Judicial Watch Lawsuit Compels Oregon, Against Its Will, to Remove 800,000 Ineligible Voters from Its Voter Rolls -- Nearly One Quarter of All Eligible Voters In the State

The Sprit of Oregon Manifest

 

From Ace of Spades:

Don't look now, but that thing that never happens is happening again.

Paul Sperry @paulsperry_

BREAKING: Settlement of a Judicial Watch lawsuit has forced the review and removal of some 800,000 ineligible voters from Oregon voter rolls

Judicial Watch is deservedly crowing:

Judicial Watch announced a settlement in its federal lawsuit against Oregon election officials, which confirms 800,000 ineligible voter names are slated for review and removal from voter registration lists. The settlement requires state officials to produce detailed data and enforce federal voter roll clean-up procedures under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

I should say that of the 800,000 ineligible names, only 160,000 are being scrubbed now; the other 640,000 will be reviewed and scrubbed from the lists later.

Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in October 2024, alleging Oregon failed to remove ineligible voters and seeking to enforce Section 8 of the NVRA after identifying widespread voter roll maintenance failures across dozens of counties (Judicial Watch, et al. v. The State of Oregon et al. (No. 6:24-cv-01783)).

In its complaint, Judicial Watch argued that Oregon's voter rolls contain large numbers of old, inactive registrations; and that 29 of Oregon's 36 counties removed few or no registrations as required by federal election law. Judicial Watch asserted that Oregon and 35 of its counties had overall registration rates exceeding 100%; and that Oregon had the highest known inactive registration rate of any state in the nation. In combination, all of these facts showed that Oregon was failing to remove inactive registrations as required by federal law.

In August 2025, a federal court in Oregon denied a motion to dismiss by Oregon and ruled the lawsuit could proceed.

In response to the lawsuit, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced earlier this year that Oregon has about 800,000 inactive registrations, which are kept separately from the active voter rolls and do not receive ballots. Of those, roughly 160,000 already meet federal and state criteria for removal--having received confirmation notices, failed to respond, and not voted in two federal elections--and are slated for cancellation. The remaining approximately 640,000 inactive records do not yet qualify for removal and will be processed through future list maintenance efforts.

In its press release, Oregon acknowledged that routine removal of outdated records effectively stalled in 2017, leaving a large pool of long-dormant registrations on the rolls without being fully processed for removal. The scale of the backlog underscores a gap in routine list maintenance that is only now being addressed. "These directives are about cleaning up old data that's no longer in use so Oregonians can be confident that our voter records are up to date," said Read.

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The settlement with Oregon remains in effect for more than five years, with a federal court retaining jurisdiction to enforce its terms. While the settlement resolves the litigation, it explicitly allows future legal action if Oregon fails to comply with voter list clean-up requirements going forward.

The settlement requires Oregon to open its voter roll maintenance processes to unprecedented scrutiny. ...

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Colorado recently removed 372,000 ineligible voter names thanks to a Judicial Watch lawsuit and settlement addressing the state's compliance with federal voter list maintenance requirements.

In Kentucky, state election board officials reported that "roughly 735,000 ineligible voter registrations" have been removed from voter rolls, as part of a 2018 consent decree settling a Judicial Watch lawsuit.

As part of its 2022 settlement, New York City alone has removed 918,139 ineligible names from its rolls: data show 477,056 removals between March 2023 and February 2025, which is in addition to the 441,083 previously reported removals.

In Los Angeles, county officials confirmed the removal of more than 1.2 million names from voter rolls as part of a settlement. Judicial Watch legal pressure also resulted in election roll clean-ups in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Ohio.