fact-check-story- with the facts and NO AP assessment

CLAIM: Oregon has more registered voters than state residents.

THE FACTS:Partially correct. A 2021 law in Oregon is being blamed online for artificially inflating the state’s election rolls with “phantom voters.”

Social media users claim the state now has more registered voters than people because of HB 2691, a 2021 law that requires county officials to mail a notice to voters 75 days prior to an election if their registration has been deemed inactive. It also prohibits voters from being classified as inactive for not voting or updating their voter registration.

“Thanks to the Democrat Super Majority in 2021, Oregon has more registered and active voters than the entire population of the state,” wrote one Instagram user, sharing a clip that claims voter registration data “by county” shows more than 4.2 million “active voters.” “This indicates a major problem and possibility that we may have hundreds of thousands of phantom voters.”

Another popular Instagram post reads: “In Oregon we have more registered voters than people who are eligible to vote. Make that make sense.”

But the population of Oregon remains sizably larger than the total number of people eligible to vote in the state and the number of those actually registered is smaller than both figures, according to federal census and state voter records.

During last November’s election, the northwestern state had a total population of 4,266,560, of which 3,190,451 were eligible to vote, according to a report at the time from the Oregon Secretary of State’s office, which oversees elections. Of those eligible, 2,985,820 had actually registered to vote.

The number of registered voters has inched up slightly since to 2,987,447, according to the most recent county-by county breakdown of voter registration data released by the office last month. But that’s still nowhere close to the 4,237,256 counted in the 2020 Census, let alone the more recent population estimates cited in the state’s post-election report

Ben Morris, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, also rejected the notion floated in one of the social media posts that county level data contradicts the state figures and shows evidence of so-called “phantom voters.”

“This is false. The state keeps the voter registration list and there is no ‘county’ data that isn’t represented in the numbers I gave you earlier,” he wrote, referencing the June voter registration report.

Brian Van Bergen, elections and recording manager for Marion County, which includes the state capital of Salem, confirmed Oregon’s voter registration system is a single database used by all 36 counties in the state.

“The thought that county-level data is somehow different than statewide data is completely false,” he wrote in an email. “It is all the same data.”

State officials also disputed the notion suggested in some social media posts that HB 2681 prohibited elections officials from updating voter rolls and automatically turned all inactive voter registrations into active voter registrations.

“Oregon still updates voter registration lists continuously to remove deceased people, people who move and people who become ineligible for other reasons,” wrote Morris.

“Some people think we only adjust data on election day – that couldn’t be further from the truth,” added Van Bergen. “It is literally what two of our full-time staff members do all day every day.”

Hazel Tylinski, a spokesperson for Oregon House Speaker Dan Rayfield, who was the lead sponsor of HB 2691, declined to respond directly to the claims, but pointed to written testimony from legislative hearings on the bill, as well as secretary of state voter registration data.

“There’s no reason to believe these claims are true based off of the publicly available information,” she wrote in an email.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.