SALEM — Oregon Secretary of State Dennis Richardson is pushing to reactivate thousands of registered voters who have not participated in recent elections.

Under state administrative rules, voters are considered inactive if they don’t vote for five years and do not update their registration information in that period. Richardson announced Tuesday that he hopes to change the rule by increasing the threshold to 10 years.

His office estimates the move would keep activate about 30,000 voters who were set to be deactivated this year, and reactivate approximately another 30,000 who were deactivated within the past decade.

Inactive voters aren’t sent ballots; however, they can go to county elections offices to pick up a ballot. Richardson argues that presents a “barrier” to voting.

In total, there are about 400,000 inactive voters in Oregon, Richardson, flanked by boxes of blank voter registration cards, said during a press conference at the state capitol Tuesday.

Many of those inactive voters have moved out of state permanently; but others have left Oregon because they are attending colleges in other states or are active service members overseas.

Making the change would involve going through the addresses of inactive voters and comparing them to DMV records to verify people still reside in Oregon.

The Secretary of State’s Office has access to those records thanks to the state’s landmark Motor Voter law, which automatically registers people to vote when they have contact with the DMV.

Inactive voters are already registered, and reactivating them won’t require them to choose a political party or remain non-affiliated, Richardson said. Inactive voters are not counted when the state tallies up voter participation.

Richardson said he did not know the party affiliation of the voters who had gone inactive.

“We can verify what their current address is,” Richardson said. “We can ensure that they already have the right to vote, because they are already registered to vote.”

Asked whether he had received a legal opinion as to whether this change could be made, Richardson said, “I’m a lawyer,” and that several members of his staff, including the head of the elections division, are lawyers.

Richardson said the statute said that “not less than five years” may pass before a voter is considered inactive; he said it does not require the secretary of state to deactivate voters after five years.

Richardson said the project was within the “capacity” of the Secretary of State’s elections division budget, and associated costs, such as staff time, would not require legislative approval.

Asked whether the Secretary of State’s Office had plans to track the number of reactivated voters who actually vote after being reactivated, Richardson said:

“I don’t know if we do or not, but we’ll discuss it, and if that can be done in an open and transparent way, that would be interesting information to have,” Richardson said.

Richardson is a Republican — the first to serve in the post since 1985 — and touted “bipartisan” support for the project.

Rep. Brad Witt, D-Clatskanie, and Rep. Jodi Hack, R-Salem, also spoke in favor of the effort, as did the secretary of the Independent Party of Oregon, Sal Peralta.

“This is about encouraging Oregonians to stay engaged in the political process by preserving their access to the ballot,” Hack said.

Witt called the current rule “dissonant and unnecessarily punitive” in a state that recently implemented automatic voter registration.

“It makes little sense that as we add hundreds of thousands of voters to our registration lists on the one hand, we would be eliminating tens of thousands on the other,” Witt said. “We need to remember that the right to vote carries with it the right not to vote.”

Peralta charged that inactive status primarily affected military and college students, calling it a “critical access issue” for voters.

But Peralta said the issue was brought to his attention by former State Sen. Frank Morse, a Republican from Albany who served in the Legislature from 2003 to 2012. Morse was designated inactive when he temporarily changed his mailing address to an address out of state, Peralta said.

“We have been kind of following this issue for the last decade,” Peralta said.