Before summarizing the Democracy vs The Big Lie battle between Stanford University Professor Justin Grimmer and self-professed “election integrity expert” Douglas Frank held here in Coos County I’d like to explore why Commissioner Bob Main and the MAGA right are so anti-democracy.
Main attended the meeting this Thursday wearing a t-shirt that said “we are not a democracy we are a constitutional republic.” He has made this claim many times before and it is a popular right-wing theme. He made a point of informing Grimmer, who holds a doctorate in political science, the United States is not a democracy. Grimmer politely pushed back indicating many aspects of our system do meet the criteria of a democracy.
Speaking from the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, then President Donald Trump said, “We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.”
Trump continues with “…it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy.” He mentions protecting our democracy twice more in the speech.
Apparently, even an authoritarian like Trump acknowledges we have a democracy. The two terms republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive. You can be a republic and a democracy.
Rod Taylor attended the Ellipse speech and along with thirteen other local Oregonians trespassed on US Capitol grounds that same day.
In the absence of democracy, we are left with an authoritarian regime. For a snapshot of what that might look like read this story from ProPublica about Tarrant County, Texas.
Main has been recorded saying that Trump should be made a permanent president.
Frank’s presentation alleges “unnatural predictability” in our local elections. (Grimmers presentation demonstrates this to be false.) Video of Frank speaking to a local group last July began with an almost ten-minute reading of his CV. Frank’s slideshow is peppered with self-promotion. He mentions MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell and a documentary he made about Frank’s election analyses entitled “Scientific Proof”. He does not mention that in 2021, Lindell, through his Lindell Legal Defense Fund, Inc, paid Frank $245,000 under the heading “Legal”.
Frank recently spoke on behalf of the defense at the sentencing hearing for former Mesa County, Colorado clerk, Tina Peters. Again, he used this opportunity to tout his credentials including his claim to be a 1990 Nobel Prize nominee.
According to the Nobel Foundation –
According to the Statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize awarding institutions can never confirm, or disconfirm, whether someone has been nominated for the Nobel Prize until the full list of nominations is made public after 50 years, according to the secrecy rule. There is no way for this person to know that he/she is nominated, if not a person eligible to nominate has told him/her so.
The Nobel Committees do not announce the names of nominees, neither to the media nor to the candidates themselves.
Unless a Nobel qualified and approved nominator told Frank he had been nominated, a violation of their rules, there is no way for Frank to be certain. During the question-and-answer period of the meeting I asked Frank who had nominated him for a Nobel prize in chemistry. He was very nonspecific but explained he had been thoroughly interviewed by a prominent publication about his work. Evidently, this interview, if true, is enough to convince Frank he can claim to be a Nobel Prize nominee. We won’t know for sure until 2040.
Frank claims that elections are “unnaturally predictable” and he provides a key unique to each state that he says proves this. Further, he claims that local canvassing has turned up evidence of phantom or fraudulent voters.
In July of this year, Frank told the commissioners “…your elections are not under your control they’re under control by somebody else and the statistics show that because they’re under control of somebody else. I can predict every election in your state which is a preposterous situation, and they’ve made documentaries about my work and with respect to that. It’s quite shocking”
According to Dede Murphy and Julie Brecke, our previous and present county clerks, we do control our elections locally.
Grimmer is more low key and wasted little time discussing his credentials but I will elaborate a bit here. He is the Morris M Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He co-directs the Democracy and Polarization Lab. He has published extensively on election administration, machine learning, and statistics. He has also served as an expert witness in several election administration cases and teaches in the National Judicial College, helping educate judges about how to evaluate expert reports. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2010 and His AB in Mathematics and Political Science from Wabash College in 2005.
Grimmer argued that Frank’s methodology is flawed and his “conclusions are based on profound statistical errors” It would be impossible for me to do justice to Grimmer’s presentation but I will share two slides that demonstrate Frank’s turnout rate prediction is off by 8.54% in Coos County. 
Using Frank’s methods compared to actual turnouts he shows similar or even greater variations in other Oregon counties.
Frank made another claim that he can “hack” into our county voting systems. He claims to have monitored our elections from his basement in Ohio. This triggered an impassioned response from Darris, the IT director who takes his job of securing the county computer systems very seriously. Frank insists that all computers have a hidden modem that can jump an air gap. He derives this from an assumption that because many electronics have a sticker on the back that says “Do Not Open” the manufacturer or the mysterious “they” he mentions frequently, must be trying to hide something.
Darris noted that modems haven’t been placed in computers for at least ten years and when he orders a computer from a manufacturer, he never includes a modem. He further explained that the county has survived so-called “penetration tests” and that there is no way Frank was monitoring the local elections remotely.
He accused Frank of riling people up without knowing all the details. This mirrored the opinions of many attendees. Frank’s false accusations were also an attack on his own competence and it is understandable why he was angry. Darris concluded by calling Frank an Idiot.
(Darris was embarrassed by his outburst and apologized to Frank and Commissioner Rod Taylor but it should be known he was a hero to many in the room!)
