In a victory for the Trump administration, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced this month that the state will resume “routine cleanup” of outdated voter registration records, a process dormant since 2017.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 Justice Department 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.