Category: Interesting

BLUF: Discovered 55,196 vote spike in Alexandria City absentee ballots with 0 (… as in … zilch, zip, nada) for Trump or Jorgensen sometime between 11:30pm 11/3/2020 and 01:00am 11/4/2020. Generated time series of VA per county election fingerprints, and cumulative vote counts. Data sources: VA Dept of Elections voter registration data by locality file, NYT Edison time series datafeed snapshots from wayback machine.

Introduction:

So I’m still puzzled by the shape of the per county election fingerprint in VA. Multiple scientists I’ve talked to and worked with on this are all scratching their heads as to what would explain the significant structures observed. As a reminder, the election fingerprint “should” look like one (maaaaybe two for a really split electorate) Gaussian lobes, without a lot of smearing, linear features or structures. They will of course not be perfect Gaussians, but we would expect them to be somewhat close. I go into the theory and details of generating these fingerprints here, and the VA per county data is replicated below as well. It does not look Gaussian at all and is by definition an “irregularity” in the election data.

For reference I show the MN plot below as well, which still shows some slight irregularities, but for the most part it looks very clean. It’s got a little bit of kurtotic energy in the tails, but it looks like a pretty well defined 2D Gaussian main lobe otherwise. It looks like it could even have two distribution centers: one distribution center for a large number of the smaller (presumably suburban + rural) localities that didn’t go for Biden, and much fewer (but more populous) larger localities that went just slightly above 50% for Biden. Both distribution centers had about 90% turnout. The MN data makes sense to me, and other data scientists that I’ve shown it too, and it doesn’t set off any blaring alarm bells. The VA data however, remains inexplicable.

So, in trying to decipher what happened in VA, I was interested in taking a look at how the election fingerprints for VA evolved over time. Does the whole structure move fairly uniformly from left to right as more turnout occurs? Does it look Gaussian at any point in the counting process and then shift? In order to attempt to do that I need the per county vote tallies over time and unfortunately I didn’t anticipate needing to do analysis like this before the election, and so I didn’t setup anything to capture the updates to the VA Dept of Elections site or the NYT Edison datafeed. I tried to do an after-the-fact FOIA request, but it has been denied by VA Dept of Elections stating that they do not keep those records.

However … thankfully, the wayback machine does have a few snapshots of the VA datafeed. Not nearly what I would like to be able to make a full sequence to watch how the fingerprint takes shape, but its better than nothing. And while we’re at it, lets keep our eye’s out for individual counties that have large vote swings and also have statistically improbable results for any candidate (> 95%).

The earliest data file I could find on the wayback machine was from 2020-11-04T04:06:57.160Z and shows results through 11:30pm on the 3rd. While thats not ideal, that at least starts us off while Trump was still ahead.

2020-11-04T04:06:57.160Z

We can already see our “boomerang” structure fairly well formed in this initial plot, and I didn’t find any individual counties that had a large update with over 95% Biden. (Now that doesn’t mean such updates didn’t happen before this snapshot, but since my snapshot sampling rate is so low, each update includes more than one set of batch updates, and specific outlier batches might be just getting rolled into the sums.)

2020-11-04T05:34:34.206Z

We can pretty clearly see that just after the last snapshot, right around midnight, there’s obviously some sort of issue that happened with the data, with a couple of really large bumps for Biden that end up getting reversed and reverted. I have no idea if there’s any specific event that this can be correlated to in news reporting, if this is a glitch in the NYT feed, etc. But it looks like this event occurred between the updates to the NYT datafeed that I could find on the wayback machine. So whatever it is that happened, it got baked into the cake already as far as this datafeed snapshot is concerned. (If anyone has the files for these timestamps, please share!)

In addition to that we see that we’ve had a noticeable shift in our fingerprint as it looks like more low-turnout areas have been shifted into the boomerang.

Whats really interesting to me is that there was one locality (Alexandria) that had a large change of 55,196 Biden votes and ZERO for Trump or Jorgensen votes in the near hour and a half since the previous data points. From the data, it looks like these were all absentee votes, which we admittedly expect to be a higher turnout percentage for Biden … but 100% of such a large sample size … c’mon man! According to VA Dept of Elections, the absentee vote in Alexandria broke overall 84.78% (55,940 / 65,985) for Biden and 13.57% (8,951 / 65,985) for Trump. Now we know the underlying distribution is not I.I.D., so we should not expect exactly 13.57% of this batch to have gone for Trump, but we would still expect at the very least a small handful of this batch should have been for Trump. Additionally, this batch of absentee ballots makes up 83.65% of Biden’s total absentee haul, meaning Tump must have received 8,951 / (65,985 – 55,196) = 82.96% of ALL the remaining absentee votes in Alexandria, which also seems pretty unlikely.

2020-11-05T02:45:04.745Z and Beyond

After the previous batch there aren’t any more large outliers at least that I caught. But I only have a few snapshots from the wayback machine to work with. We see the remaining straggler counties start to shift to underneath the “boomerang”. If there was a point in time where the data was looking like a 2D Gaussian, it was before the first snapshot that I was able to find and get my hands on.

Complete Galleries Below:

See also my previous election fingerprint blog posts here, and here. There is another, related, discrepancy in the Daily Absentee List data that I document here.

