In a victory for the Trump administration, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced last week that the state will resume “routine cleanup” of outdated voter registration records, a process dormant since 2017.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 Department of Justice 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 Department of Justice sued Oregon and Maine for refusing to provide statewide voter registration records and list-maintenance data needed to enforce the National Voter Registration Act. It has since filed similar lawsuits against a growing roster of states that refused to cooperate and administer their rolls as the law requires, including Delaware, Maryland, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Arizona, and Connecticut.
That pressure is necessary because the problem is national. The Electronic Registration Information Center, an interstate data-matching consortium that many states use to flag outdated registrations, shows how quickly voter rolls go stale. As of Dec. 31, 2025, it identified 13.9 million cross-state movers, nearly 30 million voters needing in-state address updates, 1.38 million duplicate registrations, and roughly 660,000 registrations tied to deceased people.
Predictably, critics claim the DOJ is overreaching and that “election integrity” is code for voter suppression. It is equally arguable, and perhaps more plausible, that those who want to stop maintenance of voter rolls would like to use all the names that should not be on the lists for nefarious election practices. Anyway, voter roll maintenance is optional. The law requires states not only to make registration accessible, but also to keep lists accurate by removing voters who have moved, died, or become ineligible through uniform, nondiscriminatory procedures. That’s not partisan. It’s basic governance.
The dangers of bloated and inaccurate rolls are practical, immediate, and measurable. First, bad lists create administrative chaos. Election officials use registration databases to assign precincts, mail ballots or election materials, manage pollbooks, and process provisional ballots. When rolls are stuffed with outdated addresses, duplicates, or long-departed residents, election offices waste time and money chasing ghosts, including returned mail, undeliverable ballots, duplicated records, and mismatched precinct data. Every error increases the odds of Election Day confusion, longer lines, and more disputes.
Second, inaccurate rolls erode public trust, and trust is the true currency of democratic legitimacy. You don’t need widespread fraud for elections to become politically unstable. You just need a system that looks sloppy. When registered voters outnumber the eligible population in a county, or when a state admits it has hundreds of thousands of inactive registrations it hasn’t processed in nearly a decade, reasonable people conclude that something is broken. And they are right to conclude that it was deliberately broken, because the states failing to abide by the law have done so intentionally, not accidentally. Conspiracy theorists on both sides rush into the vacuum. Institutions lose credibility. The result is a downward spiral: less trust, more suspicion, more conflict, and ultimately less consent from the governed.
That is why election integrity should not be a partisan priority. It is a democratic necessity. The right to vote is sacred, and so is the public’s right to know that elections are being run carefully, competently, and honestly. The foundation of trustworthy elections is not flashy technology or high-minded rhetoric — it is accurate records. A clean voter roll is the first line of defense against confusion, error, and cynicism.
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Oregon’s announcement should be welcomed, but not romanticized. This wasn’t a voluntary awakening. It was a response to pressure. And the lesson is obvious: pressure works.
The Department of Justice should keep it up. If states want the public to accept election outcomes peacefully and confidently, they must do the boring, essential work of maintaining accurate voter rolls. That is not suppression. That is stewardship. And the federal government should continue pushing every state, Oregon included, to do the right thing.