The more I dig, the more I am disturbed by the VA Department of Elections (a.k.a. “ELECT”) lack of data integrity and “data hygiene”. If any private citizen or company was as reckless and error prone with financial or other legal records, they’d be in jail and fined out of existence. And I’m being very very very generous as I am assuming “innocent” incompetence on the part of our elected officials and ELECT. (Although I’m not exactly sure which is worse … discovering that there is a hypothetical cabal of bad actors responsible behind the curtain, or that the vast majority of our elected officials are simply just incompetent, and the system as-is is unreliable.)
Many have been asking me for updates and status as to the various datasets I’ve been working on. Process is slow going, as I do this in my spare time, but progress IS being made. (With specific thanks to all of my peeps over at VFA on telegram who have stepped up to the plate in collecting machine tape transcriptions and images.)
I’ve previously posted on basic stats and other findings (here, here, here, here, here).
I have been working through all of the data and combined inputs from:
- the “2021 November General.csv” file, dated 2021-12-11_15:58:46
- the “Turnout-2021 November General.csv”, dated 12-12-2021
- the Daily Absentee List (DAL) File, downloaded on 2021-12-05_11:22:04
- images of the machine tapes, as available for verification and validation.
There is a whole lot of work left to do to digitize and transcribe the machine tapes and compare them to the results of the data as presented by ELECT. But even ignoring the machine tapes for the moment, we can see from the attached master spreadsheet that there are a NET 5,766 and ABSOLUTE 17,194 ballot accounting discrepancies between the various ELECT provided datasets for the 2021 Election.
| Columns L,M,N,O,P are derived from the “2021 November General.csv” file as of 12-11-2020 provided by VA ELECT on their website |
| Columns S-Y are derived from the “Turnout-2021 November General.csv” file as of 12-12-2021 provided by VA ELECT on their website |
| Columns Z-AP are derived from the Daily Absentee List (DAL) file provided by VA ELECT, downloaded 2021-12-05T11-22-04 |
| Columns H-K are generated from in person inspection of the machine tapes for each precinct |
| Columns E-G are the differences between the machine tapes and the sums reported in the (2021 November Genreal.csv” file |
| Column Q is the difference between the CAP precinct data reported in “2021 November General.csv” and the corresponding “Turnout-2021 November General.csv” or DAL derived data. For Rows with precinct == “## Provisional” : Q is the difference between column P and the sum of all of the column S for the corresponding precincts. For Rows with precinct == “## AB – Central Absentee Precinct” : Q is equal to column AM minus column P for both that row and the corresponding row of Post-Election-Day (PE) counts For Rows with precinct == “## EV – Central Absentee Precinct” : Q is equal to column AN minus column P |
| Column R is the absolute value of column Q |
Summing column Q (the net discrepancy) gives 5,766
Summing column R (the absolute discrepancy) gives 17,194
I stress again that this is based on data directly supplied by the VA Department of Elections. This is not based on estimates or approximations. There should be Zero (as in Zip, Zilch, Nada) discrepancies between their own distinct datasets that are supposed to be representing the same real world event (the election).