Looking further into the VA Daily Absentee List there were 166 “valid” counted absentee ballots that had the application receipt date greater than the ballot receipt date, and 1,797,901 ballots where the application and ballot receipt dates were equal.
An absentee application needs to be received and validated, then an absentee ballot needs to be mailed to the applicant filled out and returned. The Daily Absentee List also does not seem to be accounting for In-Person “a.k.a. early” votes, as I’ve discussed here, so that does not seem to be a viable explanation. If the Daily Absentee List DOES include the in-person data than there needs to be a different explanation for the discrepancies that I noted in the link above between the Daily and Summary absentee lists and the JSON vote count tally. Update 2020-12-04: I can now confirm the daily list does contain In-Person early vote. The In-Person is likely a good explanation for the 1,797,901 number, but the 166 ballots received before the application is still problematic. Also, this leads to more questions as to why is there a discrepancy between the total counts on the Daily and Summary lists, as well as why do both not match the actual absentee recorded vote counts from the JSON data? I’ve also updated my other blog post on the excess vote with the details.
In MATLAB, after reading in the Daily Absentee List file to the ‘DailyAbsenteeList’ variable:
% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Get the indicies of those absentee ballots that have their status marked as being one of the valid categories.
% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
>> idxv = DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS==’Marked’ | DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS==’Pre-Processed’ | DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS==’On Machine’ | DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS==’FWAB’;
% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Next we check the dates for the ‘valid’ absentee ballots and perform the summations
% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
>> sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_RECIEPT_DATE(idxv) > DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_RECEIPT_DATE(idxv))
>> ans = 166
>> sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_RECIEPT_DATE(idxv) == DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_RECEIPT_DATE(idxv))
>> ans = 1797901