Originally Posted 2020-12-01 10:58:00 (Multiple Updates)

After computing the VA election fingerprints which clearly indicate that more investigation is required into the 2020 VA vote data, I took a look at the official VA daily absentee ballot count file and compared it with the JSON reports from VA dept of elections.  The JSON data provides a summary total of the votes recorded at each virtual absentee precinct, and the daily absentee list (here) gives all of the absentee ballot registrations for each precinct. For each (virtual) absentee precinct in a locality I summed all of the daily absentee numbers from component real precincts in order to compare those numbers with the reported total absentee votes. If everything has been tallied and recorded correctly they should be equal, or at least close.

I then compute the “excess absentee vote” by taking the difference of the number of total absentee votes reported in each virtual absentee precinct minus the cumulative (‘Marked’ + ‘Pre-Processed’ + ‘OnMachine’ + ‘FWAB’) numbers for the absentee precinct.  

I finally plotted the “excess absentee” vote totals vs the % of the absentee precinct vote that went for Biden.  Ideally we would like to see excess absentee vote == 0, meaning that the daily absentee reports and the number of absentee ballots that were counted in each virtual precinct match perfectly.  (I’ll give you a hint … they don’t.)

Outstanding Question: Is there a description document someplace where the BALLOT_STATUS (‘Marked’, etc) meanings are described.  I’m using my best guess as to which categories map to valid ballots, and I’d like to double check that.

Each dot in the plot above represents one of the virtual absentee precincts across the commonwealth. Unsurprisingly, we can clearly see that as the number of excess absentee votes increases more of the absentee vote totals go to Biden. Summing over all of the excess votes, there were 1,334,968 excess absentee votes across VA in the 2020 election using this method. Where did these 1,334,968 votes come from? (See latest updates below)

All source data comes directly from the VA Dept of Elections. My tabulated results are posted below. I welcome any / all peer review and will gladly make my code and compiled datasets available.

Note: Removed incorrect files ... see updates below

Update 2020-12-01 19:30:00

In discussions with The Virginia Project and others that have been churning and burning through this data, there was a question as to weather or not the Daily Absentee Tally dataset (which is available to campaigns by request from the dept of elections), which is what I used above includes the In-Person early vote. My understanding is that the early vote was treated the same as No Excuse Absentee, so early vote numbers *should* be included in the Daily Absentee Tally dataset. But it looks like that might not be true. The JSON files published by VA dept of elections only give the sum totals per candidate per precinct (including absentee precincts), and I used the Daily Absentee Tally dataset to map how many absentee (and early votes) should correspond to each precinct.

However, there is another dataset that I was pointed to that could be a useful comparison and way to compute the missing numbers: that is the Summary Absentee Dataset located here. This dataset DOES contain the In-Person early vote absentee totals (‘ApplicationType’ == ‘In Person’), but it is only generated per absentee counting precinct and not mapped back to the voters physical precinct. It does however break down the Absentee votes per age group, gender, and type of absentee ballot … which is nice … but not what I’m looking for at the moment.

So, we have two datasets, both summaries of the absentee vote numbers with different breakdowns, that *should* sum to give the same totals. Surprise … they don’t. Why? Unknown. The ‘In Person’ vote not being included in the Daily tally does not reconcile the numbers between the two datasets, though.

The plot I generated above, redone with this other dataset is shown below. I’ve included new csv files with the additional data (I’ve labeled as “_V2”). The excess votes per absentee district are similarly computed as the totalVote reported by each absentee precinct (from the JSON files) minus the sum count of all of the Absentee/Mail-In numbers from the Summary Absentee Dataset for that absentee precinct. This new plot does not show positive excess votes, but instead shows negative excess votes, with higher negative excess votes also showing higher Biden total vote percentage. I don’t know which one is correct, but both seem to show high positive / negative excess vote numbers that align with higher Biden percent of the vote. Summing over all of the negative excess votes gives -121,049 votes that are unaccounted for.

One additional question I have is how to tease out the rejection rate of Absentee/Mail-In votes, which might be a contributing factor for both plots. Are the numbers in the Daily or Summary absentee stats files before or after rejection? I have so far not been able to find a dataset that captures the rejection rates for Absentee/Main-In ballots.

Note: Removed incorrect files ... see updates below

Update 2020-12-04 02:00:00

So I’ve been able to confirm that the Daily Absentee List DOES, in fact, contain the In-Person “early” votes. I did this by finding my name and address in the list as I voted early on Oct 26th. The early votes are the ones marked as “On Machine”. I will also note that the date reported for my early vote was incorrectly set to Oct 28th (I voted on the 26th), which is why I had difficulty finding it at first.

So this means that:

1. My first plot above *should* be correct in its computation of the “excess absentee vote”. Save for a fat finger bug in my code (I’m in the process of double-checking, btw).
2. The Summary Absentee count does not match the totals from the Daily Absentee List. Why?
3. If the Daily list is correct, and the excess vote is computed correctly above in the first plot, then how to account for the 1,334,968 excess votes?

Update 2020-12-06 00:05:00

I have revised my previously computed excess vote number of 185,713 to 1,334,968 due to finding some “fat finger” errors, and idiosyncrasies with the DAL file.

Yes, I know … thats a really big number! I’m going back over my code again to see where / if I screwed something up. I will continue to update if I find anything else.

I’ve also taken the time to clean up the plots, both with and without annotations as to which precincts were the most egregious offenders.

