EO MEDIA GROUP - Hazelnuts were used by the Secretary of State's Office Monday to demonstrate the number of voters registered under the Motor Voter law.

This week the Secretary of State’s Office arranged to borrow more than 270,000 of one of Oregon’s signature commodities — hazelnuts — to demonstrate the number of voters registered through the state’s new automatic voter registration program.

Those nuts, on display during a press conference Monday at the Capitol, weren’t bought, but borrowed, from former State Sen. Larry George, R-Sherwood. George and his family own a hazelnut processing company, the George Packing Company, according to a spokeswoman from the Secretary of State’s Office.

George, who began his term in the senate in 2007, decided not to run for reelection in 2014 and retired from the senate in 2015, before the passage of Oregon’s Motor Voter law in the subsequent legislative session.

But in July 2013, near the end of the 2013 session, George voted with his party against HB 3521, an earlier incarnation of Democrats’ efforts to pass automatic voter registration.

The George Packing Company couldn’t be reached for comment Thursday, when most of the state was immobilized due to a snowstorm. So it remains to be seen whether George’s company agreed to loan their hazelnuts for advertising purposes — newspapers across the state published images of sacks of hazelnuts emblazoned with the company logo — or George simply changed his mind.