Please see Governance Overview here.

Jump to a topic:

• Overview

• Critical Energy Infrastructure

• Campaign Finance Reform

• EPAB: Electronic Government Portal Advisory Board

• ORMap Advisory Committee

Overview

Rebecca Gladstone, Governance Coordinator

Legislative Days hearings included many issues relevant to Governance. Attending hearings in person, in the renovated Capitol building, helped restore our in-person networking! About  6 people stopped us to say Thank You to the League, they're depending on us! Please pass it on! Thank you to our volunteers reporting below, please thank them and follow up with any questions, and offers to help!

Last week we learned… 

• Speaker Fahey staff advised that Rep Ben Bowman and Sen Kayse Jama, both Majority Leaders, will be working on campaign finance reform legislation going forward. Stay tuned.

• League of Oregon Cities is interested in supporting our Recall Elections reform efforts, see position adopted in 2025. They want our help to support a revenue reform coalition.

• SoS staff, including Connor Radnovich, who worked for Sen President Rob Wagner, is now with the SoS as Comms Specialist.

• DAS staff asked to resume our mutual work from last summer, waiting to hear.

We were pleased that our CEI Hub reporter, Nikki Mandell, spoke as an invited community advocate, her LR below.

Note that ORESTAR funding descriptions differ between Secretary of State staff, limiting work and costs to requirements statutorily required for completion by 2027, and Honest Elections, including  costs being added for a complete ORESTAR overhaul.

Hearing Notes- a governance work selection:

• From the Joint Information Management and Technology Committee:

  • Data Privacy See the hearing video, an impressive array of speakers, including national ACLU attorney Chad Marlowe, about 4 minutes into the video, see ACLU Oregon - Data Privacy.Cyber Breach notification legislative work will continue, deferred to the long session.Data Centers We will be following discussion of impacts on Oregon communities, evolving transitions with the use of resources.See What Data Centers Mean for States, from the NCSL, National Conference of State Legislatures.

• From House Commerce & Consumer Protection

  • Antitrust Action nationally See this report from Attorney General Dan Rayfield staff: Competition in Oregon: Antitrust Enforcement in the Face of a New Federal Landscape. The hearing covered national corporate consolidation effects on Oregonians, perspectives from Oregon businesses, and the Federal Government Retreat from Antitrust Enforcement. We discussed working together with their legislative policy staff for the 2027 session.

•  From the House Emergency Management and Vets:

  • Oregon’s National Guard cuts A US Army Transformation Initiative discussion covered loss of facilities, staff, pilots’ training, certification, and mentoring. This may be partisan federal retribution. Rep Evans was pleased with increased cyber protection, based in Portland.

Elections processing and protection

We meet with the Secretary of State Staff for ongoing updates. They appreciate coordinating with our local league Voter Services around Oregon for educating voters: “Their 2026 Election Toolkit is a series of nonpartisan voter education materials covering five key issue areas such as the voter registration process, signing and returning your ballot, how to fill out your ballot correctly, and knowing your rights as an Oregon voter. It can be accessed and downloaded for your use at OregonVotes.gov/toolkit.”

For Advocacy, we discussed ongoing concerns.

Election Security. Three Elections platforms have ongoing cybersecurity attention, the Motor Voter System, the Oregon Centralized Voter Registration System (OCVR), and ORESTAR, the Oregon Elections System for Tracking and Reporting. See the February JCIMT SOS Cybersecurity Briefing (go to 1:17:23 in the video) and presentation slides to the Joint Info management and Tech Comm.

Stakeholders need to know that ORESTAR modifications will be limited to meeting 2027 campaign finance modifications required by HB 4018 (2026) to modify HB 4024 (2025). Those 2027 updates will cost more than the allocated $1.6M.

Two election compliance specialists are being hired to respond to campaign finance reforms, how to implement rules correctly and the complaint timing process, amid an uptick in requests and complaints filed. See the HB 4018 Fiscal Statement.

Protecting elected officials’ addresses privacy SB 224 Enrolled (2025), (LWVOR testimony) requires redacting addresses in ORESTAR. Since it is such old software, it is hard to redact across the board, not a magic switch, and they are currently unable to say that those addresses are not visible anywhere from ORESTAR. Their IT Team is working to protect addresses entered through contributions, which uses different input forms than candidates use to run for office. Another public comment period will be opened, details to follow.

Fed Overreach Concerns

• LWV is fighting voter suppression. See LWV Voting Rights, United States of America v. Oregon, LWVOR and the ACLU of Oregon as amici, updated May 19, 2026. We follow Oregon’s multi-state legal action with AG Dan Rayfield’s Oregon Dept of Justice Federal Litigation Tracker.  

• Federal CISA cuts For the Secretary of State, concern is more tied to federal resource cuts to funding used to fight election security threats. Feds aren’t trying to get access to systems but to data. CISA, “America’s Cyber Defense Agency” funding to counties has been cut. AI Bots are sending many more cyber threats. Knowing these cuts are happening, they’re reallocating election staffing money to focus on county coordination & best practices, but not actual cyber support. They will be asking for $2M for critical equipment & OCVR software upgrades, mostly not visible to voters, but system updates and debugging. Elections Director Dina Dawson has recommendations to better tackle this, long term.

