This chart shows “clone” registrations in one of New York’s counties. It is a small county, with about 85,000 total registrations. Of them, about 5,200 are “clones.” A “clone” is an excess registration assigned to an individual. For instance, one person with 25 state voter registration numbers. More often, there is only one clone per person, for a total of about 1.4 million statewide.
There are exceptions. There are some individuals with 8, 11, 18, 21, and more registrations each. In total, there are only a couple hundred of these, but the fact they exist is a serious problem.
In a recent public meeting, the NYS Board of Elections tried to explain clones away as people who happen to have the same name and birthdate, but are different people. That explanation is almost certainly true for some individuals, but I doubt it is a majority. The reason is that many of the clones, such as a man in Brooklyn who almost certainly doesn’t exist, has the same name, birthdate, and address for all 11 of his ID numbers. All were generated on the same two consecutive days in 2020.
The chart for this county, which I will not name in the spirit of amity with its commissioner, shows that the pace of clone record generation has rapidly accelerated in recent years. According to the commissioner, this is due to multiple sources of registration applications.
The explanation makes sense to a point, and may even be true from his perspective. However, the law requires data validation tools to prevent the creation of “duplicate” records with new ID numbers like the ones represented in the chart. Therefore, the explanation may be either true or partly true, but it doesn’t convert illegal registrations into legal ones.
If we look at these as innocent errors, this chart shows why our motor voter and new automatic registration methods are a total failure. The reason is that the more technology we have, the more methods we create to get people registered, and the more modern our technology becomes, the more corrupted the product is.
One side effect is that the mess created by this system makes it very easy to conceal fraudulent registrations, and I’ve found a few of those also.
At this point it would seem better to disregard the voter database altogether and instead require that people who come to vote in person on election day prove that they are citizens who have the legal ability to vote. Proper and sufficient identification should be able to be procured early in the year (like now). In fact, producing a legitimate voter ID should give the person a benefit, like 3% off his/her taxes for (only) the first year that individual shows his/her voter ID to the town clerk when paying taxes (which is probably the same place that person will later vote).
These "cloned" voters are also used as smurfs in the ActBlue money laundering campaign finance RICO Operation.