When We Found Multiple Voter IDs
What EPEC Did All Summer with Voter Registration Analysis -- and where we are heading with our voter data and election systems analysis.
Welcome to the EPEC Team newsletter, a weekly report about our work as a Virginia-based, tech-focused coalition of volunteers for the charitable nonprofit, Electoral Process Education Corp. (EPEC.info & DigitalPollWatchers.org)
Each week we highlight some of that work to keep you up to date. With fall just around the corner, here’s a partial listing of What We Did All Summer.
Next Steps in EPEC’s Discovery of Questionable Registrations
The Labor Day holiday marks the unofficial end of Summer and helps kick election season into high gear. Virginia’s marathon 45 days of Early Voting starts on Friday, Sept. 22nd, 2023, culminating with the General Election on Nov. 7, 2023 to decide who will control the Commonwealth’s assembly.
According to the Dept. of Elections, September is also National Voter Registration Month. (See the tweet: https://twitter.com/vaELECT/status/1697580522493358346)
Your humble data analysts also think September is a perfect time for registrars to check their intake processes with voter records as new registrations come into the VERIS system.
Over the past two months, EPEC’s analysis has found that more than 90,000 voter registrations in the Commonwealth of Virginia may be dupes, or questionable “clones,” as we refer to the findings when we brief officials with the datasets.
These findings are from a months-long analysis of Registered Voter Lists (RVL) and Voter History Lists (VHL) by EPEC’s team of data analysts and volunteer coalition.
After checking — and checking some more — using extensive hardware and server systems led by EPEC’s chief technology officer, Jon Lareau, assisted by volunteer data analysts, our findings appear to show that state voter lists may contain more than 90,000 voter second, or “clone” registrations, as we call them.
(See the backstory and his full analysis here, here, here and here.)
That could mean that thousands of voters may be assigned more than one Voter ID.
What do we mean by “clones”?
For now, we use the term “clones” or simply “questionable registrations” for a very important reason. As a charitable nonprofit focused on voter participation, EPEC qualifies to receive voter lists from the Dept. of Elections. But EPEC does not have access to voters’ Social Security Numbers (SSN) in the lists we analyzed.
The Dept. of Elections and registrars across the Commonwealth do.
Only by checking SSNs and other key data points to confirm these multiple IDs will elections officials in Virginia be able to confirm if the extra Voter ID records that EPEC’s processing analysis discovered are truly extra Voter IDs. So far, they look like some people have more than one Voter ID. If so, those registrations would need to be merged so that citizens are assigned just one Voter ID.
Some background and methodology, by way of Lareau, who serves as executive director of EPEC in his personal time outside of his full-time job as a data scientist and technology executive.
Throughout the summer, Lareau has assembled some massive processing power — Big Iron — with which to apply unique algorithms to Virginia’s official voting records that look for exact matches of the voter’s full name and date of birth, for example. In other calculations, EPEC’s analysis also included variables such as gender and address to check for exact matches of voters that may have multiple Voter IDs.
Catch up on here for his recent findings & methodology on the DigitalPollWatchers.org blog.
As Lareau explains:
A potential “cloned” record is defined as a record in the VA Registered Voter List (RVL) where the Full Name (First + Middle + Last + Suffix) and full Date of Birth (mm/dd/yyyy) exactly matches another record but they have different Voter Identification Numbers.
He focused on Active registration records that had been identified as clones in his programming and analysis.
“However, even if a cloned record is marked as Inactive in the database, it still holds the potential to be voted as any interaction with the voter immediately moves the registration from Inactive to Active.”
That’s why his analysis includes both Active and Inactive records, which is a continuation of his exploratory analysis on the existence of “cloned” records in the VA Registered Voter List.
Distributions in Virginia’s Most Populated Counties
Rick Naigle, a member of the board of directors for EPEC and expert in process and data analysis (Six Sigma Black Belt) also finds that most of the “clones” of Voter IDs tend to involve two different Virginia Localities.
Did people move to another county and create a new voter ID by accident when they re-registered? Is there an over-ride feature in some of the registrars’ processes that may have allowed this? EPEC is checking on these questions. Stay tuned.