Update 2020-12-10 23:12:00

Happy to report that I found a logical bug in my code.  I was subtracting PreProcessed ballots when I should have been adding when computing the excess vote with the DAL data (D’Oh!).  It’s a simple bug, but produces a big difference.  Result is a much smaller order of magnitude difference in the excess vote numbers, and a much more believable excess vote tally.
This line of code:

>> abCntVotes(j) = tdata.marked(j) + tdata.onMachine(j) - tdata.preProcessed(j) + tdata.fwab(j) ;

Should have read:  

>> abCntVotes(j) = tdata.marked(j) + tdata.onMachine(j) + tdata.preProcessed(j) + tdata.fwab(j) ;

That’s the good news.

The first bit of bad news is that the Summary Absentee List (SAL) still doesn’t make much sense, as discussed in my 2020-12-01 update above.  The other bad news is there are two absentee precincts that still stick out like a sore thumb from the DAL derived excess vote numbers. Guess which ones they are … PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY (11) and PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY (1)!  PWC district 1 and 11 are both waaay outside the standard deviation on the plot below.  Another curious fact is that we see the deviation on the Biden precincts (blue) looks markedly higher than the deviation in the Trump precincts (red)

Now if we look at the summary totals of the PWC absentee precincts we see that the sum of the negative excess absentee counts of district 1 and 10, are almost a perfect complement of the district 11 excess count (far right column).  That’s also curious.  By itself I’d call that just a coincidence, but combined with the fact that PWC 11 and 01 are also so outside the general trends of all other precincts in the plot above that gets my worry beads out.

Per discussion with PWC staff, there was apparently an error in reporting election data that got caught and corrected where all absentee votes were being sent to the district 01 absentee precinct, so this might be an artifact of that issue.

Additionally, and this is something we see in all of the precinct data and in the JSON data itself.  The JSON data files directly report the Trump, Jorgensen and Biden vote totals, as well as the ‘totalVotes’ numbers. The ‘sumVotes’ column below is the sum of the Trump, Jorgensen and Biden votes which should equal the ‘totalVotes’ column, but it doesn’t.  It’s not usually a dramatic difference, but its a difference all the same.

Again, per discussion with PWC staff, the ‘totalVotes’ numbers reported by the Dept. of Elections JSON data feed includes items such as overvotes / undervotes / unmarked ballots, which count for turnout reasons, but don’t get attributed to a specific candidate.

localityStr	precinctStr	Nreg	Donald J. Trump	Jo Jorgensen	Joseph R. Biden	sumVotes	totalVotes	issued	marked	onMachine	cancelled	deleted	fwab	late	notIssued	preProcessed	provisional	unmarked	absenteeVotesSum	excessAbsenteeVotes
PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY	# AB – Central Absentee Precinct (01)	115475	22720	781	46939	70440	70721	2590	3371	47143	0	6106	62	0	3	21449	0	91	72025	-1304
PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY	# AB – Central Absentee Precinct (10)	45383	10588	443	21371	32402	32525	968	1443	22543	0	2954	14	0	0	8842	1	42	32842	-317
PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY	# AB – Central Absentee Precinct (11)	106455	19579	782	46040	66401	66683	3303	3228	40443	0	5626	52	0	0	21338	0	111	65061	1622

So taking all of the above into account, and assuming that PWC 11 and 01 are artifacts of a data entry error, using the DAL and the JSON vote tallies we see that there is a good bit, but not extreme amounts, of variation in the “excess vote” and that the deviations in excess vote seems greater in blue precincts than in red precincts.

The SAL data still does not agree with the JSON or the DAL data files, and I’m still working to figure out why.

My tabulated results are posted below. Note that I do not include the raw DAL data in my results below, only my summarized results, as the raw data contains personal address information. I welcome any / all peer review and will gladly make my code and compiled datasets available.

Update 2020-12-13 17:44:00

Per twitter comment, looking at the data with normalized x-axis (as percent of absentee vote total) in order to compensate for different precinct sizes produces the plot below. Newport News City and Richmond County now also stand out, and we still see a difference in deviation of excess votes between Biden precincts and Trump precincts.

Discovered today that my county PWC, VA uses the HART voting machine systems and I have been doing a little research. Right now I’m just seeing what I can find and verify and collecting them on this page.

Biggest Find:

I found a very recent paper (2019) discussing and demonstrating methods by which to hack all of the major brand voting machines that use ballot images. It’s effective enough to be able to defeat any ballot image recounts as well. It’s a fairly simple man-in-the-middle attack vector, which needs to only install a wrapper around the windows scanner driver for the scanning systems. … and given all of these systems are using unencrypted(!) USB sticks(!!), thats pretty easy to do!!!

The wrapped adversarial payload can use some standard “textbook” (… no really … I own multiple textbooks that reference them) image processing tricks to selectively switch where the voter has marked the ballot in the image as its scanned, keeping the voters handwriting and style intact. The user sees their vote recorded, but the ballot image is altered before its recorded or counted. And auditing, or recounting from ballot images just recounts the swapped image. With a well designed and deterministic coding of this attack, re-running the same ballots through the scanner to perform a recount just re-applies the same deterministic conversion to the stored ballot images, and hence the recount stays the same. It’s a pretty devilishly elegant attack vector.

Now I’m not saying that that took place in the election, but it is a direct example of a pretty scary scenario and a working example.

