A new election integrity report examining how non-citizens have been registered to vote in South Dakota and Oregon warns that automatic voter registration is the culprit.

A report released by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) last week shows that both South Dakota and Oregon, which have automatic voter registration, found non-citizens on their respective voter rolls last year. The report explains that this occurs easily and warns states about using automatic voter registration.

In October, South Dakota found that 273 non-citizens were incorrectly on state voter rolls due to automatic voter registration through the state’s department for issuing driver’s licenses.

After South Dakota used the U.S. Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) to check the citizenship status of the 273 registered voters, the non-citizens were informed that the state had corrected the errors and that they would be removed from the voter rolls, according to the PILF report. The non-citizens were also notified about how to re-register to vote after becoming U.S. citizens.

South Dakota implemented automatic voter registration after a lawsuit filed in 2020 on behalf of Native American tribes regarding the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) was settled two years later, per the report.

Oregon was the first state to implement automatic voter registration in 2016, but still has issues with non-citizens registering to vote.

The state first realized that 306 non-citizens had been registered since 2021 in September. Later that month, the number increased to 1,259. At the time, the Oregon secretary of state’s office found that there were nine ineligible voters who had cast ballots.

The office explained that some voters were registered when the Driver and Motor Vehicles division (DMV) incorrectly selected U.S. birth certificates and passports as documents that the customers had provided, rather than foreign birth certificates and passports. The DMV explained that a 2021 law letting non-citizens receive driver’s licenses was also a factor in non-citizens being registered to vote. The department then implemented new procedures to help ensure the errors didn't continue.

In October, the Oregon secretary of state’s office found and instructed the removal of another 302 non-citizens who were registered to vote.

Oregon Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade (D) instructed the Elections Division to create and fill a new position that oversees the process of automatically registering voters through the DMV. She joined Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek (D) in calling for a third-party audit of the state's motor voter program. Kotek also ordered the DMV to pause automatic voter registration last month until a review had been conducted by a data expert panel by the end of the year.

Then two days after the November general election, the state announced that another 56 non-citizens were found on the voter rolls, and their registrations made inactive. Thus, the total number of non-citizens found registered to vote between September and November was 1,617.

“Automatic Voter Registration is a flawed policy that puts aliens on voter rolls,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement last week. “Policymakers should reject automatic voter registration. They cause chaos on the rolls and put immigrants in legal jeopardy.”

According to the PILF report, the NVRA “provides the most common pathway for foreign nationals to get registered to vote. The 24 states plus D.C. that have automatic Motor Voter Registration, meaning they are not often giving the immigrant a chance to decline registration, exacerbate the problem. States giving driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants increase traffic to DMVs. States with higher levels of legal immigration mean even more driver’s licenses or state IDs are needed for daily life (and increases the risk of screening immigrants for voter registration).”

The 24 states that have automatic voter registration are Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia.

The report also notes that “battleground states with a high number of third-party voter registration drives can expose immigrants to improperly getting registered to vote. Every scenario where a foreign national encounters Motor Voter protocols creates risks for premature voter registration. Unfortunately, if an illegal immigrant becomes registered and has lived a life to avoid contact with the federal government at every opportunity, there are few data-driven tools to identify and remove them from a voter roll.”

When Pennsylvania implemented automatic voter registration in 2023, Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project Action, told Just the News that the system has had multiple issues over the years.

“Recent history proves that automatic voter registration is inherently problematic,” Snead said. “California botched tens of thousands of registrations and registered 1,500 ineligible people—including noncitizens—when it adopted automatic voter registrations. Illinois improperly registered hundreds of noncitizens when it implemented automatic voter registration.

“Many states are already struggling with bloated voter rolls filled with inaccurate, outdated, and duplicative voter registrations,” he added. “Pennsylvania is no exception. In fact, Pennsylvania was recently forced to admit to allowing 11,000 noncitizens to register to vote in the state. Automatic voter registration compounds these problems by making it even easier for ineligible people, noncitizens, and even illegal aliens to register to vote, especially when states do a poor job—or even outright refuse—to clean up dirty voter rolls.”

While non-citizens are prohibited from voting in federal, state, and most local elections, municipalities in California, Maryland, and Vermont, and Washington, D.C., allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.

Lauren Bis, PILF director of Communications and Engagement, previously told Just the News that generally, most non-citizen voters self-report casting ballots, since they must do so when going through the naturalization process to become a U.S. citizen.

She explained that in states where non-citizens can vote in local elections, the locality “would have to keep separate records and voter rolls like Arizona but for the opposite purpose because they’re allowed to vote.”

Bis added that this system “seems way more complicated” and that it “could lead to mistakes by localities” where they “accidentally put [non-citizens] on the wrong voter rolls.”