VA 2024: Incompatible By-Mail Voting Data
If [Ballot Status] = "Issued," Then [Ballot Receipt Date] = (must be blank). EPEC Senior Analyst Rick Naigle explains why this matters to accurate results in elections.
More than 4.5 million ballots were cast in Virginia's 2024 General Election, and over 400,000 were cast by mail-in ballot, according to the Department of Elections.
EPEC Team has been producing results of its voter-data analysis of ballot-status management during the 2024 General Election, which includes early voting (Daily Absentee List) and Election Day summary data.
Ballot statuses are key to understanding the process of all ballots during an election.
In many instances in the 2024 election, EPEC Team analysts observed ballots that were in two states at once: "issued" (mailed out) and "approved" (ready for mailing).
A Received Ballot Should No Longer Be In ‘Issued’ Status
When a voter mails a ballot back to election officials, the election officials should record the receipt date in the Daily Absentee List [Ballot Receipt Date] field, and update the [Ballot Status] field from “Issued” to one of the following:
“Pre-Processed," ”Marked,” “FWAB,” “Unmarked,” or “Late.”
During the 2024 election, twenty-one (21) Localities had entries where Application Status = Approved, Ballot Status = Issued, and the Ballot Receipt Date field had a date entry. Virginia Beach led the Commonwealth of Virginia with 37 instances of Status / Ballot Receipt Date incompatibility. Fairfax County took 2nd Place with 21 instances (see table below).
What Causes the Error?
We do not know.
If we look at Virginia Beach, which had the largest number of questionable Ballot Receipt Date entries, the entries were made over a relatively short period of time, between 25 October and 31 October. Twenty-six of the entries were recorded as having been received on 29 October. Is this human error, or was it a problem with VERIS, the election support software?
We surmised it MIGHT have been a data input error. Could an election official have entered the App Receipt Date into the Ballot Receipt Date field, instead of the App Receipt Date field? Interestingly enough, with Virginia Beach the App Receipt Date field entries exactly matched the Ballot Receipt Date entries for the 37 ballots in question (see below). Could that have happened elsewhere?
Could that explain what happened? Did someone erroneously make an entry in the Ballot Receipt Date field when the entry should have been made in the App Receipt Date field? If they made the error, did they try to correct the error by updating the App Receipt Date field?
We looked at 2nd Place Fairfax County. What we saw was completely different. None of the App Receipt Date fields matched the associated Ballot Receipt Date fields.
What gives?
One thing is certain. The individuals who made the entries in Virginia Beach, and individuals who made the entries in Fairfax County, did not follow the same process.
We looked to see if the entries made by other Localities resembled the Virginia Beach table (all App Receipt Dates matched Ballot Receipt Dates), or the Fairfax County table (none of the dates matched).
We observed a mixture. Alexandria City, Albemarle County, York County, Montgomery County, and Chesapeake City all had one or more exact matches.
Roanoke City, Lynchburg City, and Harrisonburg City had one exact match, with all other entries having unmatched dates.
We are not sure why we see what we see, but the existence of two variations is evidence that a standard process is not defined, or — if defined — is not being implemented in the same manner as all Localities in the Commonwealth.
Many of these issues can be addressed with added software logic for data fields when a ballot is returned to a Locality’s registrar to process for tabulation. #
Rick Naigle is Senior Data Analyst and Board Member of EPEC.
See more about his process analysis of election systems here:
One of the sentences may be a bit confusing. We talked about ballots in Approved and Issued Status. Approved Status is associated with requesting a ballot. The application (request for a ballot) must be approved before a ballot will be provided (Issued).
To clarify:
Approval is the first step in the voting process. Voters submit an application to vote. All voting applications must be "approved" before a ballot can be issued.
The next step is voting. The registrar provides a ballot to the voter, CONDITIONAL on the application to vote having been approved.
The voter marks the ballot and returns it to the registrar. The registrar acknowledges custody by making an entry in the "Ballot Receipt Date" field, and then updates the ballot status from Issued to one of the received Status entries, thereby showing the current status of the ballot - is it countable, does it need cure, or was it received too late to be counted.
If the ballot is Issues, it should be still "out" ... the voter should be in possession of the ballot, not an election official.