Other Finds:

Article on VA audit process, and why it can’t possibly affect the 2020 results. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/politics/elections/virginia-election-audit-happens-after-results-are-certified-a-state-law-renders-the-election-check-powerless-to-fix-mistakes/65-cbfa162c-63fb-49c3-b298-cf84af01fc9d

HART Verity Systems Administrator Guide: https://sos.idaho.gov/elect/clerk/Hart/Verity2/6641-011%20A_Verity_2.X_Administrators%20Guide_Central.pdf

Feb 5 2016 PWC Elections Board Meeting Agenda discussing Acquisition of HART systems: https://sos.idaho.gov/elect/clerk/Hart/Verity2/6641-011%20A_Verity_2.X_Administrators%20Guide_Central.pdf

Romney Financial Ties to HART (from 2012): https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/10/20/romney-family-investment-ties-to-voting-machine-company-that-could-decide-the-election-causes-concern/?sh=5cba429e1afa

Another follow-the-money story from 2019: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/government-news/2019/07/whos-behind-voting-machine-makers-money-of-unclear-origins/

NBC Jan 2020 Story on Voting Machine makers testifying before congress: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/voting-machine-makers-face-questions-house-lawmakers-more-remain-n1113181

2018 Story on Vulnerabilities of multiple Voting Machines: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/10/20/romney-family-investment-ties-to-voting-machine-company-that-could-decide-the-election-causes-concern/?sh=5cba429e1afa

Whistleblower detailing HART shady business practices (2008): https://www.wired.com/2008/03/whistleblower-v/

HART Systems Security Issues (2006): https://hovav.net/ucsd/papers/ttbr-hart.html

Computing the VA 2020 Senate Election data time series from the NYT Edison data feed. This is direct from the NYT data feed without any processing.

source: https://static01.nyt.com/elections-assets/2020/data/api/2020-11-03/race-page/virginia/senate.json

Computing the VA 2020 Presidential Election data time series from the NYT Edison data feed. This is direct from the NYT data feed without any processing.

source: https://static01.nyt.com/elections-assets/2020/data/api/2020-11-03/race-page/virginia/president.json

Adding onto the work I’ve already done looking at the VA Daily Absentee List I wanted to compute the rejection rate for absentee ballots and some other basic statistics just from the Daily Absentee Ballot List (DAL) produced by VA Dept of Elections. (https://www.elections.virginia.gov/candidatepac-info/client-services/)

Keep in mind I’ve already been able to show:

• There were 166 Absentee Ballot Applications that were received and accepted AFTER the corresponding ballot was received or accepted (here).
• There is a discrepancy in the number of “excess” absentee votes counted vs. the total accepted registrations from the Daily Absentee List (here).
• The 2020 VA election fingerprints, as well as other states, have significant structural irregularities and indications of vote manipulation (here).
• The VA election fingerprints show a trend of increasing irregularity starting with 2008, 2012, 2016 and now 2020 (here).

Basic Info:

There are 3335335 entries, with 36 columns in the Daily Absentee List.

The column headings are: ELECTION_NAME, LOCALITY_CODE, LOCALITY_NAME, PRECINCT_CODE, PRECINCT_NAME, LAST_NAME, FIRST_NAME, MIDDLE_NAME, SUFFIX, ADDRESS_LINE_1, ADDRESS_LINE_2, ADDRESS_LINE_3, CITY, STATE, ZIP, COUNTRY, INTERNATIONAL, EMAIL_ADDRESS, FAX, VOTER_TYPE, ONGOING, APP_RECIEPT_DATE, APP_STATUS, BALLOT_RECEIPT_DATE, BALLOT_STATUS, identification_number, PROTECTED, CONG_CODE_VALUE, STSENATE_CODE_VALUE, STHOUSE_CODE_VALUE, AB_ADDRESS_LINE_1, AB_ADDRESS_LINE_2, AB_ADDRESS_LINE_3, AB_CITY, AB_STATE, AB_ZIP

Computing the Absentee Ballot Rejection Rate:

So (in MATLAB), with the full list directly imported into the ‘DailyAbsenteeList’ table variable:

% Lets see if we can teas out the rejection rate for 
% absentee ballots
>> ineligable = DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS == "Denied/Not Eligible";
>> incomplete = DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS == "Denied/Incomplete";
>> rejectionRate = 100 * mean(ineligable | incomplete)
>> ans = 0.0425

RESULT: The absentee ballot rejection rate was an exceptionally low 0.0425%

Finding the Counted ballots:

As we did in the “excess vote” computation, we need to find the indices into the list of all of the ballots that were counted, meaning their BALLOT_STATUS is in one of the following states: {‘On Machine’, ‘Marked’, ‘Pre-Processed’, ‘FWAB’}. So the ‘idxv’ variable below is a boolean flag indicating that the BALLOT_STATUS of each entry in the list is in a countable state.

% For each entry in the Daily Absentee List, test if 
% BALLOT_STATUS is in a valid state 
>> idxv = DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='Marked' | ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='Pre-Processed' | ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='On Machine' | ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='FWAB';

Now one would think that if a ballot has been marked into one of those BALLOT_STATUS categories, then that ballot application should have been ‘Approved’, right? Well lets double check that shall we:

% For each entry in the Daily Absentee List, test if 
% BALLOT_STATUS is in a valid state AND APP_STATUS is set to 
% 'Approved'.  (One would think these would match.)
>> idxav = (DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='Marked' | ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='Pre-Processed' | ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='On Machine' | ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='FWAB') & ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='Approved';

We can check for mismatches by counting the number of flags that are not equal between ‘idxv’ and ‘idxav’.

