Douglas Frank’s Missing Link

I went to Executive Club this week and listened to Dr. Douglas Frank discuss voter fraud. That evening reminded me of an important logical principle I first learned when I took Dr. Jim Stephens’s introduction to logic course at Hillsdale College: the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition.

Frank spent 97% of his talk covering the necessary condition, the existence of invalid voters on Oregon’s rolls. I found his evidence of voter registration error convincing.

I also found it fairly pedestrian. The moment Oregon made the motor registration policy choice, I had already immediately expected a significant risk of error. Frank ties the errors of automation to a failure of the Oregon Secretary of State to remove inactive voters. Our voter rolls have swelled while our purging of those rolls, as people move, has been virtually suspended, bringing us to a point where we have slightly more registered voters in Oregon than people aged 18 or older.

I can share with you a personal anecdote of this. Around five years ago, someone I knew moved to Hawaii. When this person’s ODL was about to expire, the waiting time at a Hawaiian DMV to transfer was so long, this person chose to simply renew her Oregon license. But she no longer had an Oregon address. This person used ours. We’ve been getting her ballot ever since.

These anecdotes are manifold but not necessarily evidence of voter fraud on a scale to have a material impact on any Oregon election. Frank spent too little of his presentation providing evidence for the necessary condition, that some political organization in Oregon is harvesting these invalid ballots in sufficient numbers to change an outcome.

The little he had to say to the mechanism of the fraud itself can be summarized as the fraudsters watch the vote count in real time and then harvest enough invalid ballots to win. I wonder about that. How do they get their hands on the Hawiian resident’s ballot, the one I throw away each election year or others like her? How do they do that on the scale of many thousands of votes necessary to have an impact?

Frank wasn’t clear on this in his presentation, so I asked him how that works. He claimed to me “they” merely print out duplicate ballots themselves. They don’t go out and collect the invalid ballots that were mailed to addresses where people no longer live. The people who rule every state in the United States, red or blue, stay in power because they produce their own duplicate ballots, as needed, for people on the rolls who don’t vote.

So for Frank, we’re not just talking about Multnomah County. He’s saying the Republicans in red Oregon counties get elected because they commit this mass electoral fraud as well, to keep Democrats from occasionally being elected in, say, Lake County.

That would constitute a major crime that would probably be difficult to hide on the scale Frank claims has been transpiring. I asked him if he has any evidence of such ballot printing. He said yes, that Kash Patel’s discovery of thousands of Chinese fraudulent ballots is an example.

I took this as an admission that he has absolutely no evidence of the kind. Last year, the FBI Director revealed the investigation of an alleged Chinese plot to create fraudulent votes for Chinese citizens living in the United States. An informant told the FBI that the Chinese government planned to send counterfeit U.S. driver’s licenses to Chinese expats in America so they could register to vote and support Joe Biden. Even if true, that’s not an example of American election officials printing duplicate ballots of inactive voters to rig our elections. It would just be an example of yet another attempt by a foreign power to interfere in our elections that got caught, because such things are difficult to conceal due to the scale of fraudulent votes that need to be cast to have a material impact on an election.

So, Douglas Frank certainly has a valid point that we are sending out many ballots to people that don’t live at the addresses they were sent to. Indeed, many such people may not even be alive anymore.

But he does not have sufficient evidence to say our elections are everywhere and always rigged. It may be a waste of money mailing all those ballots to wrong addresses, or maybe our automated processes that cause the surplus ballot problem save more money on net, because cleaning the voter rolls in a decentralized process, county by county, would be too labor-intensive. And it’s certainly the case that every once in a while, someone gets a misplaced ballot and illegally casts it rather than throw it away as I do.

However, the most important takeaway from Frank’s work is that he appears to be confirming for us that there actually has been no mass voter fraud in this state in recent years. He’s been at this for some time now. You’d think he’d have at least one instance where an election official printed out thousands of ballots, counted them, and changed an electoral outcome. He doesn’t.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.