About Virginia's 130-Year-Old Voter(s)
EPEC Team asks: Why doesn't the voter database flag these impossibilities? Plus, more about Virginia residents with dual-state registrations and early voting numbers.
In this update from EPEC Team:
Stats on Turnout in Virginia’s Early Voting
About The Dual-State Voters on Virginia’s Registration List
Ageless, 130-Year-old Voters in Henrico County
1. Virginia’s marathon 45-day primary election early voting season is heading into its final week before Tuesday, June 18th Game Day voting.
(You can find your location here.)
Commonwealth voters will decide who will face Sen. Tim Kaine (D) in his re-election bid, and 11 congressional seats among many local races.
In the Republican primary early voting tallies, we see the following:
Countable: 45,929
That number combines early in-person “absentee” ballots and mail-in ballots processed for tabulation, plus military and overseas.
--Of the ballots yet to be processed in the Republican primary, the numbers break out as of June 7th:
42,613 – issued (ballot requested and sent)
19,512 – marked (received back from the voter)
7,417 -- pre-processed (ready for processing)
See the full chart outputting the Republican primary DAL summary numbers here
For the Democrat Primary DAL output as of June 7, the early vote balloting activity shows:
Countable: 74,666
That number combines early in-person “absentee” ballots and mail-in ballots processed for tabulation, plus military and overseas.
--Of the ballots yet to be processed, the numbers break out as of June 7th as:
81,399 – issued (ballot requested and sent)
37,113 – marked (received back from the voter)
18,361-- pre-processed (ready for election officers to process)
See the Democrat primary DAL output graph here.
Election officials are expecting a fairly low turnout on June 18th voting. That much is clear from the low-turnout tallies with one full week of early voting to go.
The numbers are consistent with Rick Naigle’s analysis of early voting turnout numbers from 2020 through 2023. The trends show Virginia’s early voters are casting a ballot in the last two weeks of early in-person voting.
See his full report here:
Find out where you can vote here.
2. About The Dual-State Voters on Virginia’s Registration List
Recent analysis by EPEC’s chief volunteer and technical lead, Jon Lareau, shows that 2,527 Virginia residents appear to be still registered to vote in Florida.
Cross-state registration is an ongoing issue with registrars and secretaries of states to maintain accurate voting rolls. Many states deploy National Change of Address databases maintained by the United States Postal Service to update their records, since many voters forget to tell registrars they are no longer registered to vote in the state they are leaving.
Lareau’s most recent analysis builds off his 2023 Levenshtein distance (LD) metric, which EPEC Team published in a visualization in here.
He writes in his recent blog post:
Building off of our previous work on computing the string distance between all possible pairs of registered voter records in a single state in order to identify potential matches, we’ve updated the code to allow for cross state comparisons. The first states that we ran this on was VA and FL, using the dataset produced by the FL Department of Elections on 05-07-2024, and the dataset from the VA department of elections dated 05-01-2024.
There were a total of 2,527 records that matched our constraints between the FL and VA datasets.
It should be noted that it is readily apparent from reviewing the potential matched records that the majority of these matches look to have originated in FL and then were subsequently moved to VA, but the FL record remained listed as active.
Most of them are found in the more populous localities, such as:
Fairfax: 410
Virginia Beach City: 248
Prince William County: 141
Chesapeake County: 139
Loudoun County: 107
Arlington County: 98
Chesterfield County: 89
Stafford County: 76
Richmond City: 46
Lareau has broken out the numbers by localities here. #
3. Who Knew? Henrico County has 130-Year-old Voter(s)
Rick Naigle of EPEC’s board of directors and senior data analyst is asking why one Virginia County has such an impressive record of longevity.
He has found that Henrico County has eight (8) registered voters who are older than the oldest known human, which, last we checked, is Maria Branyas Morera.
She clocked in at 117 years of age this year, according to the Guinness Book of World Records and is still believed to be among the living.
Henrico County has her beat — at least on its voter list. It shows voters over that age, including one who is 130 years old and still listed as active, according the Dept. of Elections’ most recent Registered Voter List.
Error, or Fraud?
Rick Naigle writes:
We presume innocence (error), but fraud is a possibility. These are simple fixes. But apparently they are not happening.
Each registration record must be audited to determine whether there is a Date of Birth (DOB) error, if root cause is Date of Birth input error, entry error, or…
Were they born in 1894? Or did an election official or a registrant born in 1994 “fat finger” the form in the Date of Birth field?
It’s more than one or two anomalies here.
Henrico County’s voter registration records show seven other voters over the age of 117. Six out of the seven are still listed as “active voters.”
“Active” means they have cast a ballot in at least one of the last two federal elections.
Possible explanations:
Registered voter Date of Birth error.
Extensive delay removing deceased voters from the Registered Voter List in combination with poor maintenance of Registered Voter List (might be failing to identify inactive voters)
Voter fraud.
EPEC Team volunteers, who promote election participation and education, are giving a charitable benefit of the doubt on this as we delve into the issue further.
But this many voters older than the world’s oldest human should raise red flags with registrars, electoral boards, and voters.
Inaccurate, outdated, and sloppy voter rolls combined with lax oversight of absentee ballot confirmation can damage trust and participation.
Date errors are the most common errors made in Virginia electoral process data, just like in many data-intensive environments. But they are also the easiest to prevent with proper controls that flag questionable entries.
Out of 133 Virginia Localities, 27 show voters on their Registered Voter List over 117 years of age.
This may be a combination of data input error and slow removal of deceased voters. How else to explain voters whose age is greater than 117 — and are still on active status?
Other age related errors noticed in the Registered Voter List:
19,846 Registered Voters Are Over Age 95.
18,148 are still Active.
108 voters on the Registered Voter List are under the voting age of 18. Only one appears to have voted illegally.
123 registered voters have no Last Name (the Last Name field is blank / null).
273 registered before the age of 15, and of these, 179 registered before they were born.
In addition, one hundred and twenty three (123) voters on the Virginia Registered Voter List have no entry in the [Last Name] field as of 1 March 2024. No data. Blank.
How does this happen?
The Registered Voter List software should force an entry in the [Last Name] field before the registration is accepted. This is easily accomplished.
The database administrator needs to make the [Last Name] field “mandatory.” This is a very simple data quality step. That would mean records cannot be created or edited until errors in mandatory fields have been corrected.
Electoral process errors erode public confidence in election outcomes. But database administrators can assure data quality to restore public confidence in Virginia electoral processes if they make the [Last Name] field a mandatory field.
Other issues of note from Naigle’s ongoing analysis of Virginia’s Primary Election:
Batch Processing of Mail-in Ballots?
By Batch Processing, EPEC Team is referring to voter file data that show absentee ballots were handled in mere fractions of seconds.
In the process of searching for ballot receipt dates, he found that many localities did not record the time they processed the ballot. Whether a by-mail absentee ballot, or early in-person ballot, ballot handlers should be recording the time it was processed.
“Every entry should be recording date and time,” he writes. “And so, basically, because they weren’t doing this, we found fractions of seconds instead of to the second” in the analysis of the process.
Generally, it takes a few minutes for election workers to inspect an absentee ballot and confirm if it’s legal. These ballots were processed into the system as fast as 18 per second — according to the records.
This has raised questions about what type of software is being applied to tabulate and process the ballots. So expect EPEC Team to continue reporting this out to ensure ballots are being handled according to statute and procedures. #
More news about Early Voting and voting trends to come in our next issue of EPEC Team.
And, one more time, here is a link to find your voting location before early voting ends on June 15th.
Until next issue of EPEC Team, that’s a wrap. #