It is unlikely Grimmer or Frank dissuaded anyone from the positions they held when they walked into the room. As John Sweet has said, “this is not county business but if we are going to discuss it then let’s share both sides. “
One chilling note. Frank claims to have established a “local team” to canvas neighborhoods for potential voter fraud. According to Frank, he isn’t directing this local team, merely “coaching” them. Be mindful, he coached Tina Peters into a nine year prison sentence.
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Professor Justin Grimmer’s presentation addressed three core Frank claims. One being Frank’s opinion that our voter rolls have too much “churn” or turnover. Based upon statistics on movers, death, and coming of age he finds nothing surprising about changes in Coos County’s voter file.
National Reputation
A simple Google search for “Justin Grimmer” returns a list of his academic affiliations and publications.
A similar search for “Douglas Frank” produces a bounty of articles and information describing him in an unflattering light, primarily as an election denier who makes unproven fantastical claims.
Below is brief list with some selected quotes
100% Pants On Fire Rating
“Instead of planting apple seeds, I think I’m going around starting little fires everywhere,” Frank said. “And then I come back and I throw gasoline on those fires.”
Frank is known nationally as an elections skeptic who has toured the nation giving hundreds of presentations to push false and unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding election machines and urge audiences to “wake up” and investigate “fraud” in their communities.
“In the end you don’t win with evidence,” Frank told the crowd. “You win with a movement.”
Frank claims to have data that proves non-governmental organizations – like The Center for Tech and Civic Life , which received $350 million in donations from Mark Zuckerburg, which spurred the “Zuckerbucks” conspiracy – are involved in stuffing ballot boxes.”
Associate Professor of Political Science at Carroll College Jeremy Johnson said Frank has been peddling conspiracies about elections and voting machines around the country, stoking anger and mistrust in institutions, and that he’s seen no evidence any of Frank’s claims are accurate.
He made his way back to his rental car, pocketing about $320 in cash donations that he said were going towards the car and his hotel room.
“I don’t do this for the money,” he said.
“Your secretary of state knew before the election that your books are completely hackable, that your poll books, when you sign in when you go to the polls, are completely hackable,” Frank said in audio obtained by Kansas Reflector. “They knew it. And they were hacked big time. Because we have recordings of that. By the way, those recordings have usernames and passwords. I have the usernames and passwords for all your county clerks in your state. That’s how secure they are.”
Secretary of State Scott Schwab said his office reviews voter rolls and computer logs regularly and hasn’t seen any evidence of compromise.
“These types of unfounded allegations,” Schwab said, “are harmful to our republic.”
Frank doesn’t let facts get in the way.
Bloated voter registration rolls are central to Frank’s argument. People often move without updating their voter registration, and election officials have to be careful about whom they delete from records.
The idea is “they” — when pressed by legislators on the panel, Frank identified Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and George Soros as likely culprits — decide the outcome of an election in advance, then print ballots that correspond to excess registrations and have them delivered to drop boxes en masse.
If that isn’t enough, they can hack into voting machines that secretly connect to cellphone towers while monitoring results on election night.
“Before all the elections, they get together?” said Rep. John Toplikar, R-Olathe. “The ‘they’ people get together and decide what they’re going to do?”
“Somebody does,” Frank said.
Rep. Vic Miller, D-Topeka, joked that he has “hard evidence” of voter fraud within his district.
“I only got 70% of the vote,” Miller said. “When people I talked to, every one of them said they voted for me.”
Schwab said Frank wasn’t being honest during the hearing when he claimed the secretary of state had refused to meet with him to review evidence of voter fraud. Schwab said his office provided several opportunities for a meeting and didn’t get a response.
Frank warmed up the church crowd with a charming story about how he has been married to his high school sweetheart for 40 years.
The couple has three children. The youngest, a son, is 19.
“He says there are no conservative girls left in the world,” Frank said. “So what I do is, when I come home from my trips and I find these really beautiful 19-year-old girls, I take selfies with them, and I get their information. So every time I come home for two or three days, I say, ‘Here are some more, son.’ It’s pretty fun.”
Frank, whose area of academic training is in surface chemistry, offered a verbal presentation that included significant allegations of fraud, without including evidence of his claims. During his presentation he encouraged commissioners to fulfill their civic duty to protect constitutional election rights which, he said, may include “nullifying” or refusing to comply with state elections law.
Frank claims that he’s aware of about 400 ballots in Shasta County that were cast either illegally or fraudulently. He offered no verifiable proof of that claim, but said he and others have reported those concerns to the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office. Shasta Scout has not yet reached out to the Sheriff’s Office to confirm.
Franks’ comments throughout the meeting were met by support from about twenty members of the public. The same crowd also showed strong support during the meeting for Laura Hobbs, a candidate for the Shasta County Board of Supervisors who describes herself as “100% MAGA” and frequently makes claims of ongoing fraud at the Shasta County Elections Office.
I was there when Bob main interrupted professor Grimmer about us be democrat or republican. After a few minutes of this, i jumped in loudly from the back of the room and said, “We are a Democratic Republic “!
The bickering stopped. Anyone who took civics or poly sci would know it.
I wanted to ask Mr. Frank how many Sharpies he used to invent his graphs.
I heard you! Why they want to engage in this spurious, stupid argument is beyond me. Frank is a very glib liar and the less mathematically inclined are smitten with him.
He uses sixth order polynomials instead of a Sharpie to smooth out his errors, haha