6K Mystery Voters on VA's Perm. Absentee List
We see approved records in VA's 'permanent absentee list' but no matching record in the Registered Voter List (RVL). What's going on here?
By Jon Lareau, Executive Director, Volunteer CTO, EPEC Team
Republished from Digital Poll Watchers blog:
Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)
Current analysis of the Comprehensive Absentee Application List (CAAL) from the Department of Elections shows at least 6,096 statewide records that are currently approved to receive absentee ballots, on a permanent basis, that do not have corresponding records existing in the Registered Voter List (RVL).
We are now in the early voting period for Virginia’s April 21, 2026 Special Election on redistricting. (We strongly urge you to vote, and to vote “NO” on the ballot question.)
Derivation, Methodology of Analysis
Prior to the start of early voting for the Special Election to amend Virginia’s constitution and allow redistricted congressional maps, EPEC Team purchased a fresh version of the Registered Voter List (“RVL”) and the Comprehensive Absentee Application List (“CAAL”) from the Department of Elections (“ELECT”). We also purchased the Voter History List (VHL) at the same time.
This gives us a full, temporally consistent, official dataset of all of these files direct from ELECT.
The CAAL encompasses the Permanent Absentee List (“PAL”) as well as those voters who have made non-recurring requests for absentee by-mail ballots. Upon examining the CAAL file, a couple of issues are easily observed.
First is that the CAAL, as we received it from ELECT, contains a number of duplicated records, with the only distinction being the APP_STATUS field.
Because there is no other distinguishing difference between rows that represent the same voter ID, it is impossible to know which row represents the current “status” of the voter ID being represented. There is no distinguishing transaction time stamp or other method to determine precedence of the records.
We don’t have any way of knowing which row entry came first; e.g., was John Q Public (in the table example below) first deemed to be “INCOMPLETE” then “DENIED,” and then John Q Public corrected his request and was “APPROVED”?
OR was he initially “APPROVED” by default, but then an issue was discovered by the General Registrar and he was deemed “INCOMPLETE,” with him finally getting “DENIED” because he didn’t correct the issue after a given time period?
There is no way to tell from the incomplete data provided by ELECT. (See example.)
So how do we make an inference as to whether a given voter with multiple conflicting records in the CAAL are “APPROVED” to receive mail in ballots or not?
Since we don’t know the temporal precedence, we could try and make a mathematical simplification / assumption that an APPROVED state can be cancelled out by any “non-approved” state; we then take the sum of any APPROVED state (with a value of +1) combined with any “non-approved” (with a value of -1) state for a given voter ID number that appears in the CAAL.
If the result is positive, we could consider the current state as being “approved.”
While that might be an appropriate way to interpret the data … a more conservative method is to only consider those records where there is no conflict in the APP_STATUS field.
For example: There is only a single row representing a given Voter ID number, and its status is “APPROVED.” This would assure us there is no confusion in the data (although it may be a significant under-count as to understanding the total numbers that are considered APPROVED by the state from the official record as provided).
If we take that second, more conservative, approach and then cross-correlate with the aforementioned RVL, which was purchased at the same time as the CAAL, we discover a second issue with the data from ELECT: 6,109 APPROVED records on the CAAL list of permanent absentee applications have no existing record in the RVL, the official list of voter registrations for the Commonwealth.
To be extra conservative in trying to interpret this data, if we further restrict this list to only those records that are “Permanent Absentee,” meaning they are signed up to automatically receive mail-in ballots every election in perpetuity, the number drops by 13 to 6,096.
That is … we see 6,096 statewide records (a very conservative estimate) that are currently approved to receive absentee ballots, on a permanent basis, that DO NOT HAVE CORRESPONDING RECORDS EXISTING in the Registered Voter List.
This is based on official data from ELECT.
All data was purchased at the same time from ELECT, so we have the most temporally consistent datasets possible to compare against.
Our analysis was extremely conservative in our interpretation of the data from ELECT, ignoring entries that could not be clearly interpreted or rectified. #
EPEC Team is following this finding and will continue to update on this issue.
Jon Lareau volunteers as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for EPEC Team and is the Executive Director. You can follow his posts on X here.
Track your locality, precinct, or city with Daily DAL summary data here.
Track Ballot Status and Early Voting Tallies from the DAL here.
More on Turnout and Estimates of Modeled Turnout in Our Next Report.
As one of the latest ads promoting a “no” vote on the maps says, this is no time to sit out an election. Find your polling place or check your registration here.
And get out to vote! #
I wonder how many on the permanent absentee list…have died.
So whats the next step? How do you try to get the 6000+ AB removed?