The first discovery

Altered certified vote counts

If you want to know who New York’s Board of Elections certified as the winner of any given election, you can go to their website. For the 2020 election results, follow this link. Almost two years ago, on August 15, 2021, that’s what I did. The document I downloaded was the first document I looked at in my quest to understand how Biden emerged as the winner in an election he appeared to have lost.

Later that same week, I posted the ballot count totals for each county to the America’s First Audit New York (AFANY) telegram chat page. One of the people there contacted me shortly after to inform me of a mistake. I forget which colleague, so I’ll just call her Pam. The Orange County number I posted was off by 475 votes. I was embarrassed. How could I have made the mistake? It was a simple matter of copying the numbers in one spreadsheet and pasting them into another.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how I could have erred. Not that it never happened but I like to know these things. I opened my copy of the file. Aha! The numbers were exactly what I’d posted earlier. I hadn’t made a mistake after all. I contacted Pam to tell her the mistake was on her end. Now it was her turn to be confused.

Pam looked at her file and said, “no, it says exactly what I told you before. You’re off by 475 votes. “

“Where did you get your file?” I asked.

“The Secreatary of State’s website.”

“Send me the link you used.”

Pam sent it. It was the same link I used to get my file.

“What’s the filename of the file you downloaded?”

“2020President.xlsx”.

The same name as the file I had.

“Send me your file.”

A close comparison of the two files revealed that hers was “created on” 8/21/2021, a week after mine. “Is that when you downloaded it?” I asked. It was. Our two files had been downloaded from the same site, they were the same file, in the sense that they had the same filename and purported to contain the same information. And yet, the total ballot count for Orange County differed by 475 ballots between the two files.

At the time, I knew very little about elections. For instance, I was aware that in a presidential election there are two candidates from the two major parties, and a few independents and write-in candidates. I was unaware that there were so many of these that they would occupy 27 columns on a spreadsheet.

Biden and Trump each had two columns. This is because they were both listed twice as the candidates for a total of four parties. Trump was the Republican and Conservative party candidate. Biden was the Democrat and Working Families party. After them, there was Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins, Libertarian Jo Jorgenson, and Independent Brock Pierce. There were eighteen write-in candidates, including musicians Phil Collins and Kanye West. The ballot count for all of these candidates and parties were identical in both files.

The difference was located in the last two fields, marked “Blank” and “Void”. A blank ballot is a ballot printed for use by a walk-in voter at a polling station that isn’t used. These are counted before and after the election to be sure that none of the blanks wandered off and got used by a person to cast multiple votes with them.

Voids, also known as “spoiled ballots”, are ballots that were not correctly filled out, were damaged, or for some other reason could not be used after they had been marked, thus changing them from a blank into a void. I spoiled a ballot in the 2022 election by writing an unflattering editorial comment near the ballot measures section of the ballot. The ballot measure seemed designed to enable election fraud, I didn’t like that, and wrote as much on the ballot. The tabulator wouldn’t read my ballot because of my writing, so I had to write “VOID” over it and get a new ballot (formerly blank).

The file dated 8/15/2021 has 498 blanks and 331 voids. The file dated one week later has an additional 676 blanks but the number of voids has gone down by 201 (Table 1). Combined, this is a net difference of 475 ballots.

Table 1 Orange County discrepancies

These changes to the certified totals were both published on the New York State Board of Elections website as official results. The election was certified in New York on December fourth, 2020, more than eight months earlier. And yet, changes were still being made.

Blank and void ballots are not votes but they represent opportunities to commit election or voter fraud. That is why they are counted and the count is recorded. For instance, what does it mean that on 8/15 there were 498 blank ballots but one week later, there are 1,174, an increase of 676 ballots? It could mean that the first count was preliminary and thus incomplete but the second count was either the final count or another intermediate step toward a final number. Both of these explanations are not credible because by the time these numbers were published, the election had already been certified eight months earlier.

Another explanation is that at some point during the week ending on 8/21/2021, someone found a box of uncounted ballots and added them to the previous total. If that is what happened, it is an example of carelessness and negligence. One more possibility is that a certain number of blanks were reserved for fraudulent use if needed. Until it was known how many would be needed, the blank ballot count was kept artificially low by intentionally leaving some ballots uncounted. Then, after it was known how many fraudulent ballots had been cast, the remainder could be counted and added to the total, thus accounting for every ballot.

A problem with these three scenarios is that without proper chain of custody documentation of what happened, there is no way to differentiate between these three possibilities or to learn of a fourth. New York Citizen’s Audit (NYCA) did ask for chain of custody information but for the most part, received little to nothing.

