Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF):
There are 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.
Derivation:
As we’re now in the early voting period for the VA April 21 2026 Special Election regarding the redistricting push (sidebar: we strongly urge you to vote, and to vote “NO” btw), we purchased a fresh version of the Registered Voter List (“RVL”) and the Comprehensive Absentee Application List (“CAAL”) from the department of elections, as well as a Voter History List (VHL), all at the same time.
This gives us a full, temporally consistent, official dataset of all of these files direct from the department of elections (“ELECT”).
The the CAAL encompasses the Permanent Absentee List (PAL) as well as those voters that have made non-recurring requests for absentee by mail ballots. Upon examining the CAAL file, there are a couple of issues that are easily observed.
The first issue observed 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. As 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. i.e. Was John Q Public in the table below first deemed to be “INCOMPLETE” then “DENIED”, and then John corrected his request and was “APPROVED”? OR was he initially “APPROVED” by default, but then an issue was discovered by the GR 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.
| ID | FIRST | MIDDLE | LAST | … | APP_STATUS |
| 12345 | John | Q | Public | … | APPROVED |
| 12345 | John | Q | Public | … | INCOMPLETE |
| 12345 | John | Q | Public | … | DENIED |
| … etc … |
So how do we make an inference as to if 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 a any “non-approved” state, and then we can 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. i.e. There is only a single row representing a given Voter ID number, and it’s status is “APPROVED”. This assures us that there is no confusion, although it may be a significant undercount 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. Namely, that there are a number of APPROVED records on the CAAL that have no existing record in the RVL. There are 6,109 of these, to be exact.
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 that they are signed up to automatically receive mail in ballots every election in perpetuity … the number drops (only by 13) to 6,096.
That is … There are 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 only official data from ELECT
- All data was purchased at the same exact 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.
