Keep up the pressure on state voter roll purges |
In a victory for the Trump administration, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced this month that the state will resume “routine cleanup” of outdated voter registration records, a process dormant since 2017. The effort could ultimately cancel up to 800,000 inactive registrations, roughly 20% of the Beaver State’s total voter rolls. This long-overdue cleanup comes only after the Justice Department sued Oregon and other states to enforce basic voter-roll maintenance standards.
For years, Oregon’s political class treated voter roll maintenance as a nuisance at best and a moral failing at worst. The state paused its cleanup mechanisms in 2017 and allowed a backlog of inactive registrations to pile up. This wasn’t an administrative oversight but a policy choice. It is telling that Oregon didn’t reverse course until the DOJ, under President Donald Trump, applied sustained and necessary pressure.
In September 2025, the Justice Department sued Oregon and Maine for refusing to........