% How many absentee ballots have their BALLOT_STATUS set to 
% a valid (i.e. "countable") state, but are not marked as 
% 'Approved'
>> numUnapprovedButCountableVotes = sum(idxv)-sum(idxav)
>> ans = 1437

RESULT: There are 1437 entries that have BALLOT_STATUS set to a valid state, but don’t have an approved absentee ballot application

Well … this begs some follow up questions…

Q1: Of the ballots that have been set to a valid BALLOT_STATUS state but were not set to ‘Approved’, what is the breakdown by APP_STATUS?

>> cancelled = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='Cancelled or Duplicate' & (idxv~=idxav))
>> deniedInc = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='Denied/Incomplete' & (idxv~=idxav))
>> deniedIne = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='Denied/Not Eligible' & (idxv~=idxav))
>> issued = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='Issued' & (idxv~=idxav))
>> onHold = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='On Hold' & (idxv~=idxav))
>> pending = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='Pending Approval' & (idxv~=idxav))
>> provisional = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS=='Provisional' & (idxv~=idxav))

RESULTS: Of the 1437 ballots that were in a countable state but not marked as having APP_STATUS=’Accepted’, their APP_STATUS was:
cancelled = 444
deniedInc = 568
deniedIne = 4
issued = 28
onHold = 101
pending = 288
provisional = 4

Q2: Of the ballots that have been set to a valid BALLOT_STATUS state but were not set to ‘Approved’, what is the breakdown by BALLOT_STATUS?

>> unapproved_mailIn = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='Marked' & ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS~='Approved')
>> unapproved_preProcessed = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='Pre-Processed' & ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS~='Approved')
>> unapproved_earlyInPerson = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='On Machine' & ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS~='Approved')
>> unapproved_FWAB = sum(DailyAbsenteeList.BALLOT_STATUS=='FWAB' & ...
    DailyAbsenteeList.APP_STATUS~='Approved')

RESULTS: Of the 1437 ballots that were in a countable state but not marked as having APP_STATUS=’Accepted’, their BALLOT_STATUS was:
unapproved_MailIn (‘Marked’) = 512
unapproved_preProcessed (‘Pre-Processed’) = 578
unapproved_earlyInPerson (‘On Machine’) = 347
unapproved_FWAB (‘FWAB’) = 0

Checking for duplicate identities:

Another check we can do is try to determine the amount of duplicated voters that have been accepted.

% What about the possibility of the same person being marked 
% with multiple ballots?  We will now go through 
% the'Accepted' and countable ballots and
% look for duplicate names and address information.
>> idxvs = find(idxav);
>> fnames = cellstr(DailyAbsenteeList.FIRST_NAME(idxvs));
>> lnames = cellstr(DailyAbsenteeList.LAST_NAME(idxvs));
>> mnames = cellstr(DailyAbsenteeList.MIDDLE_NAME(idxvs));
>> sffx = cellstr(DailyAbsenteeList.SUFFIX(idxvs));
>> addy1 = cellstr(DailyAbsenteeList.ADDRESS_LINE_1(idxvs));
>> addy2 = cellstr(num2str(DailyAbsenteeList.ADDRESS_LINE_2(idxvs)));
>> addy3 = cellstr(num2str(DailyAbsenteeList.ADDRESS_LINE_3(idxvs)));
>> zips = cellstr(num2str(DailyAbsenteeList.ZIP(idxvs)));
>> addy2 = strrep(strrep(addy2,'NaN',''),' ','');
>> addy3 = strrep(strrep(addy3,'NaN',''),' ','');
>> zips = strrep(strrep(zips,'NaN',''),' ','');
>> namesAndAddys = join([fnames, mnames, lnames, sffx, addy1, addy2, addy3, zips]);
>> [unames,unr,uni] = unique(namesAndAddys);
>> duplicateVotes = numel(namesAndAddys) - numel(unames)
>> ans = 166

RESULT: The number of repeated accepted absentee ballots is 166 … now where have we seen that number pop up before … ahhhh yes … its the same number of ballots that have ballot applications that we received and accepted AFTER the actual ballot was accepted and cast!

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

My first pass at looking at the data was to simply plot the cumulative changes for Biden and Trump. Blue is Biden, red is Trump below. This is just simply summing the non-NaN entries in the ‘TotalVotes’ column associated with when the ‘BallotName’ column contains either ‘Trump’ or ‘Biden’. More to come. Just a cursory look at the raw data for right now as I get to know the dataset. Trying to make sure I understand what this dataset is and isn’t representing.

Changelog data is available here.

% import changelog into variable ‘data’

>> t = zeros(size(data,1));
>> ti = contains(data.BallotName, ‘Trump’);
>> t(ti) = str2double(data.TotalVotes(ti));
>> t(isnan(t)) = 0;
>> b = zeros(size(data,1));
>> bi = contains(data.BallotName, ‘Biden’);
>> b(bi) = str2double(data.TotalVotes(bi));
>> b(isnan(b)) = 0;
>> plot(cumsum([b,t])); title(‘Cumulative Vote Changes Per Candidate’); grid on; grid minor;

MATLAB Source Code

Updated 19:17 2021-08-03

See also my post on “excess” absentee votes in VA here.

I’m going to keep my previous blog page Statistical Detection of Election Irregularities:2020 updated with the Nitty-Gritty details of processing these fingerprints. This page I’m just going to post the latest results that I have for each state, and let the data speak for itself.

