PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — The Oregon Secretary of State's Office is updating the voter registrations of a group of individuals without U.S. citizenship after a data entry error at the DMV.

According to Secretary of State LaVonne Griffin-Valade, the noncitizens became registered to vote through the Oregon Motor Voter law due to a data entry that occurred when applied for driver's licenses.

"The error occurred when DMV staff entered information about the type of identity document provided. One example is entering 'U.S. Passport' when the document was actually a foreign passport. The other example would be entering 'U.S. Birth Certificate' when the document was actually a foreign birth certificate," the Secretary of State's Office said Friday in a news release. "No individual took action to register inappropriately."

Griffin-Valade's office did not include how many individuals were erroneously registered. Willamette Week reported it involved just over 300 people.

Amy Joyce, the administrator of DMV Services, said on Friday that only two people affected by the error had voted.

"Importantly, this does not mean those individuals were not U.S. citizens at the time they voted -- just that they failed to provide proof of citizenship to DMV. The SOS office is working through that now," Joyce said.

The DMV is working to verify all birth-certificate based voter registrations, which will take up to two weeks, Joyce said.

"This analysis will be completed well before ballots are sent in Oregon," she said.

"To prevent this unlikely error from occurring again, DMV immediately instituted a prompt in the data entry screen to ensure front desk staff accurately enter citizenship information and the agency has developed a third step (daily auditing of all transactions, after a two-step verification during the transaction) to verify materials are accurate before forwarding them to the Elections Division," she added.

Griffin-Valade praised automatic voter registration in her statement, saying it has helped thousands.

“Safeguarding the integrity of our elections is my top priority,” she said. “When my office was made aware of this error, we moved quickly to update the voter rolls. I am also personally calling on the DMV to take immediate action to improve its processes to ensure this doesn’t happen again.