ORSOS Deletes Records Indicating Which Registrants Were Wrongly Purged as Deceased per ERIC Data
(Washington, D.C.) – February 10, 2025: The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) alerted the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to Oregon’s apparent violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. PILF draws attention to voter roll list maintenance document retention failures – particularly when the State is alerted by the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to retractions of its reports identifying deceased registrants. The Civil Rights Act requires such documents be kept for at least 22 months – whereas Oregon tells PILF the records are received and destroyed monthly.
Throughout 2023 and 2024, PILF requested “Deceased Retractions” reports from Oregon and other ERIC member states to gauge the number of impacted registered voters. In 2024, Oregon denied PILF’s document inspection requests because of a policy to “not retain them.” In short, Oregon election officials say they review the files upon receipt but intentionally do not save them before being destroyed in an online document transfer portal. PILF filed a lawsuit under the National Voter Registration Act’s 24-month minimum document retention mandate in January 2025. However, the Justice Department has exclusive jurisdiction to enforce document retention mandates under the Civil Rights Act (52 U.S.C. § 20701).
The letter to the DOJ shares PILF insights on ERIC retraction reports collected in other states:
The Foundation has succeeded in collecting retraction reports from seven current member states without litigation. Some states’ reports date back to 2013. The files provide a combination of basic voter roll information like name, registration date, and unique voter ID numbers – plus internal ERIC data. Before passing retractions on to states, ERIC checks the last known voter status (e.g., active/inactive/cancelled) for the affected registrant and includes the indicators in the file. The Foundation’s latest tally shows that fifty-five percent (55%) of registrants who were wrongly marked deceased were already cancelled from voter rolls before the retractions were issued from ERIC.
The letter concludes with an offer to meet with the DOJ and provide additional details as needed.
“The Justice Department has unique authority to investigate this matter in Oregon. Without these retraction reports, it is almost impossible to know which registered voters were affected by bad data. — PILF President, J. Christian Adams.
Read the full letter here.
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