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How to Change Your Voter Party-Affiliation Registration in Oregon

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It’s easy to register to vote in Oregon, online, in person, by mail.
Visit the Oregon Secretary of State Elections homepage or the Register to Vote page directly.

It’s also easy to update your contact information, e.g. address, name, etc.

HOWEVER, note that it’s not so easy at that Secretary of State’s website to figure out how you can change your party affiliation online or in print. That webpage says:

You can update your voter registration information, except to change your party for the Primary Election ….

But there is no specific instruction or link to any page with specific information about how to update your party affiliation so it’s anyone guess if you can do that without calling or visiting a county elections office, which is either very easy or very difficult depending on where you live and what transport you have. Maybe if I drill down and enter my personal data in all the forms it will become clear how one changes one’s party affiliation, but without doing all that, I couldn’t tell you.

The SoS print voter registration forms (PDFs also online) allow you to “update” all sort of personal information, e.g. name, county and state, home address, and date of birth, but it does not include on the form a clear option to update your choice of “Political Party.

On the other hand it looks as if you can write in a change on that form (assuming you print it out). I suppose you can add a note about your party change to the bottom of the form where it asks you to specify what information you are updating. But it’s not clear that is permitted.

RECOMMENDATION ON CHANGING YOUR OREGON VOTER REGISTRATION PARTY AFFILIATION:

Contact your county’s Elections office; they should almost always be the first place you turn anyway when you have questions about Elections and Voting. You can find links to your county’s elections info at the SoS County Elections Officials webpage.

Some county elections websites give very clear instructions on updating party affiliation, but not all of them do. Multnomah County Elections does give clear instructions and I suspect that the instructions apply to every county – after all, Oregon elections law is state law, not local.

Here, for example, is what you’ll see at the Multnomah County Elections Office website:
Party affiliation change – please update your party affiliation by completing a new registration card online (link is external) or print (link is external).

Happy voting!

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4 responses to “How to Change Your Voter Party-Affiliation Registration in Oregon”

  1. r.lint says:

    Your gov sites need updating, navigation and finding information is to say the
    least a website mess, (have been in the computer industry over 30 years)
    Still looking for primary vote information, you form you sent out is just as bad
    as your web,
    Closed primary as i understand it is setup to stop the voters from casting their vote for who they want and vote for a party without choice, This system
    does not show the true desires of Oregon voters but gives all the power to
    political parties who are then free to do as they please and not the peoples will or good for Oregon, time to fix things
    Thanks

    • Laura Orr says:

      It seems as if many Oregonians would agree with you, if the commentary on the political and citizen advocacy group websites and letters to editors are any indication. Power shifts take time, and persistence, and fortitude, and humor, and friends, and determination, and sometimes generations and ….

  2. Thanks for the heads up about going to Multnomah County’s website to find out how to change my party affiliation. It is surprising how hard I have had to look to find anything on this. Hopefully, the process is all fairly straight forward, it should be.

  3. Adam says:

    Been giving me trouble I gave all the information it needs so I can update things but then it sends me back to the same page not sure what to do

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