence before posting rate.
Do you think the Bharar Ganarajya- the Republic of India – is a “small town (or) suburban area where there are few voters and lots of voting places”? I have a lot bad to say about India, but outside the nadir of the Gandhy dynasty during the Emergency it has and remains a fairly stable, robust democratic republic ruling over the largest population in recorded human history, and it overwhelmingly uses in person voting and paper ballots. Electronic voting is an increasingly large minority, but it is still distinctly a minority.
Now far be it from me to say there is absolutely no corruption in India or that none of that seeps to the ballots.
But it is almost certainly less corrupt and more secure as a whole than about half of the US states, with even the electronic voting machines being limited and defined to trustworthy brands and models, and each being audited weeks before each election to ensure no funny business.
But even then the majority – and it is not even close – use paper ballots and ink. And while the process on the national level is too gigantic to handle in one go, it does work over the course of six weeks with staged voting.
And yet somehow even India – oh so famous for not being overcrowded or subject to long waiting – is able to deal with this through the magic of “having more polling places open so you can divide the gigantic workload easier.” Hence why the idea is that no citizen should be more than 2 kilometers (about 1 and 1/4th of a mile in American Customary) from a polling station and that they should serve a maximum of 1,500 people. And yes, this requires millions of polling stations for national elections, but they have the people and material to run them. The big downside of this is the overall time for national level, vote by stage elections but even then it was comparable to the legal wrangling over Florida in 2000 at the worst.
I am absolutely not gonna claim India has all the answers and knows how to do it perfectly and there are some parties (especially radical leftist ones in Bengal) I suspect would wantonly abuse it and get around the safeguards. But it is still a living, breathing system showing how paper and ink centric voting ballots can work on just about the largest stage imaginable, while also showing how EV can be incorporated with a minimum of scandal or dispute.
The idea that this can only work on the archetypical New England Town’s scale is indefensible.
Even the electronic voting systems that are at work take pains to show they cannot be used online precisely because that would involve external connection and thus the risk of external tampering. Online voting at present is a terrible idea.
Everyone’s increasingly online, including criminals and scam artists. And among the things people increasingly do online is get scammed or defrauded. This is bad enough when dealing with one’s personal belongings and information, but it is absolutely indefensible when it comes to the right of people across the country to govern themselves. Maybe that might change some time in the future, though it would require almost root and branch changes. But it is not here now.
Which raises the obvious issue of where the tabulation takes place, who oversees it, and how this would go.
And all of the ones you mention are user sided, but not enough on the backend.
That kind of backup would be useful but if it is so it would be at least as functional and far more secure to just go with that. France and India can do it.
Our system is dysfunctional not because in person voting with paper ballots is inherently so, but because much of the country is dominated by political systems that seek to make it so.
“Everyone’s increasingly online: we do a lot of previously in person transactions this way, like banking, taxes, sales…”
And you can *verify* whether those transactions were completed in the way that you intended. If you pay $37.05 for a particular product and you get charged $43.20, you can see the correct amount on your credit card. This is *not* the case with voting.
Back to Oregon for a moment…
Purging “inactive” names from the rolls only removes names that are not voting anyway. The problem at hand is people voting who should not be voting: non-citizens, felons, the dead, etc. As long as those names are on the active rolls and they continue to vote, they will remain on the rolls and continue to make election results questionable.
Just evaluating names that have a DOB making them over 90 years of age would be a starting place to stop the dead from voting. In the big picture, not that many reach that age… Checking those against the death index should eliminate some; some “proof of life” should settle the rest.
Search for residence addresses that claim to house 5 or more voters. A scan of property records could clear up some of this, a drive-by to verify the existence of a residence would also clear up some of those.
These things take some time and effort, and require some activity other than sitting on one’s butt in front of a computer… but the integrity of elections is important.
I return you now to your regular programming….
Just evaluating names that have a DOB making them over 90 years of age would be a starting place to stop the dead from voting. In the big picture, not that many reach that age…
==
The 1940 Census located 11.3 million people whose estimated date of birth was in one of five calendar years: 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934. Per Population Pyramid, there were in the U.S. in 2024 1.863 million people between their 90th and 95th birthday. That’s about 16% of those who were alive in 1940. Atypical, but not uncommon.
==
Expire the registrations like everything else. Make people re-register every so many years.
Mail voting is very convenient but subject to all the problems detailed in the post and comments. Having election day be a holiday is a good idea. A high percentage of CA voters voted by mail in the last election which adopted redistricting. I like the idea of online voting with adequate security.
Expire the registrations like everything else. Make people re-register every so many years.
==
As late as 1959, you had to register in person in the county in which I grew up. You did so annually. You lived in the core city, you did so at the board of elections. In the towns, you did so at the town clerk.
==
I dislike the idea of adding another public holiday. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the Fourth of July are the only holidays truly embedded in popular culture inasmuch as people celebrate them at home with their own efforts. Moving the election day to Saturday will do.
==
As for online voting, it requires another set of black boxes that only technical specialists understand.
==
To qualify for a postal ballot, you should have an abiding condition which inhibits voting in person. The following do: employees of the U.S. government posted abroad and spouses in country with them; servicemen and spouses resident with them; persons under 25 enrolled at a residential campus; homebound persons; persons whose work takes them out of their home county overnight for > 50 days per year; and miscellaneous persons who are eligible to vote but live in institutional group quarters. These last might be able to vote in person but present an issue in local elections because they’re a demographic mass but often weakly associated with the local community or they’re kind of wafty. Roughly 9% of the adult population fits one of these descriptions, though some are foreign residents or debarred for other reasons. There are also people who live at some distance (say, > 8 miles) from the nearest polling station. You find them in Alaska, in the western United States, and some odd areas like Minnesota’s Iron Range and northern Maine. I think they might account for somewhere around 3% of the electorate. You have an abiding issue, you should have attestations and be able to set up a standing order for a postal ballot which has to be renewed quadrennially.
When the credo of your political party is “by any means necessary” don’t expect that they will make an exception for an election.
Huntington Beach, California put up a ballot initiative during the last election requiring an ID to vote, it passed by a convincing majority, the State is fighting it tooth and nail.
California is now infamous for the lengthy time duration needed to certify the results.
— Art Deco
That could work too, but I suspect making E-day a holiday would work better. It would emphasize exactly what it is. Instead of voting for six months, here there and anywhen, re-emphasize that this is Election Day.