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This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit newsroom covering the state.
The legal battle in Douglas County Circuit Court over a disputed May election result took an unusual turn last week.
Following the filing last week of a second amended petition for review by plaintiff Todd Vaughn, Judge George Ambrosini abruptly recused himself. The judge did not cite a reason for the recusal, nor did he respond to OJP’s request for comment.
Vaughn claims he was the rightful winner of the May 20 election for a seat on the Umpqua Public Transportation District board. On Aug. 26, Vaughn filed a second amended petition alleging a wide-ranging conspiracy by “a cabal” of public officials in Douglas County, including state lawmakers and county commissioners. Ambrosini was not among those named.
Vaughn’s new petition contains a lengthy backstory about what he claims is an organized effort to keep him out of public office.
“[Douglas County Clerk] Dan Loomis has been actively working to make sure that I do not win elections,” the complaint says. “He and other elected officials have what I would call a cabal, to keep themselves in power.”
The 26-page document names Douglas County officials who Vaughn claims conspired against him. It also contains a number of speculative statements, such as: “After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, due to election fraud, Vaughn became seriously interested in politics.”
Vaughn says the “cabal” undermined his 2024 primary challenge of incumbent state Sen. David Brock Smith (R-Port Orford), which Vaughn lost, and further claims the cabal then sought to knock him off the board of the Umpqua Public Transportation District, which serves Douglas County.
“The cabal could not tolerate Vaughn and his colleagues having success as a
public official, so they ran a slate of candidates against Vaughn and several of his
colleagues,” Vaughn’s new petition claims.
Also included in Vaughn’s amended petition is an unsourced assertion that Oregon elections are crooked.
“According to a former military intelligence analyst, now election analyst, Douglas County is one of many Oregon counties that suffer from ‘strong/rampant fraud,’” the petition says, without offering any evidence or examples to support the claim, or the name of the “former military intelligence analyst.”
The underlying issue in the case is Vaughn’s loss to challenger Natasha Atkinson on May 20. Vaughn initially filed a petition for judicial review on June 24, asking the court to examine the election’s outcome. In that race, Vaughn, the incumbent, led Atkinson by 82 votes—about 1.1% of the votes then counted—on election night. But when Loomis announced the second and final count results eight days later, Atkinson had won by 238 votes, or 2.33%. (The threshold for an automatic recount is one fifth of 1%.)
County Clerk Loomis then sent the results to the transit board for certification, normally a routine step. But the board and then-district CEO Ben Edtl, who consulted on Vaughn’s 2024 Senate campaign, refused to certify the outcome or immediately pay the transit district’s share of election expenses.
Judge Ambrosini’s recusal, first reported by The News-Review in Roseburg, could slow the case down. The parties are currently battling over which documents the clerk’s office must produce for Vaughn and his attorney. The county is objecting to the extent of Vaughn’s requests.
“Vaughn’s discovery requests are not focused on resolving the specific claims in his amended petition but are instead part of a broader effort to obtain sensitive election data for political purposes,” John DiLorenzo, the county’s attorney, wrote in an Aug. 28 filing.
Those “political purposes” appear to be an effort to undermine confidence in Oregon’s vote-by-mail system by some of Vaughn’s allies, including his attorney.
Edtl, Vaughn’s former campaign consultant and the recently resigned CEO of the transit district, is a co-chief petitioner for Initiative Petition 37, which seeks to end vote by mail statewide. Edtl’s co-petitioners are Michaela Hammerson, an Umpqua transit board member who filed a declaration in support of Vaughn’s amended petition. The third co-petitioner on the ballot initiative is Stephen Yoncus, who is Vaughn’s attorney in the Douglas County case.
The End Vote By Mail political action committee hopes to capitalize on President Donald Trump’s disdain for mail voting. The campaign reports raising just $9,000 so far and has not turned in any signature sheets (it needs 156,231 valid voter signatures to qualify for the November 2026 ballot), but Edtl says he’s confident national funders will support the campaign.
On the county’s behalf, DiLorenzo took issue with the new petition.
“Vaughn claims to desire a restoration of trust in elections—while filling his filing with false accusations and baseless conspiracy theories intended to mislead the public into distrusting every election that goes against Vaughn’s preferred candidate,” DiLorenzo wrote.
“Vaughn’s third petition continues to fail to allege any ultimate facts supporting a cause under [election law] or identifying even a single voter or ballot defect that can corroborate his allegations. Instead, Vaughn’s latest petition and his response to this motion rest almost entirely on cryptic references to ‘cabals’ and ‘irregularities’ that are entirely speculative and irrelevant to the election at issue.”
The case is set for a hearing Sept. 16.
