The Case for Election Data & Donors
An update for donors and partners about EPEC Team's new services, unique results, and latest issues in the 2023 VA general election.
In this issue:
Why Your Work on Election Security Matters
EPEC’s New Subscription Service, and New Sections
Latest Election Findings, and the Case for EPEC’s Donors
Before our weekly update on the General Election in Virginia, some preamble:
Question: How did we get to a place in America where fewer than half (44%) of Americans of all political views tell pollsters they are confident the next presidential election will be counted fairly or accurately?
How did our media landscape become so warped with ideology that voters and citizens who express concerns, or volunteer to serve as observers, are attacked as “election deniers”? Or worse, blamed for that low confidence — merely because they questioned some very questionable results in key swing states?
The plain fact is, 2020’s massive shift to no-excuse absentee ballots, and an expansion of voting days in many states, using outdated voter registration systems and ill-prepared staff to manage them, exerted tremendous pressure on already over-stretched election systems and staff.
Even today, some 15 million mail in ballots are still unaccounted for from the 2020 election. These are clear and demonstrable facts for anyone who has taken an objective look at the election systems data and truly believes in trusted elections.
This is one among many reasons we launched Electoral Process Education Corp., or EPEC Voter Data.
The U.S. Census data info graphic shows below the scale of the shift to mail-in ballots between 2016 and 2020.
Our answers for these questions was to form the nonprofit, non-partisan charity, EPEC (Electoral Process Education Corp.) and get to work building trust in elections.
EPEC’s New Subscription Service, and New Sections are Live
As EPEC’s Jon Lareau noted recently, in some three years of looking at official datasets from the Department of Elections, he has yet to find an official dataset that reconciles accurately.
EPEC uses hard data from official datasets to document what works, and what clearly does not in our election networks. We identify problems in an election ecosystem that has to manage overlapping processes and platforms, overlapping vendors, and shifting legislative demands. We document and research best practices.
EPEC’s mission is to provide data, analysis, and education that enable Election Security and Election Integrity teams to promote voter participation.
To that end, we are proud to announce new sections and data analysis services to support that mission:
EPEC MVP Data Analysis Subscription Services
Where the unique intellectual property developed by EPEC is applied to datasets for value-added analysis on elections management. This is for qualified partners.
EPEC’s Resources Page
Where we compile a menu of Presentations, Visualizations, Daily DAL analysis, Links we curate, and Videos to extend our educational mission. Let us know what you think!
EPEC Impact Page
Where we offer a menu of results we have achieved in just a year of promoting voter participation through transparency in election technology systems. It’s a work in progress…
Election Guidance + FOIA Library
Where we compile publicly available documentation about election systems, and are building out an EPEC Knowledge Library of our publications and findings. We consider this a public service to Virginia, for starters.
Check out the links and let us know what you think! #
Latest Election Findings, and the Case for EPEC’s Donors
In the meantime, our volunteer coalition is documenting the following issues:
Poll watchers and election volunteers have found that precinct information for Virginia State Senate, and Virginia State House races are missing the proper information.
EPEC’s senior analyst and board member, Rick Naigle, has identified ballots being cast outside of their correct House and Senate districts by locality.
In Loudoun County, voters that were supposed to be assigned to a new district are listed in a precinct that is outside of the voting jurisdiction in which they reside.
The Dept. of Elections has yet to acknowledge nor fully explain why, on Oct. 5th, the voting data plummeted, then came back up again in a few days. Are all the ballots accounted for?
Our analysis of the [Daily Absentee List] DAL shows a large number of UNMARKED + UNDELIVERABLE records, as well as the continued mystery of vanishing DAL records. We will be updating these findings in more detail in the next issues of EPEC Team publications. Stay tuned.
That’s in addition to our current findings, which include:
--Thousands of Virginia voters appear to be assigned multiple voter IDs, following a months-long EPEC analysis of voter lists. (See our interactive data here.)
--Many of the Voter ID “matches” that EPEC has researched appear to have voted more than once. We have asked Elections officials to check our findings.
--EPEC’s analysis of 2022 absentee voting results show that military absentee ballots are more than twice as likely to fail tabulation than the general voting population’s failure rate. See more in our Resources section.
--After comparing Virginia’s voting lists with the National Change of Address database, EPEC found more than 5,000 addresses in the official registered voter list (RVL) voters which cast ballots in the 2022 general election without a recognized valid address. See more in our Resources section.
--EPEC found a difference of over 66,000 discrepancies between the Dept. of Election’s official results and the results on its Website from the 2022 General Election. See our interactive visualization of the data here.
These are some of the reasons we formed EPEC. We seek to partner with elections officials, and a coalition of citizens of all political views working to build out election security infrastructure and find ways to measure improvements in election systems.
With your help, we can continue working toward accurate voting records that build trust in election results and are a true reflection of the will of the people. We are grateful to the volunteers whose time and expertise make this possible.
If you would like to make a donation to help us get closer to our funding goal for data purchases, or our funding goal for hardware and server maintenance, check out our donation page. We have more to share with our donors in the days to come.
You can make a one-time donation here or send out a check to:
Mailing Address:
Electoral Process Education Corp.
9480 Main Street
Suite 1128
Fairfax, VA 22031
Thanks for forwarding to groups who might want to benefit the EPEC story.
That’s a wrap for this week’s EPEC Team Newsletter. Until the next update, see you at Digital Pollwatching. #