As a reminder and summary, according to the published methods in the National Academy of Sciences paper (here), an ideal “fair” election should look like one or two (depending on how split the electorate is) clean, centered (as in symmetrical) Gaussian distributions (or “bulls-eye’s”). Other structural artifacts, while not conclusive, are evidence and indicators of election irregularities. An election irregularity with a known cause is that of a directional streaking, which implies an incremental fraud. Another known and attributed irregularity is that of large distinct peaks in near 100% votes for the winner (the vertical axis) that are disconnected from the main lobe which the authors label a sign of “extreme fraud”.

I welcome any and all independent reviews or assistance in making and double checking these results, and will gladly provide all collated source data and MATLAB code to anyone who is interested.

Bottom Line Up Front:

None of the states election fingerprints I’ve done are perfect, but PA, WI and VA stand out as having significant irregularities. FL, GA, MI, NY and TX I’d still label as deserving scrutiny as they show significant non-Gaussian structures. MN, and NC all have imperfections, but no major structural irregularities. MN look to be the cleanest distributions of all so far.

One really interesting aspect of the analysis I’ve been doing is to look at the trend over time of VA between 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 as the per county fingerprint has shifted from a much more “fair” distribution to one that has distinct structural artifacts indicative of election manipulation. And no, this change isn’t a sign of changing demographics … mathematically that would just move the centroid of the “bulls-eye” and not impose such significant structural irregularities. The VA historical data seems to confirm the hypothesis that these irregularities have been increasing over the years.

FL (by County):

GA (by County):

MI (by County):

MN (by County):

NC (by County):

NY (by County):

PA (by County):

PA (by County, In Person Only):

PA (by County, Mail-In Only):

TX (by County):

TX (by County, Early Vote Only):

TX (by County, In Person Vote Only);

VA (by County):

VA 2016, 2012, 2008 (by County) for comparison:

VA (by Precint):

VA 2016, 2012, 2008 (by Precinct) for comparison:

WI (by County):

Updated 19:17 2021-08-03

See also my post on “excess” absentee votes in VA here.

Note: that I’ve made a new blog post that is just the latest results by state and doesn’t have the play-by-play commentary. I’ll still update this blog with the technical details, but if you just want the latest results see here.

So as some of you know I’m a data guy … and I’ve been crunching some numbers on the election using standard statistical techniques for identifying the signs of election irregularities, and there are a LOT of signs.  The techniques I’m using are as published by the National Academy of Sciences in a 2012 paper titled “Statistical Detection of Systemic Election Irregularities” and cited over 188 times, at least according to google.  (https://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16469). Note that I am not the author of the original paper. I have attempted to contact the authors but have not yet heard back from them.

These methods are not conclusive, but they can be indicative, and they use standard and robust statistical methods that are well understood on the raw data as provided by election operators. For each voting location (County/Precinct/etc) one only needs to collect the following:

• Number of actual votes for each candidate in a location
• The total count of votes cast in the location can be computed as the sum of votes for all the candidates.
• Number of registered or valid votes possible in the location.

Bottom Line Up Front:

None of the states election fingerprints I’ve done are perfect, but PA, WI and VA stand out as having significant irregularities. FL, MI, GA, NY and TX I’d still label as deserving scrutiny as they show significant non-Gaussian structures. MN, and NC all have imperfections, but no major structural irregularities. MN looks to be the cleanest of all so far.

One really interesting aspect of the analysis I’ve been doing is to look at the trend over time of VA between 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020 as the per county fingerprint has shifted from a much more “fair” distribution to one that has distinct structural artifacts indicative of election manipulation. And no, this change isn’t a sign of changing demographics … mathematically that would just move the centroid of the “bulls-eye” and not impose such significant structural irregularities. The VA historical data seems to confirm the hypothesis that these irregularities have been increasing over the years.

The Theory:

The theory behind this technique is based on looking at how Gaussian (a.k.a. a symmetric “Bell Curve”) the 2D histogram of the (% Voter Turnout) Vs. (% Voted for Winner) looks.  This “Election Fingerprint” is computed directly from the reported returns and the published voter registration data from each County or Precinct.  The graphic below is extracted from the original authors paper, and we can see the difference between “ideal” elections and the data for some specific cases.  The actual data is on the left, with the “ideal” model on the right.  The top 3 rows are from elections that are assumed to be manipulated.  The bottom row (from Switzerland) is assumed to have been a fair election. We can see that Switzerland’s data matches the model fairly well, while the other 3 show significant deviations.  So … bottom line … we are looking to verify that the election fingerprints have a symmetric, clean Gaussian “blob”. The presence of of other structured patterns by definition show irregularity. Some (but not all), of these structured patterns are well-known indicators of specific types of fraud: Streaking away from the main lobe in one direction indicates “incremental fraud” or a.k.a “ballot stuffing” at a statistical rate; Voter turnout of over 100% is a red flag and a sign of “extreme fraud”. Etc.

The Data:

So I’ve only had time to get through a few states so far. My biggest challenge is collecting all the data … if you know of a central archive of machine readable data that I could access I’d appreciate it!. For most of the ones I’ve done so far, the most granular I’ve been able to get is at the county level, except for VA where I’ve been able to get to the precinct level. Let’s start first with PA and compare with the Russia ’11 or Russia ’12 Data as presented above.  All data has been gathered from either official state-owned elections data repositories, or from scraping the CNN elections returns data map.

I will happily make all source data and code available to any interested parties.