Naigle has identified 14 Localities across Virginia where most of “clones” are found. See the chart below:
The majority of the numbers are distributed across four of Virginia’s largest Localities: Fairfax County, Prince William County, Virginia Beach City, and Loudoun County. According to Naigle’s analysis, the questionable registrations in these localities represented 25% of the total questionable registrations EPEC found.
That would work out to more than 23,000 possible, extra voter registrations. Again, the “clones” need to be checked with data on voter records such as SSNs and drivers’ license information to confirm the matches are matches.
The ‘Motor Voter’ Correlation
We also find that, over time, the possible duplicates or “clones” tends to correlate with the advent of the National Voter Registration Act in 1993, commonly referred to as “MotorVoter.” Among its features, the statute requires elections officials to provide public updates on voter-maintenance and clean-up work on voter registration systems. He also finds a consistency with the potential for multiple registrations every two years, going back to 1962. Other trends in increases align with the arrival of the VERIS voter registration system in 2007. (See chart below.)
Speaking of which, Virginia’s new “Statewide Voter Registration System and Election Management System,” is slated to deliver a new and modernized version of VERIS by 2025.
According to the Statement of Work by contractor The Canton Group, training on database management techniques for the new system kicked off in July and August.
The new system is slated to provide ways to “measure of how ELECT and local election officials adopt and use SVRS…and the elimination of dependencies on existing election systems, and increased efficiency in the election management process.” Go Live date is listed as February 3, 202,5
Notes on EPEC’S Process and Voter Management
EPEC’s analysis of current voter registrations shows a “concentrated effort by various election integrity groups and public officials around the state of VA to clean up the voter rolls.”
For example, the “number of detected exact (Full Name + DOB) “clone” registration records in the VA Registered Voter List (RVL) file has decreased overall from 2022-11-23 to 2023-07-01.”
Per Lareau: “Specifically the VA Department of Elections (“ELECT”) made a concerted effort in early 2023 to remove and clean up a large number (~19,000) of deceased voters and other errant records.”
So although the unique intellectual property and datasets Lareau and EPEC have produced using with official Dept. of Elections data shows that these efforts have made an impact on the number of exact “clones” identified in the database, the findings also show there is still more work to do. #
* Editor’s note: EPEC is preparing to launch unique, value-added analysis services that would help groups that are qualified to receive voter data understand the trends with registrations and balloting operations.
Stay tuned while we put the finishing touches in place. For more information, send us an email at secretary@epec.info or go to epec.info.
2. Dates, Links, and Backstory for Volunteers & Training
Citizens, Digital Poll Watchers, Elections Officers, Volunteers, and Data Geeks:
Are you ready to assist in the democratic process for Virginia’s 45 days of voting?
If you want to get trained up and participate a good place to start would be your local General Registrars for training and times.
Virginia’s Dept. of Elections has a list of GR contacts here.
The Virginia Fair Elections coalition also has a Resources Page with relevant information about voting systems and how to get started.
—Virginia Fair Elections: https://vafairelections.org/resources/
—Training Videos are are here, which include:
Central Absentee Precinct (CAP) |
Election Officers and Poll Watchers
Working with the Registrar’s Office
Also good to review: Elections Day Guide for Elections Officers
If you need to update your registration, the Dept. of Elections website runs down the How-Tos here.
Dates for training on the legalities of voter registration are still available here.
Finally, a key deadline is today
After all the changes to the way we vote that happened in the Covid Election of 2020, the House Committee on Ways and Means has issued a Request for Information (RFI) to “understand and evaluate the activities of certain organizations that are tax-exempt under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Sections 501(c)(3) and Section 501(c)(4).”
For example, the committee is asking:
—Does the IRS’s current guidance on the definition of “political campaign intervention” properly account for new forms of political advocacy?
—Are there any tax-exempt organizations whose voter education or registration activities you suspect might have had the effect of favoring a candidate or group of candidates which would constitute prohibited participation or intervention? If yes, please describes those activities?
Full letter is here.
The deadline to respond with observations and suggestions is today, Sept. 4, 2023. Email: waysandmeansRFI@mail.house.gov.
That’s a wrap for now. Happy Labor Day! See you at the digital poll watching. #