Lobbyist briefed Kotek staff on noncitizen voter registration
Lobbyist for motor voter advocacy group briefed staff, provided talking points repeating Kotek's false claim state identified noncitizen registration "proactively"
At 11:30 a.m. Saturday, September 14, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s staff convened an emergency online meeting of what it dubbed an “IMT,” or incident management team, to respond to news, broken the day prior by Willamette Week, the state had unlawfully registered 300 noncitizens to vote since 2021, according to notes of the meeting obtained by Oregon Roundup via public records request.
Included on the IMT’s agenda was a briefing by the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, a George Soros-affiliated advocacy group for the very automatic voter registration (AVR) system - also called motor voter - that led to the illegal registration of illegal immigrants to vote in Oregon. CSME’s Oregon lobbyist Jack Dempsey was among the group’s panel presenting on the call.
Seattle-based CSME’s sister organization, the Chicago-based Instiute for Responsive Government, reportedly initially informed Oregon in July 2024 it had registered noncitizens to vote. Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles and Secretary of State office say the registrations - now estimated by the Secretary of State at 1,741, 30 of whom actually voted - arose from data entry errors.
CSME’s briefing to state staffers acknowledged “non citizens voting does happen at a small scale,” according to the notes, but the organization was “committed to filtering noncitizen registration.”
The CSME representatives urged Oregon staffers, “don’t hide the ball from the public,” and promised to send talking points to help Oregon message about its unfolding controversy.
The next day, Sunday, September 15, CSME’s lobbyist Jack Dempsey sent a list of talking points to Elisabeth Shepard, Kotek’s Communications Director and the staffer who added the CSME briefing to the agenda.
The lobbyist’s talking points, intended to guide how the Governor, the Secretary of State and the Department of Motor Vehicles’ parent agency, the Oregon Department of Transportation, spelled out steps the state was taking to address the problem, including ensuring documents intended to prove U.S. citizenship were actually U.S. documents.
CSME urged state officials to tell Oregonians, “ODOT was evaluating best practices for quality control when they identified areas for improvement” when it “proactively initiated a full and thorough review of our historical records and process to identify any ineligible Oregonians registered to vote.”
The claim that Oregon “proactively” identified the registration of noncitizens echoes that of Kotek, whom Willamette Week quoted two days previously saying the unlawful registration of noncitizens “was discovered because the Oregon DMV and the secretary of state were doing their due diligence ahead of the 2024 election.” It wasn’t until September 19, six days after Kotek’s statement and four days after delivery of CSME’s talking points, that The Oregonian reported Oregon DMV acknowledged it first learned of the problem from the Institute for Responsive Government six weeks before the public learned about it.
Influence Watch, a right-leaning website that tracks the activities and donors of nonprofits, describes the Center for Secure and Modern Elections (CSME) as a “left-of-center advocacy organization created as a project of the New Venture Fund, a leading ‘dark money’ pass-through funder and fiscal sponsor, to promote sweeping changes to the elections process, including state laws that automatically register voters at state agencies.”
The New Venture Fund, according to Influence Watch, “is part of a multibillion-dollar ‘dark money’ network run by the consulting firm Arabella Advisors in Washington, DC.”
In 2022, CSME spawned the Institute for Responsive Government. The Institute for Responsive Government, which advocates for automatic voter registration and opposed efforts to verify voter citizenship in other states, was involved with a video, recorded over the summer, in which then-Oregon Elections Director Molly Woon said she thought it unfortunate if anyone was denied a ballot “for any reason whatsoever.”
Kotek “paused” Oregon’s AVR program following disclosure of the registration of noncitizens to vote, but has since restarted it.
We cannot be surprised that the dirty dishonest Democrats would be registering illegal aliens. This was obvious when the Dems first proposed allowing illegals to have drivers licenses. It is the policy of the Democrat party to cheat in elections, because that’s the only way they can win. The Democrats are rotten to the core, but it is impossible to get rid of them because they are given political positions for life. And even after they retire, they keep meddling in Oregon politics as seen by DiFazio and his constant urge to involve himself even though he supposedly retired. Guessing that the number caught cheating is 1/10 of what it actually is in real life.
Do NOT let this issue die. It strikes at the very center of our democracy.