PENNSYLVANIA:

(Note: This analysis is incorrect and has been updated below, but is kept here for historical purposes.) We see the same streak moving up and to the right, which according to the authors is indicative, but not conclusive, of incremental Fraud (aka “ballot stuffing”) where ballots are taken away from both the non-voters and the opposition and added to the winners at a certain statistical rate.  Note that the authors have labeled the sharp peak at (100,100) in the Russia plots above as indicative of extreme Fraud, or that almost all votes have been taken away from non-voters or the opposition.  PA definitely has signs of incremental fraud looking at the image I computed below, but does not show a telltale peak of extreme fraud.

PA UPDATE 10:45pm, Nov 14th

I’ve been able to get an updated machine readable dataset from the PA Dept of elections (here), instead of plugging things in by hand as well as finding and fixing a few significant errors in my code that I think might have been responsible for the above plot shape (I had flipped the place of two variables in my code! … this is why I’d love for someone else to review this work and help me find typos and mistakes!). The PA dataset was the first one I did, so I also wanted to go back and revisit it to clean up the code to make use some of the modular improvements I did with subsequent runs.

With this new dataset from the PA Dept. of Elections I also have the ability to separate out the In-Person, Mail-In and Provisional vote tallies per county per candidate.

So lets dive in, shall we …

Right off the bat there’s some numerical inconsistencies in a few of the counties data. The data set from PA dept of elections provides: In-Person, Mail-In, Provisional and a TotalVote count for each candidate. There are three counties where the sum of (Mail-In + In-Person + Provisional) doesn’t equal TotalVote : Montour, Northumberland and Potter. They are small differences … only a few hundred votes max … but still, they are tabulated below.

	diff Biden	diff Trump	diff Jo
Montour	4	8	1
Northumberland	216	485	13
Potter	30	99	1

The in-person data by itself has an odd “boomerang” shape, which is a bit confusing and definitely irregular, but its not associated with either the “incremental fraud” or “extreme fraud” cases that are called out in the PNAS paper. It’s irregular and somewhat eyebrow raising, but not super indicative of one of the known major fraud categories.

The Mail-In data in PA however … well thats another story! The mail in ballots clearly show the “up-and-to-the-right” kurtotic streak called out in the paper as an indicator of incremental fraud (“ballot stuffing”) as discussed above.

There really aren’t that many provisional ballots total compared to In-Person and Mail-In, so they all line up just above the 0 % voter turnout when looking at them in isolation. There looks to be a centered distribution with a peak around the 30% vertical mark, and then a big spike at 100%.

And now putting everything together (using the reported total vote data and not the sum of the three) we get the following completed fingerprint. The distribution has a definite kurtotic tail spreading upwards from the central lobe, and a single lone datapoint at (60,80).

Update 2020-11-20 17:08

Found another set of (small) issues in the PA data.

In Crawford County PA, there are 314 more votes for Trump, and 557 for Biden being reported that the sum of (Mail-In + In Person + Provisional) that were recorded. (“excess votes”)

In Jefferson County PA, there were 29 excess Trump votes and 32 excess Biden votes.

I’m using the latest data direct from PA Dept of elections: https://www.electionreturns.pa.gov/api/ElectionReturn/GetCountyBreak?officeId=1&districtId=1&methodName=GetCountyBreak&electionid=undefined&electiontype=undefined&isactive=undefined&fbclid=IwAR1RZB5pDIs2JSX4u-Xv_0K1OyWJCu2mpc_Xq3uHbw8ZGCeU5bw_oEY6dN4

Next up, MICHIGAN:

So MI doesn’t have nearly the distinct (+,+) kurtotic tail that PA has in the Mail-In data, but there is a definite “kink” in the distribution where it looks like its been bent into a smaller boomerang, but this time with one wing of the boomerang pointing upper right and the other pointing down. It’s also got some distinct salt-and-pepper artifacts and clustering above the main lobe. Keep in mind the theory is that the ideal “fair” election fingerprint would look like a symmetrical Gaussian lobe, according to the National Academy of Sciences paper. And again this method and analysis cannot provide conclusive evidence, but it can provide indicative evidence of election irregularities. Also note that this data is from AFTER the computer “glitches” were caught in Antrim and Wayne counties and corrected. (I think Wayne was the other one if memory serves.)

FLORIDA:

This looks fairly clean, with a solid bimodal distribution, and no diagonal skew. i.e. the % Voter turnout was fairly consistent, but there is a distinct partisan split (not too many people left in the middle I guess). However, there still is a kurtotic vertical “squiggly” tail for Biden, which isn’t a very strong indicator of election irregularities, but it is a deviation from the ideal “fair” (clean + symmetric lobes). It’s not nearly the red flag of a large diagonal skew (indicating incremental fraud), or a separate sharp disconnected peak at the [100,100] cell (indicative of extreme fraud), or many units with extremely high turnout disconnected from the main lobe.

NEW YORK:

Like FL, I’m not quite sure what to make of this one, as it has a nice centered lobe, but this odd kurtotic tail going up and to the left. (towards lower turnout % and higher Biden vote %) There is no delineation between absentee / in-person votes in this data. Its just a histogram of turnout (via absentee OR in-person) % vs. votes % for Biden in NY counties. Now it could be that there is ALSO a correlation between lower turnout and higher absentee ballots returns, and that absentee ballots were skewed towards Biden. But I don’t have the data to check that.

Update @ 1045pm Nov 14th:

Given that I was able to break out and decompose the new PA data that showed a similar looking combined distribution, I’d be interested to see if the NY data has the same indicators of incremental fraud in one of its components like Mail-In or In-Person ballots, but I don’t have a dataset that breaks that out.