• Consumer Data Privacy related to LWVOR and ACLU amici status to protect voting data, the Joint Info Management and Technology hearing featured Data Privacy: Impacts on Oregon Consumers and Communities. See the ACLU overview including protection advice, data broker controls, evading warrant requirements, mass privacy waivers, surveillance and vehicle tracking. 

  
  

Critical Energy Infrastructure [CEI] Hub

By Nikki Mandell

The Interim House Emergency Management and Veterans Committee  [HEMVC] devoted a portion of its June  Legislative Days hearing to the CEI Hub (Agenda & Recordings). Rep. Thuy Tran (HD 45), HEMVC chair, has become the lead champion of CEI Hub legislation in Salem, picking up the torch from Sen. Michael Dembrow who retired in Jan. 2025. 

At leadership’s direction, Rep. Tran focused the hearing on oversight, requesting that testimony not propose legislation or new programs. The CEI Hub hearing portion featured testimony from the Oregon Dept. of Energy (overview of fuel flow and storage in OR), Dept. of Environmental Quality (description of the Fuel Tank Seismic Stability Program and macro-summary of facility reporting), Nikki Mandell, community advocate (limits of DEQ’s FTSS program and need for a plan to geographically diversify fuel storage), Mike Koretenof, community advocate and retired DEQ program manager (OR’s underground storage program in the 1990s as a guide for an above ground storage diversification program).

After the hearing, Nikki and Mike met with Rep. Tran to discuss potential 2027 legislative concepts. The goal is to jump-start action toward decentralizing fuel storage to (1) ensure fuel access in other parts of the state if/when the CEI Hub becomes inoperable due to any of a myriad of hazards (seismic, fire, derailment, sabotage, human error, pipeline break), and (2) for that decentralized storage to reduce the amount of fuel stored at Portland's CEI Hub. Two key challenges will be financing and ensuring that any new or expanded storage does not endanger local communities.   

Contacts and conversations with League members in coastal or east-central Oregon would be most welcome. Please feel free to email lwvor@lwvor.org. Coordinator’s note, see their handout filed on OLIS.

Campaign Finance Reform

By Norman Turrill

The Montana Plan

This proposal is named for the state that started the idea. Supporters in Montana recently submitted enough signatures on a statutory initiative petition to likely force it onto the Montana November ballot. The Hawaii legislature also recently passed a statute implementing it for that state.

The idea originated with a former Federal Election Commission staffer. It stems from the recognition that all corporation powers and privileges have been granted by state and federal laws but not by their constitutions. The U.S. Supreme Court created a new corporate power with the Citizen United case that gave corporations the right of free speech. The Montana Plan proposes to revoke all corporate powers and privileges granted by the state, then reinstate these without including campaign finance privileges.

The Montana Plan defines an “artificial person” as any entity that is not an individual. This is a very comprehensive term that includes every type of corporation: for-profit, nonprofit, union, trust, trade association, foundation, religious organization, partnership, unincorporated association, etc. Each of these types of corporations has a separate section in Oregon statutory law, but they are never mentioned in the Oregon Constitution.

The Honest Elections Oregon (HEO) organization, with which the League has been collaborating for years, is now drafting a proposed Oregon constitutional amendment initiative to implement the Montana Plan. HEO believes this must be a constitutional amendment because the Oregon Legislature has shown for decades that it is hostile to any attempt to reform campaign finance.

Campaign Finance

HB 4018 (2026) on campaign finance  is now law, rammed through by the House and the Senate during the last legislative session. Because the Legislature betrayed the deal made in 2024 with HEO for withdrawing Initiative Petition 9 in exchange for passage of HB 4024 (2024), HEO now believes that it has no choice but to draft a new constitutional amendment initiative on campaign finance. HEO believes this must be a constitutional amendment because of the hostility that the Oregon Legislature has shown to any attempt to reform campaign finance.

In the meantime, the Elections Division under the Secretary of State is struggling to implement these bills’ requirements by January 1, 2027. In testimony to House Rules in June, SoS representatives said it will be difficult and require more money to meet this deadline. HEO believes this is because they are also trying to replace ORESTAR at the same time and are conflating the two projects. Even though HEO believes that ORESTAR should be replaced, it believes that the parts of HB 2024 and HB 4018 required to be implemented by January 2027 do not require modifications to ORESTAR.

EPAB: Electronic Government Portal Advisory Board

Rebecca Gladstone

Oregon Electronic Portal Advisory Board

This state website (portal) advisory board, meeting quarterly, has had increased leadership transitions. As a public member appointed in 2018 , Rebeccca Gladstone requested increased privacy disclaimer visibility and user tracking notices, highlighting the importance of opt-out options and transparency, particularly in light of new payment services and interagency data sharing. The new legislative member, Rep Edwards, mentioned interest in this during the JCIMT legislative days meeting (video).

ORMap Advisory Committee

Rebecca Gladstone

The ORMAP Project has not met for over two years and doesn’t currently have policy questions for the Advisory Committee that Peggy Bengry Rebecca Gladstone serve on, Peggy for the technical group and Rebecca for policy. The goal is to develop a statewide cadastral map, for coordinated (geospatial) districting across the state. We were invited to include our concerns for accurate elections’ districting, along with Secretary of State Elections Division staff, who is no longer listed. It is convened by the Oregon Dept of Revenue.

Interested in reading additional reports?  Please see our Climate Emergency, Revenue, Natural Resources, and Social Policy report sections.