Tobias Read is Oregon's secretary of state. (Photo by Laura Tesler/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
A call with federal officials and state election officers ahead of the 2026 election was full of bluster and mostly free of facts, according to Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read.
Read, a Democrat elected in 2024, had Deputy Secretary of State Michael Kaplan join a Wednesday video meeting with state election officers and several representatives of the federal Election Assistance Commission, FBI, U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
“We heard a lot of bluster and not a lot of facts,” Read said in a statement. “I want to thank the dedicated public officials who are doing their best to protect our free and fair elections, and I am deeply concerned that there are high-ranking officials in the federal government who are more interested in preserving their own power through conspiracy theories and lies than serving the American people.”
Pre-election calls with state election officers and the Election Assistance Commission, an independent and bipartisan federal agency, are common, said Tess Seger, Read’s spokesperson. But an early February invitation from Kellie Hardiman, who described herself as the “FBI election executive,” raised eyebrows among state officials.
So did the involvement of Heather Honey, an election conspiracist best known for falsely claiming that the number of ballots cast in Pennsylvania in 2020 exceeded the number of voters in the swing state President Donald Trump lost. The Department of Homeland Security last year made Honey, who was also a subcontractor for Arizona’s partisan review of 2020 ballots, a deputy assistant secretary for election integrity.
During the call, Honey urged state officials to check their voter lists against the Homeland Security Department’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database.
States typically use the tool to verify the citizenship or immigration status of people applying for benefits including Medicaid and food aid, but 23 states use it as a tool for voter registration or voter list maintenance. Oregon does not, though the Oregon Health Authority, Oregon Employment Department and Oregon Department of Transportation can access the data for benefits, driver’s licenses and unemployment insurance.
The federal government has been trying to add to the database through demands that states share their voter rolls. Some Republican-led states have handed theirs over, while the federal government sued Oregon and 28 other states to get access. A federal judge last month blocked the Trump administration from accessing Oregon voter registration records.
The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office maintains that relying on SAVE data for voter list maintenance is dangerous, because the program has repeatedly identified U.S. citizens as potential noncitizens. That puts people eligible to vote at risk of disenfranchisement.
Honey mostly avoided answering questions from Democratic secretaries of state in California, Colorado, Maine and Minnesota about what the federal government data states provide to the SAVE system, according to Seger’s summary of the call.
She did deny that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be present at polling places, a major concern after former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said on his podcast earlier this month that ICE will surround polls in November and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she “can’t guarantee” ICE agents won’t be at polling locations.
It’s a federal crime for military members to interfere in any way in elections, and to deploy “any troops or armed men” to voting locations.
Commented