I have been working with a number of different groups for GOTV efforts for the 2021 VA Election, as as such I have been archiving and trending the Daily Absentee List (DAL) data files for a while now. One curious case that I’d love to get somebody at VA ELECT to explain, is why the set of (“Marked” +/or “Pre-Processed”) Ballots for GALAX City has suddenly been reduced to near zero.
As background, the DAL is effectively a transaction log of the status of all early and absentee ballots in VA. When a qualified voter requests a by-mail absentee ballot and it is sent to them a DAL record is created in an “Issued” state. Once it is received the record is updated to “Marked”, and once the ballot has been opened and scanned into a tabulator it is updated to “Pre-Processed”.
In the chart below we can see the number of issued ballots increasing, then decreasing as ballots are received and updated to “Marked” or “Pre-Processed”, but then suddenly (starting with the Oct 26th DAL files) we see the “MarkedOrPre” trace drop to near zero. The only line in this graph that I would ever expect to see decreasing is the number of outstanding “Issued” ballots. So … whats going on here?
