The man who wants to kill vote-by-mail in Oregon contests May election result

That agency head, Ben Edtl, is a Tualatin-based political consultant who is also the chief petitioner for a 2026 ballot initiative that would end Oregon’s pioneering vote-by-mail system. Edtl, 47, is a rising player in the MAGA wing of the Oregon Republican Party.

He also runs the public transit agency in Douglas County. In April, he became the full-time CEO of the Umpqua Public Transportation District, which serves about 110,000 people in the state’s ninth-most-populous county.

In the May 20 election, races for five seats on the transit district’s board of directors were on the ballot, although only four were contested.

In all four of those races, a challenger defeated the incumbent, sweeping an election that Edtl says was a referendum on his leadership. His side lost.

Understandably, Edtl was displeased. More remarkably, he issued a June 30 letter to Douglas County Clerk Dan Loomis declaring that he and the incumbent board “find the circumstances surrounding this race deeply concerning and unacceptable.”

Typically, election officials say, the largest issue they might have to deal with after a closely contested election is a possible recount. But the result in the Umpqua transit district race that Edtl and his board are contesting — decided by 238 votes out of 10,102 cast — is far outside the margin of one-fifth of 1% that automatically triggers a recount.

To be clear, Edtl isn’t asking for a recount. He says he and his board simply won’t accept the result — nor, according to documents the Oregon Journalism Project obtained under a public records request, are they willing to pay for their agency’s share of the cost of the May election: $32,112.76.

In his letter, Edtl said he and the board were “expressly refusing certification” for one of the four election results “until and unless transparency is provided in alignment with federal law.”

Edtl’s stance has elections officials across the state scratching their heads. Several of them convened a July 7 conference call for a briefing on the situation in Douglas County.

Klamath County Clerk Rochelle Long, president of the Oregon Association of County Clerks, says Edtl’s strategy is novel. “I have never seen this happen before,” Long says.

Multnomah County Elections director Tim Scott is similarly nonplussed. “In 23 years of election administration, I have never seen a jurisdiction reject certification,” Scott says.

Edtl is playing both a short- and long-term game. In the short term, he’d very much like to keep his job. He sees contesting the election as his best hope of doing that. In the longer term, he wants to generate attention and support for his larger goal: undermining public confidence in and then overturning Oregon’s first-in-the-nation practice of conducting elections entirely by mail.

“Look, Douglas County is heavily Republican,” Edtl tells the Oregon Journalism Project. “What this election shows you is that Republicans cheat as well, and it shows those who have power use vote-by-mail to hold on to it.”

The candidate whose loss Edtl refuses to accept is Todd Vaughn. Vaughn, an incumbent, filed a petition for review of his race June 24 in Douglas County Circuit Court, saying he was contesting “illegal votes” and “nondeliberate and material error in the distribution of the official ballots by a local elections official.”

A logger and wildland firefighter, Vaughn didn’t offer any specifics, just his sense that he’d been wronged. “Having been significantly ahead in the election-day results, and then losing by an even larger number a week later, this election is considered suspect,” he wrote.

The backstory of the candidate who apparently defeated him, Natasha Atkinson, the CEO of Umpqua Homes, a Douglas County provider of housing for people with disabilities, may shed some light on the underlying dispute.

Last October, Atkinson resigned from the transit district’s board, telling Jefferson Public Radio that she’d been concerned about the takeover of the board by “America First Republicans.” The last straw, she said, was the board’s decision in September to hire Edtl, then a GOP legislative candidate for an Oregon House seat in Tualatin, as interim director. (Edtl, who ran a coffee company that failed during the pandemic, ran unsuccessfully for Portland metro area legislative seats in 2022 and 2024.)

Earlier in 2024, Edtl supported and advised Vaughn’s primary challenge to incumbent state Sen. David Brock Smith (R-Port Orford). Vaughn lost that race, but the bruising campaign raised Edtl’s profile in Southern Oregon, and brought him to the attention of the Umpqua transit district board on which Vaughn served. By Edtl’s own admission, his transit experience consisted of riding TriMet while growing up in Portland.

“If it was a functioning district … then I would say fine,” Atkinson told JPR about Edtl’s new job as CEO. “Like hiring somebody from outside of transportation land, that can sometimes lead to great innovations, right? But we’re not.” (The agency’s audited financials show it lost $1.1 million in 2024 on a budget of about $6 million.)

On April 21, a month before the May election, the transit board made Edtl’s appointment to the $130,000-a-year post permanent. “I’ve hired a lot of leaders in my private sector career, and Ben is no doubt the best hire I’ve made,” board vice chair John Estill said at the time. Edtl says he commuted from Tualatin once a week, and despite his lack of transit management experience, he brought the agency back from the brink of insolvency.

“We did a complete DOGE of the district,” he says. “We saved $600,000 on basic stuff.”

Edtl says, however, the May board election was a referendum on him — with board members who opposed his hiring now holding a 5–2 majority.

“They want me out,” Edtl says. “We’re having a board meeting on July 19, and I guarantee they are going to fire me.”

One of his two supporters on the transit board, Michaela Hammerson, is Edtl’s co-petitioner on the 2026 statewide ballot initiative to end vote-by-mail.

Edtl spoke to OJP from Washington, D.C., where he says he is meeting with national GOP groups interested in funding his anti-vote-by-mail initiative. “The Republican National Committee is on board, and the White House knows what we’re doing out here in Oregon,” Edtl says.

Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read oversees state elections. He’s watching the Douglas County situation with dismay. “In Oregon, we respect the will of the people, whether we agree with it or not. You don’t get to deny the results of an election just because you don’t like it,” Read says. “Our founders fought for our sacred right to vote, and a few financially motivated election deniers don’t get to disrespect Oregonians by refusing to accept their votes.”

In his June 30 letter to Loomis, the Douglas County clerk, denying election certification, Edtl tried to appeal to Loomis’ partisan loyalties.

“As one Republican to another, I want to note that our concerns are not isolated to this district,” Edtl wrote. His appeal fell on deaf ears.

“It was weird that he referenced that [party affiliation],” Loomis says. “It’s just a strange thing. If he’s looking for a favor, that’s just not going to happen.”

Loomis conferred with state elections officials about Edtl’s letter. In a June 30 email to Oregon Elections Division director Dena Dawson, Loomis explained the process his team followed in Douglas County.

“The ballot opening and counting process was conducted with full transparency and included numerous opportunities for observation and oversight,” Loomis wrote.

“This ensures public confidence and safeguards the integrity of the outcome. While it’s not unusual for a losing candidate to question the results, the facts are clear: The election was properly administered, thoroughly documented, and certified in accordance with the law.“

In a July 1 email to Secretary Read’s two top aides, Dawson wrote that Loomis followed all procedures correctly. “I reviewed the district’s justifications and Dan’s responses, and Dan is spot on at every turn, in my opinion,” Dawson wrote.

Loomis filed a point-by-point rebuttal of Vaughn and Edtl’s claims in Douglas County Circuit Court on July 2, asking the court to affirm the results of the May election. A ruling is expected soon. 

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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project (oregonjournalismproject.org), a nonprofit investigative newsroom for the state of Oregon.