I initially planned to release all of this after the 2022 midterms, thinking it would be a “safe” distance. But even the midterms were fraught with nonsense. This is the post I’d planned to do then.

If you wanna skip the words you can scroll through the picture scrapbook.

Thoughts

Fidelling with this data and being shocked at what I saw launched me into a reality-reshaping Borgesian dreamscape for the last 2 years (that seems difficult to wake from)…it is only made worse by everyone (on all sides of the argument) continually ignoring ONE simple question :

“Will some sane respectable authority PLEASE JUST EXPLAIN away the errors I see in this data, so I can stop incessantly thinking about it?".

It feels like one of those nightmares where you’re trying to save someone but no matter how loudly you yell, they cant hear you. No matter how fast you sprint/swim/fly toward their outstretched hand, they’re pulled farther away. One of those anxiety nightmares.

Instead of credible explanation, all of my previously trusted sources and institutions just repeated the same data-free platitudes with horrifying zombie like monotone. “Our elections are free and fair.” It was and continues to be INCREDIBLY disheartening, disappointing, and dissolutioning. During work and in free moments with family, it CONTINUED to nag at me.

“Why was there no credible person categorically walking through this and empirically debunking the allegations with undeniable data and evidence? Why wasnt ACTUAL data being presented to completely and finally annihilate the allegations?".

To make matters worse, there were tangentially related events that drew me reluctantly deeper into this Hitchcockian dreamscape… such as the post-inauguration resignation of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Bockvar, which I saw occur in real-time, just after having read the allegations made about how she made last-minute administrative changes to ballot security measures. Changes that (according to Pennsylvania law) are ONLY authorized to be performed by the legislature. Why didn’t she just make a public statement and explain it away to concerned people like myself so we could dismiss and quickly resume our lives.)

While still making sense of the above, there was more that kept adding more questions than answers such as Molly Ball’s now infamous article in Time Magazine. I thought, as I began reading it, surely someone will now procedurally debunk everything and clarify what I was seeing, and finally put to rest all these anomalies. Instead, it did the opposite.

Over the last 18 months muncipalities have quietly released findings that seem to corroborate the findings in the data…but without a clear and unequivocal explanation as to why.

As early as last week the Georgia Secretary of State (another controversial swing state frought with questionable events) explicitly admitted in a recorded broadcast on an obscure news network that hundreds of thousands of ballots were seen on closed-circut camera to be illegally “stuffed” in boxes during the Runoff Elections. This is the same Secretary of State (along with the Governor) that very vocally/nationally refuted suspicion of election issues in a now infamous recorded phone call with one of the 2020 general election candidates that was leaked to the Washington Post (a story that was stealth-edited later after the initial hysteria).

How is a rationally-minded person to interpret these events? Where was the evidence-based refutation of these issues?

I constantly tried to poke holes in my findings, and in some cases I was able to successfully disprove it myself (without help from authoritative figures unfortunately).

As an example: “over votes” occur when it appears that more people voted than were registered to vote. This is often decried as unrefutable evidence of fraud. I found evidence of this in some places (and more historical examples in states like Minnesota and Michigan), but after further investigation I found that this can legitimately happen without malfeasance. It happens in the same way that a TOCTOU or Use-After-Free vulnerability pattern arises in software. When a variable is assigned (in this case, the number of registered voters) by using the number of registered voters at the BEGINNING of the election season by assigning it based on the number of registered voters from the PREVIOUS election season WITHOUT first adding any of the new voters, late registrants, or the same-day-of-election registrants. When this is done, the addition of those newly registered voters can make the final total of valid votes to appear larger than the number of registered voters, since the “number of registered voters” was actually borrowed from the LAST election. This is how the “more votes than voters” (or “overvote”) complaint arises and why many incorrectly assume that this implies impropriety or fraud. It doesn’t always, but can in some cases. This “Overvote” example is not universally applicable to everywhere, it depends entirely on the same-day and “late voter” registration policies of the municipality in question.

Nuance like this matters in data science, computer science, finance, and accounting.

I digressed into this example (at the risk of readibility and brevity ;-) to provide an example of how thoroughly I attempted to discredit my own findings. In some minor cases, like this, I was able to concoct credible explanations and scenarios that explained some of the findings, but for the most part, questions remained.

For example:

If the DoB’s are simply a clerical error…

… then why were the ballots sent to the voter in the first place and why was the Application approved? What does it imply about the state of the voter rolls?

or

If the “ballot received” dates precede the “ballot sent” dates, maybe the voter simply obtained a DIFFERENT ballot some other way?

Perhaps, but if this is true, then what does it imply more broadly about the ease of access to multiple ballots?

or

Maybe all of these “anomalous” ballots were eventually invalidated in some later process?

Maybe, but where is that documented? “Ballot duplicate” or “ballot invalidated” seems like THE MOST important data to track (of all the tracked data) if that process is being performed.

Also, once a ballot is removed from the trackable identifying envelope, it becomes generic and anonymous. This is a good thing, it simulates the privacy of a voting booth to protect the sanctity of your secret ballot. But you can imagine what that does for tracking erroneous ballots once they’re unwrapped.

Regardless of what the answers may be as I thought critically about this, what is more concerening is that there is enough inefficiency in the process and ambiguity in the system that it isn’t clear to those who need to understand it most: the public.

Furthermore, what hasnt changed since December 2020 is that I had to do all this troubleshooting, ALONE. Why were there no authoritative sources (or those in elected office) providing reports or audit-logs or making public statements or holding Q&A to address these issues. At the time of writing, I have still found NO CREDIBLE or authoritative attempt at a detailed explanation that would address my broader findings let alone the few findings I have shared here.

If anyone can provide me with insights or demonstrate how this data or analysis is flawed, I would love to put this to bed.

I even shared this data with few colleagues in late 2020 and early 2021. Some of which dismissed this as clerical error or bureucratic oversight/incompetence.

“Have you been to the DMV lately man?".

As if to imply the inefficiencies of the DMV are also in the election system…yet it was not cause for concern. I tried to adopt this logic for a few days…but I just couldn’t. I eventually concluded that this was a false equivalency. Would we casually dismiss an inexplicable and wildly fluctuating bank account balance to benign “clerical error”? And if we did, would we then blindly trust that our bank balance would be truthful and accurate at a time of a large purchase? After a bank that reported an inexplicably fluctuating bank balance, could we trust that our regular deposits would clear with the correct amounts? Probably not.

Would we casually dismiss and tolerate a wildly fluctuating inaccurate credit report while ALSO attempting to be approved for a home loan? It seems only natural to corroborate and verify data when when that data is being used for pivotal decisionmaking.

I am open to ideas, explanations, or credible takedowns of the data and findings. I beg for it infact. No one wants to hold uncomfortable truths, they are cognitively-heavy and cumbersome, isolating, and demoralizing.

P.S. An Idea: Why dont we insist that all legislation and lawmakers use a public versioning system to “track changes” to legislation. Instead of backroom legislative changes we would get to see exactly who made which changes and when. We would see Speaker of the House make “pull requests”. We would see publication dates. When a 3000-page bill is first unveiled to House members a mere 8 hours before the vote on it, we, the citizens, would know it. When legislation moves “out of comittee”, it could be the software equivalent of a “release milestone”.

The Scrapbook

there are few clippings from now larger notebook.