The situation is similar for voided ballots. In Orange County, the number of voids drops from 331 to 130, for a loss of 201 ballots. How does that happen? Did someone erase the pen marks on 201 ballots to restore them to being blank ballots? Were some of them then used as live ballots? A voided ballot, to be counted as a void, must have the word “VOID” scrawled across it in large letters. That cannot be removed easily, if at all.

This means that some of the ballots counted as voids were not voids. Someone had to either look at a perfectly clean ballot and count it as if it had been visibly defaced, or the total was manipulated digitally, without reference to the ballots. One election observer I communicated with told me that at the precincts he observed, there were no more than a few dozen voids in each. He was stationed in Queens, the second most populous county in New York. How does tiny Putnam County accumulate hundreds of voids (at least initially) while Queens only has voids in the low dozens?

At the very least, these two changes demonstrate that the certified totals were incorrect. If the results are incorrect, what is the meaning of “certified” in this context? I thought “certified” meant that the numbers provided had been checked and were found to be unambiguously accurate.

Without chain of custody, the three known options for these changes amount to the following: 1) the NYBOE can’t count, 2) the NYBOE (or a subordinate entity) is negligent, 3) someone committed election or voter fraud by embezzling blank and voided ballots.

Any official at the NYBOE office would likely prefer the first or second explanation. Several county officials have told me personally that their subordinates are incompetent (which means the supervisors are also incompetent). Incompetence is always the lesser evil compared to fraud.

An official could say, “give us the benefit of the doubt. You can’t prove criminal intent but you have us dead to rights on incompetence. We’ll admit that freely.” However, why should they be given the benefit of the doubt? If the audit trail has been destroyed, whether through negligence or intention, there is no support for a claim of negligence just as there is no support for a claim of malfeasance.

The reason they don’t get the benefit of the doubt is that the audit trail is destroyed. The purpose of the audit trail is to provide all county and state employees a get out of jail free card. If they lose that card, they become fully responsible for everything the audit trail might have been able to explain innocently. The “innocent” explanation evaporates along with the audit trail.

The odd thing about this is that there is an audit trail of sorts. Each of the two documents has a tab marked “Revision History” (and thanks to CD for pointing this out to me). The revision history shows dozens of changes were made in multiple counties after the election was certified. Some of the changes are massive.

The largest revisions occurred in Westchester County the day after the election was certified, 12/4/2020. It is interesting that Westchester adds 305,904 blanks for the Judicial District 9 judges race, 6,409 blanks for the president/vice-president race, 48,976 blanks for Congressional District 16, and over a hundred thousand more in other races. Either this was the first and only count, and therefore not a revision, or the original count was off by those amounts.

There are a total of twenty-three revisions dated between 12/8/2020 and 6/18/2021. One modification that stands out is in Orange County, which subtracted 23,066 blanks from their count. Where did they go? Were they real blank ballots that later disappeared? Or was the original count inflated? Either way, this is a serious miscount in a county with a total of 172,843 ballots cast. Speaking of which, this is in Orange County, the same county that ended up with 1,174 blanks. How do you miscount 1,174 as something over 23,066? That is a big difference.

On December 8, Suffolk County adds 12,448 votes for Joseph Biden and 573 for President Trump but only 125 blanks and 117 voids. Could some of their blanks have been converted to Biden votes? Without a proper chain of custody, it isn’t possible to prove it didn’t happen that way.

If you were paying attention to the dates in this article, you may have noticed that the latest revision is dated 6/18/2021. And yet, we have evidence of two revisions, both in Orange County, that happened sometime between 8/15/2021 and 8/21/2021. That change is not reflected in the revision history of the 8/21/2021 document but it should be there.

The latest revision listed in the 8/15/2021 document is dated 2/26/2021, almost six months earlier. Is that how long it takes to update the document? If so, why does the revision get updated but the fact the revision was made takes almost half a year to be added? Both numbers are in the same document. Is it that difficult to push the single button required to reach the revisions tab?

This, I remind readers, is the first thing I found, in the first document I looked at as part of the NYCA audit of the election. Since then, such discoveries have become a weekly, sometimes daily, experience. This goes beyond incompetence. This is serious administrative negligence for the least of the problems found to date. Others are clear violations of election law, such as the existence and tolerance of cloned records.

The fact that the people of this state pay salaries to the people responsible for the many errors and illegal records contained in official election materials is a disgrace. The state of recordkeeping is so poor that I am inclined to take officials at their word: everyone is incompetent. Then fire them!

After that, hire some competent investigators to determine who was responsible for the many violations of election law and deal with that separately and appropriately.

UPDATE: I was reminded this morning of two things that resulted in corrections to this article.
1) Although I got the document referred to here from the Secretary of State’s website, it is derived from the NYSBOE website and is available there also (that’s the link in the article). Meaning, the numbers are from the NYSBOE. The SoS only copies them from there.
2) The election in New York was certified on December 3rd, not the 4th.