An Inside Look at Oregon's DMV Nightmare

From today's Oregon State Legislature hearing

Oregon has found itself in the headlines recently due to an internal audit of voter records. At the core of the issue are illegal immigrants — who are allowed to get a driver’s license in Oregon — automatically being registered to vote after visiting the DMV.

It won’t come as a surprise that when the law was passed in 2020, we were assured this couldn’t happen:

But it turns out that it did happen:

And actually a lot more than first thought……

That’s the backdrop to today’s session of the Oregon State Legislature’s House Interim Committee On Rules. I tuned in to watch the hearing and made some video highlights. First up, Senior Legislative Analyst Leslie Porter provides some historical context into the issue:

So more or less, the laws have gone in the direction of allowing more people to get driver’s licenses — including illegals — while also automatically registering people who visit the DMV. So how did these people slip through the system?

Kris Strickler, Director of the Oregon Department of Transportation, explains — sort of:

Amy Joyce, Administrator, Driver and Motor Vehicle Services ACTUALLY explains the problem:

And this answer sets off every single one of my bullshit detectors. The default selection on a dropdown menu should have no bearing on anything IF THE WORKERS ARE ACTUALLY WORKING. The default selection is only passed on to the next step if the workers don’t touch the field AT ALL — and supposedly this is after they discuss paperwork with a co-worker?

So we’re supposed to believe the process went like this —

Amy: “Hey Bob look at these documents for me.”

Bob: “We can’t use these because they don’t prove citizenship.” (Otherwise, there’s no issue.)

Amy: “OK”

Amy 30 seconds later: “Whoops I didn’t enter that information into the computer.”

1200+ times.

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Nope, not buying it.

My hunch is that workers who are too lazy to change the default dropdown option will also be too lazy to consult with a co-worker in the first place, but I’m a pretty cynical dude.

Joyce then explains the scope of the problem, why it didn’t exist before, and what they are going to do about it. (Complete with blur transition!)

I just have to say — having more options in the dropdown menu can’t possibly be the problem if the workers aren’t changing the options in the dropdown menu. That’s 100% bureaucratic bullshit.

If I may garner another hunch, I’d say the fact that there used to be manual audits at the end of every day was a much bigger factor into the non-existence of the problem. And the DoT seems to know it, since one of the fixes is to re-implement daily audits of the data.

Which raises the question — why did they ever STOP doing these audits?

When the hearing got around to the question-and-answer session, Vice-Chair Representative Jeffrey Helfrich started it off by asking if it was the internal vigilance of the Oregon DMV that caught this ongoing error:

Once again, Amy Joyce’s answer sets off my BS alarm. Somebody asked an incredibly generic question through an online portal, and that’s when the government leapt into action?

Really?

This answer is undermined just minutes later, when Representative Kim Wallan remarks that she’s been asking about election security for a long time, with little in the way of answers. She then asks the question of the day — why did government spring into action for this random question online but not for elected legislators in the room?

You probably won’t be shocked to hear this, but I found Joyce’s answer to once again be unacceptable. A random entity asking a random SUPER VAUGE question online doesn’t cause government to work on the weekends. (My guess is they knew EXACTLY who the Institute for Responsive Government is and didn’t want to get embarrassed.)

Bonus points to Secretary of State Chief of Staff Ben Morris for effectively saying “Well, it’s in the manual and that’s our check” in response to a massive failure of the workforce.

But Oregon wouldn’t be Oregon without somebody sticking up for the underdog — and Representative Andrea Valderrama doesn’t disappoint:

At least Oregon taxpayers (probably) won’t be on the hook to (once again) fix the screwups of the Oregon government.

And that was basically the meeting. You can check out the entire hour-long video here. As far as this specific issue, it seems to have been extremely narrow in nature — — and certainly don’t live up to the breathless headlines — but the failure of the system brings up some important questions. (Once again, why did they stop doing daily audits of the data?)

So while this particular data “error” may have been irrelevant to the results of elections, it shows that government wasn’t interested in getting the data right in the first place. So no matter how much they yap about election security NOW, it’s only because they got caught.

Two weeks ago they were saying this type of error was impossible. Now they’re telling you this was the only error and it’s fixed. But I wonder what would happen if we went through deceased Oregon “voters”……….or Washington voters who don’t speak English.

I bet we’d find many more “impossible” “errors”.

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Edit — Kamala Harris sat down with MSNBC Journalist Stephanie Ruhle for an interview that was scheduled to air roughly an hour ago. I can’t find the interview itself yet, but did run across this preview, which features this breathtakingly vapid take:

Trump’s tariffs were bad because they were Trump’s. Kamala’s tariffs are good because they’re Kamala’s!

I’ll keep half an eye out for the full interview while watching the Royals game, but if somebody comes across it please leave a comment!