The Oregon Fix - for Normal People

How can we know if there is or has been fraud practiced in Oregon’s elections? It is impossible to prove for sure, but I expect that anybody who is aware of the situation in our state and has reasonably good judgment is suspicious by now. Here is a sampling of facts about the voting situation in Oregon:

• Every Oregon election since 2000 has been voted by mail exclusively
• People are automatically registered to vote when they receive a driver’s license, giving nefarious actors nearly unlimited “phantom voters” whose ballot can be bought or stolen with relative ease.
• Potential voters need minimal ID to register to vote in Oregon. All it takes is the last four digits of a social security number, or a pay stub, or a bank statement, or a government document and the willingness to lie if its not you.
• The legislature continues to propose and pass more and more liberal voter registration laws even today. For example, a person who hasn’t voted for 10 years will no longer be inactivated on the voter rolls.
• Ballot harvesting is legal in Oregon. Any person may collect ballots from individuals as long as they turn them in within two days of collecting the ballots from that voter. ORS 254.470 SECTION (6)(D) and ORS 260.695 SECTION (14)
• The secretary of state controls all election audits and has issued a directive that county clerks are not allowed to conduct their own audits.

For anybody who is willing to cheat, all it takes is organization and ambition and the election is their oyster to crack open any way they would like.

In light of this, a study of voter registration and vote results was done, looking at voter registration trends from 1988 through 2016, and comparing them to the votes tallied for the presidential election every 4 years. This was used to develop a linear regression model to predict the outcome of the 2020 election. An outline of the details of how the study was done is contained in the 9 part series entitled The Oregon Fix. From this study it became clear that there were 3 distinct types of counties in Oregon. Twenty-three counties have consistently registered and voted more and more republican, five counties have consistently registered and voted more and more democratic, and eight counties have sometimes trended more democrat, and sometimes more republican. These are depicted in the map below:

Just to make it clear, the breakdown of the population in these counties is opposite of their land area: The 5 democratic counties contained 46.5% of the voters in 2020, the 8 no trend counties contained 33.9% of the voters in 2020, and the 23 republican trending counties contained 19.6% of the voters in 2020

If you look at the voter registration by party in each county and compare it to the presidential voting results for each county through 2016 many of them match very well. You can then see if the 2020 election was consistent with that model. Anybody can look at the results and see the correlation. To begin with you can see that the democratic trending counties fit the model well, and the 2020 election fits so well that you would think it was also used to generate the model. The 2020 election is represented by the dot inside of the circle and it fits with the past history perfectly:

Here is a summary of the prediction and voting in each of these 5 counties:

That’s about as even as the results can come out, and it fits the model pretty well for the most part as you can see from the graph.

Since it looked like the model worked well we can move on next to the purple counties which have no clear trend over this time period. Here are the results:

These results don’t look quite as well correlated as the result from the Democratic trending counties. But variations happen, and while the vote counting definitely seems to be favoring a Biden win a little bit more than we might expect, it could still be well within the limits of variability. It might make one a little suspicious, but not too much.

So how did it go for the republican trending counties? Have a look at the graph and the numbers for these twenty-three counties:

If this looks normal and random to you then you don’t need a course in statistics, you need a course in common sense! This is like flipping a coin twenty-three times and having it come up tails each time, 23 times in a row. And not just by a little bit, but it actually varied from the model by more than all of the other counties put together, despite having less than one quarter the voting population.

Something definitely is wrong in these 23 counties. While this is not an absolute proof that fraud happened in the 2020 elections in Oregon, it would be foolish to think that the preponderance of evidence does not show any cause for concern. Two questions come to mind from this obvious anomaly. How might this have been done, and why was it done in these counties?

• Why? I think that the simple answer is that this was an easy way to cheat and not be noticed. All of these 23 counties went for Trump, so most of the time people will look and see that fact and think “nothin’ to see here.” They are also small counties, so people looking for a significant amount of cheating aren't drawn toward these areas. This was a place where a change is easy to hide, yet statewide can make a real difference.
• How? These twenty-three counties are large land areas with great distances between the towns and the county seats. It seems highly unlikely that there was a collusive effort between these county clerks to change the election result in the 23 smallest counties in the state. It seems much more likely that this result was organized at the state level. It is significant that there are no counties which count by hand any longer, it is done by machines in every county in Oregon. If you can’t tell, my opinion is that there is a back door open on these voting machines to which the county IT people have no visibility, and the tabulators were hacked in some way unknown to the county.

We at Audit Oregon and many other groups have been asking for an audit of the 2020 election for some time, but no county clerks have agreed with us, and most county commissioners have been supportive of their clerks. As stated earlier the secretary of state has issued a directive against it. The standard of proof for a grand jury to indict is “preponderance of evidence”. It sure seems like this data indicates that we have met that standard. With the midterm elections upon us it seems unlikely that an audit will happen, but a change in public perception is also needed.

How do we fix this problem in the longer term? Ideally we would want to conduct voting in person, with paper ballots, and required ID to vote on election day for the vast majority of voters. Because we in Oregon have voted by mail for so long and developed our systems around that, there is great resistance to going back to this old fashioned method of voting. I admit that until recently I found vote by mail to be so convenient and easy that I was all in favor of it too. But these problems coming to light have now changed my mind about that, and I’m certain many of you are thinking likewise.

I wish I could give you exact instructions on what to do in your county, but I can’t. We need to begin by voting, but we can talk to friends who trust us and whom we trust. We can speak up when we get the chance. If you know your county clerk you can make him or her aware and ask for extra security measures, especially around the tabulation machines. Most importantly, we can be good, honest, and truthful. I don’t know what white hat operations might be happening behind the scenes, but I’ve become convinced they do exist, and they covet our voice to help right this wrong. We are not about trying to get people to act against their will, we are giving them an opportunity to be on the right side of history. And we must not underestimate the power of a majority of people just taking a stand for what is right.

A patriot’s prayer: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” Romans 12:21. Father God, honesty in the operation of our government is indeed a serious concern for you and for us. You know much better than we do whether unjust measurements and unjust equipment is being used. Expose the truth, change the attitude of the public, and if any in authority need to repent, may they do so quickly for their sake and for ours.