How to Change Your Voter Party-Affiliation Registration in Oregon

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!