This past July, Commissioner Rod Taylor embarrassed himself by inviting a known flim-flam man to impose his election fraud conspiracies upon the citizenry. Douglas Frank, a self-professed “election integrity expert” and former high school math teacher has the ear and financial backing of well-known election deniers like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO. Nonetheless, Frank has been repeatedly debunked by genuine experts. Dozens of pro-democracy citizens responded by attending a subsequent commission meeting to inform Taylor of Frank’s dubious reputation.

Taylor’s response was to accuse Frank’s detractors of being “math deniers” so with his permission, I put the commissioners in touch with Professor Justin Grimmer of Stanford University. Grimmer graciously reached out via email explaining he has “ …extensive experience analyzing elections and I have served as an expert witness in several court cases, including as a witness for the state of Georgia in their defense of an election reform, the state of Alabama in defense of an election reform, and for the California state bar in the John Eastman proceedings.

“My research group has been evaluating Doug Frank’s claims for three years.  We have demonstrated that his conclusions are based on a statistical misunderstanding.  We provide extensive explanation of the issue here:

https://electioninsights.org/ “

A 2022 story on CNN quotes Grimmer.

 

“At the core of how our democracy works is that we have to trust election results,” said Justin Grimmer, a political science professor at Stanford University. “Luckily, the theory is so crazy that I think only the people who really want to believe or really, really want to see some conspiracy in the world would be persuaded. But nevertheless, I think there’s a real danger there.”

“…I think this took my research group an afternoon. You uncover that there’s no basis for this,” said Grimmer, who looked at data for 42 states and found that Frank’s assessments do not provide any evidence of voter fraud. “But if you’re not someone who, like me, spends all day working on statistics and data, six order polynomials and nearly perfect correlations — it sounds like he’s uncovered something really impressive.”

Taylor, who is a true believer that Trump lost the election by fraud, was naturally uninterested in Grimmer’s offer and equally unmoved by the testimony of county citizens. Instead he has invited Frank back for a work session. It’s not yet clear what he hopes to accomplish, but he has blocked three hours. The work session is on October 10 at 9:30 AM at the Owen Buiding in Coquille .

To his credit, Taylor agreed to John Sweet’s invitation to have Grimmer attend and present an informed and scholarly perspective on Frank’s allegations. We have a real showdown between Democracy and The Big Lie happening right here in Coos County Oregon. It was tempting to bill this as a Clash of the Titans but only Grimmer really meets the criteria for a titan whereas Frank is more reminiscent of the Titanic.

 

 

 

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