Dr. Douglas Frank - Can Oregon voters trust the election system?

Reports that some Oregon voters discovered unexpected changes to their party affiliation during the primary election are raising new questions about election administration and voter confidence. Are these isolated errors or signs of deeper problems with the system?

Dr. Douglas Frank is a physicist, inventor, and elections analyst. He joins the show to discuss concerns about voter registration records in Oregon, claims involving party affiliation changes, and the broader debate over election security, transparency, and public trust in the voting process.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm glad to get to your phone calls and emails in a moment. At 866-Hey Lars. You know, the election a week ago produced, I think, some very surprising results. A gigantic no vote on a tax measure promoted by the gigantic Democrat majorities and the Democrat who's serving as uh governor of Oregon, although I think she's going to get a pink slip from voters in November. But one of the most consistent questions for the last seven days is hey, I didn't get a Republican ballot. I've been a Republican for years or for decades, and somebody re-registered me without my knowledge. I asked a number of those people questions about what the circumstances were. Had they changed their driver's license, their address, or whatever. But Oregon voters showed up for the primary and discovered their party affiliation had been changed without their knowledge, denying them a chance to vote as Republicans, meaning their ballot didn't even include the Republican candidates, nor did it include the Democrat candidates. And I don't know how many of these and whether or not there was a skew that more Republicans were affected by this by Democrats, but I thought to uh talk to a real expert. That's Dr. Douglas Frank, and we've talked to him before about elections. Dr. Frank, welcome back to the program.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Well, thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Do you have any inkling as to why all of these voters and m you know would would have this kind of same experience? And I was getting calls and emails from all over the state of Oregon from people who said, I've been registered as a Republican for years or decades. I didn't change my driver's license. I didn't update anything, I certainly didn't change my party registration, and yet mysteriously, they're knocked out of eligibility to receive a Republican ballot. Is there something going on? And what should we look for?

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yes. The problem in your state is that there are multiple ways to get registered, and all of those systems are basically constantly re-registering you. If you get welfare, if you go to jail, and as you mentioned, if you get a driver's license, or let's say you renew your car registration, any government agency you touch automatically re-registers you to vote. And when it's automatic, of course, the kid asks you what party you want to be. And so what happens is all these systems are constantly re-registering you. And then on the other end, there's this software that's trying to reconcile. Okay, Lars Larson, he's already registered. Okay, which which party evaluation do we keep? The previous one, this one, how do we bring in his old voter history? All these systems have to work together and they don't work well. And I heard you mention beforehand, you were wondering if it's skewed against Republicans. I don't have direct evidence for that, but I'll tell you this. When I was in Oregon a couple weeks ago, I would giving public lectures almost every night, and people would be sitting in the audience and they'd say, and I'd bring up the voter rolls right in front of them, their own voter rolls, and I'd say, What's your address? And we'd look people up. Lots of people were uh registered as unaffiliated even though they had been Republicans. So I know it's absolutely true, and it's a huge problem in your state.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Well, and in fact, let me ask you this because uh one of the things that occurred to me is we all, I mean, almost all of us deal with computers one way or another. And usually there are default settings saying if you've come in to change your address, it doesn't necessarily change anything else. In fact, the system is built to say, would you like to change this? And it doesn't say, oh, well, in that case, let's set everything else back to factory default positions, which would be non-affiliated. It just changes your address, or it gives you an enhanced driver's license, or it signs you up for food stamps, or whatever it's going to do. But wouldn't you think the system would have been built if it was built to be to honor the right of people to vote? It would have been built to leave all the other defaults in place so that when you make one change, it doesn't just set everything back to zero.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

Well, there you go, being rational again. Uh you're you're assuming that government works efficiently and that government organizations work seamlessly together, and that the person writing the software thought of all these things. The fact is, you know, even just last year your governor admitted that your Department of Motor Vehicles was re was registering non-citizens. So it's not it's not um easy. I'm a software engineer myself, and I know it's not easy to make all these different systems work together. And when the default, and you said you mentioned default, the default is unaffiliated. So you have all these systems that are automatically registering people unaffiliated. And then somewhere down the line, some smart software has to look at all that and say, well, which one of these is the real one? And it has to make a decision. And those priorities are not obvious, not always.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

But that's that's the part, Dr. Frank, I don't understand. Because if somebody comes in and says, I need to sign up, for example, for food stamps or TANF, and you say, Okay, we're signing you up. And by the way, we're gonna re-register you, although, as you say, they don't necessarily tell you that. And it goes to the system and says, Hey, Lars has signed up for food stamps, that would be the first time in my life, uh, and we are we are going to re-register him. And the registration system should look at it and say, Well, Lars is already registered, so why don't we leave all of the other things in place that were there already? Because if it automatically re-registers somebody as non-affiliated, and then when, Dr. Frank, I mean, I can ask you you're a computer scientist and a physicist and everything else, the pl the time you're going to become aware of it is when you get a ballot and it doesn't have Republican candidates on it. And at that point, when you ask, hey, this is wrong, can I fix it? And they say, Oh, not until the next election, you're past the deadline to fix it. And the system knows that. And you're right that if you have all these different players, number one, there shouldn't be all those players. But number two, if Tobias Reed, the Secretary of State, is going to authorize the DMV and the food stamp office and the welfare office and whoever knows how many all all these other agencies to re-register people, then he should say, if I'm getting you know, if I give somebody permission to drive a forklift, the first question I'll say is, are you qualified to do this? Do you know how to do it? And if the agency says, no, we have no idea how to make sure people stay registered, then say, I'm not going to give you authority to drive the machine if you don't know how to drive the machine, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:48

You're you're dead on. But you're assuming that government works in a rational way. And it and there are bad actors and there are just normal government bureaucrats, and you mix the two together, and I think that's why you've ended up in this horrible system. I think it's the particularly interesting in this primary that even though we won the lawsuit, the judicial watch proved that your voter rolls were out of compliance with state and federal law. And that's a conservative number, my friend. It should be about twice that. Okay. But that but they didn't clean it up before they mailed the ballots. So everybody needs to realize he used a corrupted voter rolls to begin with. And then when you combine all these other systems, it's a mess. You really there's only one solution, and that's for if you're you need to go in and vote in person, and you need to, you know, check it all yourself. The whole solution that I've been proposing across your state is I've been telling people until you take it back local, take back your local registration, take back your local tabulation and reporting, till you take that back local, as long as you're letting somebody else do all this work, you're always gonna this these sorts of things are always gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

Unbelievable. That is Dr. Douglas Frank, who's an elections expert and a world-renowned physicist.