A smoky haze enveloped the grounds of the Lone Pine Events Center last week, pushed Terrebonne’s way from the wildfires surrounding Central Oregon. Inside the meeting space, Dr. Douglas Frank, a notorious election-integrity pundit, was stoking flames of another kind.
Talking before a crowd of approximately 40 people, as part of his “Who Is Controlling Our Elections?” tour, the physicist, who has become well-known with his message that election fraud is widespread across the nation, showed a depiction of “Lady Liberty” with one arm pointing to the sky and the other holding a ballot box as he rammed home his belief that citizens need to stop election fraud.
“That’s why your state is communist, because you’ve not been protecting your ballot box,” said Frank, who’s been labeled the “Johnny Appleseed of election fraud” by the Los Angeles Times. “Your elections are being run by somebody else, somewhere else, and you have no idea what’s going on in your elections. That’s no way to run an election. It’s a way to let other people control your lives.
“My whole goal is to get you back in charge of your elections, and I’ve been doing that all around the country,” Frank said. “I talk about Oregon all over the country, and I tell them that it’s one of my best states in the whole country. I’m having so much success here, and they’re saying, ‘What? How can you possibly have success in Oregon? That place is communist.’ It’s because you guys are feeling the heat. The pain level is high. You’re awake. I go to these other states, and they’re like, ‘Oh, Dr. Frank, everything fine here.’ No, it’s not fine. Our elections are a wreck. They’re a wreck in every state in the country.”
Judy Stiegler, a former Oregon state representative and current political-science professor at Oregon State University-Cascades and Central Oregon Community College, says Oregon’s elections are far from a wreck. In fact, she said Oregon officials have done a “solid job” of ensuring Oregon voter rolls and elections are correct and minimizing fraud.
“I think that in Oregon, we have done a solid, solid job of listening to and paying attention to concerns that people might have and addressing them,” said Steigler, 73. “No system is 100% perfect in any way, shape or form. It isn’t, and it’d be ridiculous for anybody to say it is, but I believe very strongly that we do an exceptional job in Oregon with making sure the voter rolls are accurate.”
Frank, who has a PhD in surface electroanalytical chemistry, has been investigating and publicizing what he says is widespread election fraud since December 2020. He’s been closely affiliated with Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow, a supporter of President Donald J. Trump who contends the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Lindell reportedly funds Frank’s work, although Frank did ask for donations to cover his expenses at the Terrebonne presentation, where no one questioned Frank’s take on election integrity. He said that he sees inactive voters become active right before elections and believes counterfeit ballots are being disseminated by China. He also spent about an hour of the talk detailing his recent trip to South Korea to help analyze that country’s election data and his role in bolstering protests there. He said he believes it’s important for citizens to demand local control of voter rolls by city and county officials rather than through state or federal databases. Currently, residents can register to vote online, which then stores their information in a cloud-based system. He stressed it’s not an issue drawn on party lines.
“What’s wrong with our elections? Everybody thinks they know what’s wrong, but really, the key thing that’s wrong is in every state in America, and I mean every state, is the elections are central(ized), so somebody else, somewhere else, is controlling your life. You need to bring it back,” he said. “This is not a Republican-Democrat issue. It’s about whoever is in power staying in power. I don’t have much use for the labels anymore. Every state is compromised.”
According to Brennan Center for Justic, which is part think tank, part legal-advocacy group, states “are required to conduct regular list maintenance to remove ineligible voters from the rolls” and can utilize the Electronic Registration Information Center to help ensure voter rolls are correct and current by comparing them to other states’ data to look for voters who’ve moved, died or who have duplicate registrations.
Frank pointed to the Oregon Driver & Motor Vehicle Services department’s Oregon Motor Voter program, which began in 2016 and automated voter registration when a resident renewed their existing license or applied for a new one. Prior to that, residents could register to vote at the DMV, but had fill out a form that the DMV then sent to the applicable county clerk.
In September 2024, after what the Oregon Department of Transportation labeled an “inquiry from an outside entity,” Gov. Tina Kotek directed the DMV to conduct a comprehensive review of the new automated program, in which the DMV determined that “clerical, technical, and policy errors” saw approximately 1,900 people who were registered to vote but who hadn’t provided proof of their eligibility to do so. The DMV further determined that it wasn’t necessarily fraudulent behavior; rather, there were many were instances in which DMV personnel accidentally chose the wrong option in the OMV interface’s drop-down menus.
“When the motor voter law was passed, we knew there were going to be challenges,” Stiegler said. “I think what we’ve done over the years is a lot of things to make sure that there isn’t an opportunity for fraudulent voting to occur. The whole idea was to make it as easy as possible for people to register to vote, and yes, there have been challenges. There’s been a mistake here or there, but overall, I think it’s a very sound system.”
After that comprehensive review, the Secretary of State’s office indicated that only 44 of those 1,900 incorrectly registered actually voted. Additionally, Tobias Read, Oregon Secretary of State, said that spot audits would occur regularly going forward to ensure that the daily Automatic Voter Registration files sent from the DMV match what the SoS receives.
During the Terrebonne meeting, Frank said he’s under a non-disclosure agreement with respect to the voter rolls he’s attained, but then opened and displayed what he said were official Oregon voter rolls. He pointed to a local address, which an audience member said is a business, where approximately 10 voters listed as their personal address, and then other instances of what he said are “inactive” voters, further suggesting they were “ineligible” to vote.
However, Stiegler takes issue with that classification.
“Maybe you haven’t been a real active voter in the past, but that isn’t to say you’re an illegitimate voter,” she said, adding that officials in county clerk’s offices across the state and into the Secretary of State’s office “take it very seriously.
“They believe we have a good, solid voting system in this state and that we don’t have a lot of fake voters,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of people who are trampling on the validity of our voting system.”
According to a December 2021 Ipsos/ABC News poll, a survey of 982 adults ages 18 and older, 65% of those polled believed that former President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was legitimate while 33% did not.
This article appears in the Source August 6, 2026.
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Oregon is not communist despite what this individual may think.
Communism is a centralized political and economic system where the state owns all property and controls the means of production.
Oregon uses an all-mail voting system established by a 1998 voter-approved ballot measure.
Ballots are mailed directly to registered voters to increase participation and convenience.
Elections are administered locally by county clerks from both major parties under state laws and public oversight.
Calling state policies or election systems “communist” is a frequent hyperbolic criticism used by political commentators or activists to attack opposing political views or non-traditional voting.
Universal mail-in voting is a democratic administrative choice used to manage voter turnout, not a transition away from private property, free markets, or democratic elections.
However, Oregon’s DMV does, at times, resemble a Third World country in terms of staffing and operations.