MINNESOTA:

Minnesota has a slightly kurtotic vertical smear in the tails, but other than that, it looks like a nice, centered Gaussian distribution.

TEXAS:

Texas data looks noisy but it does have a well defined centroid and little sharp linear features. It does have some “salt-n-pepper” data-points that are smeared in the vertical. With Texas data we also have the ability to break out the mail in and in person votes, which while also noisy, don’t show any extreme structural features.

WISCONSIN:

WI analysis updated 2021-08-03, See HERE: https://digitalpollwatchers.org/new-wi-2020-election-fingerprints/

NORTH CAROLINA

GEORGIA

VIRGINIA (note there are multiple updates below):

Whoa buddy … what the heck is going on here!?!?! We’ve got a number of precincts with over 100% turnout, and some wacky distribution shapes and none of them even remotely approaching Gaussian!
The VA plot is just bonkers and I’m currently going back and checking my work. I am not sure what to make of the VA data. I’ve included the per precinct plots and per county below, but am currently double checking my work.
VA is the only state so far where I’ve been able to:
A – get per precinct data vs per county and
B – download the raw data directly from VA dept of elections (they publish json files per precinct) without having to hand-jam into a machine readable format.

VA Update (12:33am 11/13/2020):

I did find an error in how I was matching precinct names of the list of registered voters per precinct up with precinct vote counts. VA provides the registered voter count per precinct in a global JSON file and the vote tallies of precincts are provided 1 JSON file per county with multiple records per precinct. The challenge comes in that some precincts span multiple counties.

Another issue with the VA data is that absentee ballots for counties are counted centrally and the central counting facility is considered its own precinct, but there is no assigned count of registered voters for each absentee tallying facility, which are also split by VA congressional district. So if two counties straddle a congressional district, each county will have an absentee vote counting precinct listed for that district. The vote data is tallied by precincts, that each fall within a district, for which we have registration data on. So I have to compute the number of ‘residual’ registered voters that should be assigned to the absentee precincts for each county by summing the differences between registered voters and total votes for all of the other precincts in the county in the same district. (i.e. every in-person vote shouldn’t be considered as eligible to also vote absentee). It’s a record keeping pain, but its doable.

I additionally needed to fix some parsing functions, and issues between the two data sources (the registration files and vote records from VA secretary of state) that were treating ‘-‘ characters and spaces inconsistently, etc.

Ok … so all that’s now fixed … but VA still looks just bonkers at both the aggregate county and at the precinct level! The county level data doesn’t resemble Gaussian at all, and the precinct level has another large “boomerang” with one wing going upwards and another down and to the right. I still don’t know what to make of that, but its enough for me to say that it looks irregular and should therefore be investigated very very closely.

There were 153 precincts in VA … mostly county-wide absentee counting facilities … that had extreme voter Turnout (below 2% or above 98%). These can be seen on the far left and right of the per precinct graph. Now, again, that’s not necessarily conclusive of fraud, but it is a hyuuuuge red flag even though we had COVID to deal with. Especially since some of the turnout percentages are as high as 358%! The registration data I pulled from the VA dept of elections is dated 11/1, so it should presumably be including all registrations (absentee or otherwise) up until that point.

Three. Hundred. Fifty. Eight. Percent! That is statistically unbelievable even for a highly contested election. I’m going back and triple and quadruple checking again that I haven’t missed anything in the parsing of the data from VA dept of elections, I’ll update this page again if I find any more fat finger mistakes on my end.

VA Update (12:45pm 11/14/2020):

Horray! The sky is not falling in VA! … just some very dark and menacing storm clouds …

After having a couple of other independent looks at the data from two other stats-minded people, I discovered there was a nasty little bug in my “residual” registration number computations that was causing the residual registration numbers to be undercounted, and therefore the turnout numbers to be overestimated in the absentee districts. So thats a relief!

However … that doesn’t change the “boomerang” look to the per-precinct fingerprint or the fact that the per-county fingerprint is oddly shaped. So good news is the sky is not falling in VA … bad news is that it still looks like it might!

Update 2020-11-24 09:30:

I finally got all the data together to do the 2016, 2012 and 2008 VA Elections as well for comparison…

2016 VA fingerprint shows two clear distribution centers with fairly nominal looking tails that don’t have a ton of structure (but still some). Given how polarizing 2016 was, two distribution centers is not surprising. One centroid is above the 50% line for Trump. The other (presumably for Clinton) is below. (Yup … found and fixed another parser bug and updated the images below.)

Both the 2016 and 2020 show a single distribution centroid with a highly directional set of smeared tails. 2012 looks a little less smeared, and 2008 looks even better and is approaching a Gaussian. So, over the last 4 presidential elections the plots for VA have gone from being fairly symmetric and Gaussian (but not quite), to being waaaaay smeared with linear artifacts.

Side by Side (Use Slider): 2008 to 2020

VA (2020) Per Precinct:

I am also generating plots for each individual county at the per precinct level. I care particularly about PWC as thats where I live … and with the correction above we can see below that the in-person vote has a fairly steady ~15% turnout number, but is smeared in the vertical. The 3 congressional absentee precincts for the county can be seen off in their own little cluster at around (65,70). What I’d really like to be able to do is “unwrap” the absentee ballot data from being grouped into congressional districts and instead have those numbers be included in the real precinct counts, but I don’t think thats possible given the data that VA dept of elections has made available.

Gallery of every VA county’s per precinct data is below: