The CEO of the Umpqua Public Transportation District in Douglas County has resigned. The district’s board approved Ben Edtl’s resignation on Monday. That’s after the Oregon Secretary of State’s office opened an investigation into the district over its response to the May election. As CEO, Edtl refused to accept the results of one of the races for a board seat and refused to pay for the district’s share of running the election. The first meeting of the new board ended abruptly after an argument sprang up between Edtl and newly elected board members.
Nigel Jaquiss has been covering this issue for the Oregon Journalism Project. He joins us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Elections for local transportation districts are not often high drama affairs. In fact, they’re the kind of races that voters might simply skip over on their way to filling in the circles for county commissioner, legislative seats or federal offices. But the Umpqua Public Transportation District in Douglas County is now at the center of a high stakes fight and longtime elections officials say they do not know of a precedent.
It all stems from the election in May when five seats in the transportation district were on the ballot. Four of the winners are now serving on the board, but the fifth has not been recognized. The race for that seat is being challenged in court, and the district has refused in recent weeks to pay the county for its share of the cost of running the election.
The Oregon Secretary of State’s office is now investigating all of this. Nigel Jaquiss has been writing about it for the Oregon Journalism Project, and he joins us now. It’s good to have you back on the show.
Nigel Jaquiss: Thanks for having me, Dave.
Miller: So before we get to the details – and there are a lot of them – why should this matter to people outside of Douglas County?
Jaquiss: Three of the principals involved in this dispute, Ben Edtl who was, until recently, the CEO of the Transportation District, his lawyer Stephen Joncus, and the most recent former chair of the board, Michaela Hammerson, are collectively the chief petitioners of a ballot measure aimed at the November 2026 ballot that seeks to end vote-by-mail. I think that is the very important subtext for this ongoing court dispute.
Miller: We’re gonna hear more about that, but let’s first understand the local dispute. Can you tell us a little bit about the Umpqua Transportation District and the community it serves?
Jaquiss: Absolutely. The Umpqua Transportation District serves Douglas County. The largest city is Roseburg. The district, as you said earlier, had an election in May. In many ways that election was about the continued leadership of Ben Edtl, a political consultant from Tualatin, who was the CEO of the district.
One seat, held by incumbent Todd Vaughn, showed on election night that Vaughn was slightly ahead of a former board member named Natasha Atkinson. Eight days later, when the second count was released, Atkinson was well ahead and appeared to be the winner. However, the board both refused to seat Atkinson and refused to pay for its share of the election. Those are both highly unusual, according to elections officials from around the state.
And thirdly, Vaughn then went to Douglas County Circuit Court and filed a petition for review, asking for a judge to look at the election result with the hope that result would be overturned and that Vaughn would keep his seat.
Miller: One of the things that the previous board did last year was hire Ben Edtl. Who is he?
Jaquiss: Ben Edtl has run a couple of times for the legislature in the metro area. Most recently, he ran for a seat that covers Tualatin and West Linn. He’s a Republican. He is an avowed MAGA conservative. He formerly ran a coffee company in Portland.
He got involved with Todd Vaughn, the member of the Transit District, last year. He helped Vaughn run in a contested primary on the South Coast for a Senate seat. And I think he formed an association with Vaughn and others on the Transit District board at that time. Earlier this year, they hired him as the Transit District CEO, although he didn’t have any prior transit experience or a great deal of relevant management experience.
Miller: That’s striking. I mean, just last week we talked to the new executive director, by chance, of the Transportation District in Clatsop County. He has been working in transit or related jobs for three decades now. But as you say, Ben Edtl didn’t have any of that kind of experience. Why did the previous board hire him?
Jaquiss: Well, it’s a little bit unclear. It appears that they were philosophically and politically aligned. Ben Edtl is a guy with a lot of energy and a lot of ideas, and he seemed to make an impression on some of the board members. Like transit districts all over this state and all over this country, the Umpqua Transit District is facing serious financial troubles both because of ridership that hasn’t bounced back post pandemic and now new federal funding challenges. So I think the board was looking for something different. And they certainly found something different in Ben Edtl.
Miller: What does it even mean for a transit agency to not certify a particular election? I thought that it was county election officials who do that for local races or the Secretary of State’s office which does that for statewide or federal elections.
Jaquiss: The reason that you and I and most reporters have never heard of it before is because it’s a pro forma step. When the election results, the final results, have been tabulated, the county elections clerk sends the results to the boards or government bodies that are holding an election. Their certification of that election is absolutely a pro forma step. We never hear about it because no other government that I’m aware of, in Oregon recent history, has said, “No, we don’t accept that.”
So, highly, highly unusual, as was their decision not to pay for their share of the election. It costs money to put on an election and typically that cost is shared pro-rata by the different government entities that have something on the ballot. But in this case, they both refused to certify and refused to pay. Now I should point out – and I’m talking too much, Dave – that the board, last night, reversed both of those decisions. They have agreed to pay in full and they have decided to certify the election result.
Miller: You mentioned briefly the tallies from the county election office. It is worth, without going into the percentages here, just saying what they were. Because they are at the heart of this issue it seems, or at least nominally at the heart of this issue.
So, in the preliminary reporting that the county released the day ballots were due, Todd Vaughn had a lead of 82 votes. That was with about 8,700 ballots counted. And then in the week that followed, the elections office counted about 50% more ballots, so a huge number of ballots were then added to the mix. And it was at that point that the office said that Natasha Atkinson had won by about 238 votes or about 1.3% points.
There are a lot of numbers there. But the point here is that the numbers changed in significant ways after many more ballots were counted. How common is that?
Jaquiss: In my experience, it’s very common. I’ve been covering politics for more than 25 years in this state and for all of that time we have regularly seen, on election night, that the candidate who leans more conservative is doing better. And as late votes come in, those late votes are very frequently skewed more progressive – and that’s what happened in this race. It’s not a partisan race, but Todd Vaughn was the more conservative candidate. Natasha Atkinson, the challenger, was the more progressive candidate.
Remember that not only can people turn in their ballot on election day, they only have to be postmarked by election day. So a lot of votes came in late. And sometimes we refer to that as the slacker vote, people who don’t vote until the very last minute. I’m one of them. Those votes often change the outcome of elections. And I should point out that we have a mandatory recount statute in this state. It’s at 0.25%. And 238 votes, which was the final margin, is not all that close. It doesn’t come anywhere close to the mandatory recount.
Miller: Right, percentage-wise, because there were so few votes total in this race, that’s five times higher than that mandatory recount threshold. What exactly is Vaughn alleging in this lawsuit?
Jaquiss: There have been a couple of iterations of his first complaint, his second complaint. He’s basically saying he doesn’t trust the results. He doesn’t really have any facts that he can point to and say, “well, this happened and that’s clearly not fair” or, “this person did this and that’s clearly not fair.” He just doesn’t trust the results. So there’s a hearing coming up on Friday. Douglas County is contesting his request for judicial review. And I think we’ll hear more about whatever fact he may allege at that time. And then there are motions due in coming weeks where both sides will have a chance to lay out their argument in full detail.
Miller: But in the meantime, as of last night, the second time that the new board met, they have voted to actually go forward with paying the county for their share of the election and to seat Natasha Atkinson.
Jaquiss: That’s correct. A third important thing that happened last night was the board accepted the resignation of Ben Edtl. Edtl resigned August 13. I think he said he would be willing to stay on for 90 days and I believe the board has said, “We’ll accept your resignation effective immediately.” So he is finished there. But he is far from finished in his larger endeavor, as I said earlier, which is trying to overturn vote-by-mail.
Miller: I want to play some audio from the second to most recent board meeting – a very contentious meeting. What we’re going to hear here is Ben Edtl, the CEO who had been silent for about 12 minutes into what turned into an under 20 minute meeting. This is where he decided he didn’t want to be silent anymore. His voice will be the first one we hear.
[Recording of the Umpqua Public Transportation District’s board meeting playing]
Ben Edtl: I’d like to advise the board on this. Monday’s … [Talking in background] I am the CEO and I have the right to be directly recognized.
Yeah, sorry … Excuse me. I would like to advise the board.
Board Member 1: No.
Edtl: No, no. I need … you need to hear what I have to say.
Board Member 1: You don’t speak unless we let you speak.
Edtl: That’s not true.
Board Member 1: That is.
Edtl: Is that the new rule?
Board Member 1: You are our employee, we’re not your employee.
Edtl: Right, but I can speak as the CEO at this public meeting.
Board Member 1: She didn’t ask you to speak.
Edtl: Sir, I’m sorry. Please listen.
Board Member 2: Ben, it’s the rule.
Edtl: No, please listen.
Board Member 2: So …
Edtl: This will be fast. You’ve already wasted enough time and everyone else’s time. I want you to understand something that you do not understand.
[Recording ends]
Miller: It was soon after that that some of the new members of the board walked out and then they came back to officially end the meeting. But as you noted, as of yesterday, the new members of the board did accept Ben Edtl’s resignation.
In a letter that Ben Edtl wrote to the Douglas County Clerk at the end of June, when he said his district was denying election certification, he wrote this: “As one Republican to another, I want to note that our concerns are not isolated to this district.” What was the clerk’s response?
Jaquiss: The clerk, Dan Loomis, did not like that. I think he did not like that invocation, if you will, of partisanship. He told me in an interview, this is not a partisan matter. This is a vote tabulation matter. He has strongly rejected the argument that the vote was, in any way, improper or that the outcome was, in any way, improper. So he and the county are defending themselves vigorously in court.
Miller: What did you hear either from Douglas County Clerk or other elections officials at county levels or at the state level about what’s at stake in this?
Jaquiss: Elections officials I spoke to, a number of them, firstly said they had never heard of a similar circumstance and they were quite shocked. Secondly, I think they and the Secretary of State’s office are concerned that, as you pointed out in your opening, this is one of many, many, many districts around the state. This is not the governor’s race or U.S. Senate race. It’s a small district race. And if people start rejecting the outcome of the election because they don’t like it, it sets a very dangerous precedent. It could undermine the integrity of elections or people’s willingness to believe in the outcome.
So I think that’s why you’ve seen Secretary of State Tobias Read get involved. I think that’s why his office is investigating. There’s really no evidence that anything untoward happened here. I think it would be bad for everyone if you just could say, “hey, I don’t like the way that came out. I’m not going to certify or acknowledge the outcome of that election,” regardless of whether it’s the Umpqua Transit District or any of many hundred special districts around the state, or a county, or a city, or a statewide election.
Miller: I want to go back to where you started. What are Ben Edtl and others trying to do in terms of getting rid of vote-by-mail in Oregon?
Jaquiss: For decades, really since the beginning of vote-by-mail, there have been some people who have just been really philosophically opposed to it. So you’ll see at every county fair, the group connected to this ballot measure, all over the state, trying to gather signatures. I have a feeling they’ll be successful in making the ballot because there are a lot of people, including the President of the United States, who said yesterday he is eager to end vote-by-mail – although he probably doesn’t have the authority to do so.
So I think it’s gonna be a hotly contested issue from now until November 2026. And I think we’ll be hearing a whole lot more about it in the interim.
Miller: Nigel, thanks very much.
Jaquiss: Thank you, Dave.
Miller: That’s Nigel Jaquiss. He’s a reporter for the Oregon Journalism Project and for Willamette Week.
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