The magical disappearing voter ID numbers
The magical disappearing voter ID numbers
How do they do it?
Last September, I asked someone a question about voter ID numbers. The question was, “do you think the county or state Boards of election ever reuse their identification numbers?”
I was curious because several months earlier, a programmer on the New York Citizen’s Audit team had pointed out that some State Board of Elections Identification (SBOEID) numbers seemed to be missing. Since then, my analysis of the Spiral algorithm indicated the same thing.
Were they missing? Were they waiting to be assigned? Were they re-using numbers? It would be peculiar if they were awaiting voters because all of the Spiral algorithm numbers looked like they’d been assigned before approximately June 15th, 2007. With all this in mind, I gratefully accepted an offer from a colleague to poll every county commissioner in New York State about this.
On October 12, 2022, I got my answer, at least, from the few dozen out of New York’s 62 counties that felt like answering. Here are samples from a few counties:
In answer to the question, “Does your county re-use voter ID numbers from voters who may be deceased or moved out of the country?”
“Voter IDs are specific to the voter and never re-used.” (Chautauqua County)
“No, we do not re-use voter ID numbers.” (Cortland County)
“No.” (Genessee County)
“We do not reuse numbers once they are purged, unless directed by the state board. Very rare.” (Madison County)
“No.” (Oswego County)
“The county does not re-use any voter ID numbers. Voters who are deceased and those “Purged” from our database for moving or other reasons always retain their original Voter ID…every voter we have has a unique County ID and a unique NYS Voter ID (SBOEID).” (Rensselaer County)
“If the voter moves, that number does not get used again. If the voter moves back, they get a new county number but their state [number] stays with the voter.” (Warren County)
In answer to the same question for the state:
“No.” (Genessee County)
“Not to my knowledge.” (Oswego County)
Most other counties referred this question to the state BOE, who didn’t answer any questions.
From these answers, the following may be deduced:
County commissioners believe that county ID numbers are either;
Never re-used
Re-used extremely rarely, when told to do so by the NYSBOE
Some county commissioners believe that the state does not re-use SBOEID numbers
County commissioners believe that SBOEID numbers are unique to each voter and follow them (get updated) wherever they go within the state. In other words, they never have more than one SBOEID number and that number is the first and only number they are assigned.
Some of you may be wondering why I started this article by posing a question about missing SBOEID numbers but then switched to discussing re-use of numbers. The connection is that a deleted number becomes available for re-use. If it has been deleted from the database, there may be no record to indicate it had ever been used. Therefore, it could easily be re-used, even if unintentionally.
If commissioners were aware of the practice of re-using numbers, they would likely also be familiar with the practice of first deleting those numbers from voter records to make them available. Based on the answers received from various county officials, they are unfamiliar with the practice of re-using county ID numbers and have good reason to believe it doesn’t happen at the NYSBOE either.
The reason is that, if an SBOEID follows the voter wherever they go, it cannot ever be deleted and thus would never be available for re-use. A corrollary is that every voter has a CID and an SBOEID number and the CID is never deleted. Therefore, the SBOEID cannot be deleted without creating an orphan record that has a CID but not an SBOEID number.
New York Citizen’s Audit (NYCA) has not done a County ID (CID) number comparison across databases. They have done such a comparison for SBOEID numbers and can prove that SBOEID numbers are deleted in most counties, and voters are reassigned to different SBOEID numbers. In many cases, they are assigned to an existing number but in others, it looks like they are given a new number.
In Clinton County, for instance, thirty-five voters have had their SBOEID numbers altered (Table 1). This becomes visible when different time-stamped voter rolls are compared. Simply generate a list of every SBOEID number that appears in each database, then compare them to see which numbers (if any) are either missing from the newer database or have been reassigned to different names.
The example provided in Table 1 shows that this voter had two records in the voter rolls as of October 12, 2021, and three records on December 21, 2022, fourteen months later. In 2021, both registrations have unique SBOEID numbers. This is not supposed to happen under New York election law, which prohibits the creation of additional SBOEID numbers after the first is generated. This is because that first SBOEID number is supposed to stay with the voter for their “voting life”.
There are multiple regulations designed to prevent what we see here in the rolls for this voter. The reason for those regulations, according to a commissioner and deputy commissioner of elections I spoke with (in two separate counties) is that multiple registrations like this create the opportunity for double voting. The good news is that for this voter, although the existence of the second SBOEID number violates the law, the earlier SBOEID number was purged at about the same time as the newer SBOEID became active. That means they were not simultaneously active.
What is interesting about this set of records is not that they represent an original record and a clone but that the clone ID is exchanged for the original SBOEID in the latest version of the database. If presented with this information, a county commissioner with a flexible shoulder socket could pat himself on the back for deleting the illegal clone record and giving it a legal SBOEID number. If flexible and double-jointed, he could also pat himself on the back for destroying evidence that the illegal record had been made in the first place.
Table 2 shows the opposite happening, also in Clinton County. In this example, the same two records are present in the 2021 and 2022 version of the voter rolls examined by NYCA. They have the same name, address, DOB, registration dates, and CID numbers. However, the two records in the 2021 database have the same SBOEID number but in 2022, one of those records has a new SBOEID number, making it a clone.
A check of the 2021 database shows that the number, which ends in the numbers 4924, doesn’t exist. It is a new number introduced after the 2021 database was made, though there is no change to the voter’s status or address. Or was there? A closer look shows that both records have purged and active status, respectively, in both databases. The status, however, is swapped. The purged record in 2021 is active in 2022 and vice versa.
If one were inclined to be generous, one could say it looks as if someone in Clinton County noticed the new SBOEID number, recognized it was illegal, and purged that record. To ensure the voter was able to vote, the previously purged record was made active. Again, our double-jointed commissioner can pat himself on the back for this because an illegal record was “fixed”, this time by purging it.
The question remains, why was the clone record made in the first place? The voter had not moved. On this question, a commissioner has told me that his county receives a virtual tornado of forms from multiple agencies simultaneously, each of which attempts to register “new” voters in his county. He said there can be as many as eleven of these forms for the same voter, thus creating significant potential for confusion among his underpaid and incompetent staff. As I imagine this taking place, it reminds me of an occasion when I brought a friend to see the famous psychic Uri Geller perform in the Netherlands.
For some reason, we were able to obtain seats very close to the stage. This allowed a clear view of everything Geller did. This was important because he did a lot of things to a handful of tiny seeds. If we had been farther away, we wouldn’t have seen anything. As it was, we still didn’t see anything.
Geller rattled the seeds in his hand as he walked briskly from one side of the stage to the next, spilling seeds everywhere he went. Then, in a fluorish, he lifted his hands, smiled broadly, and said something like “Ta-da!” To this day, I don’t know exactly what he thinks he did, apart from distributing seeds in a jagged row across the stage.
If Geller was a county commissioner of elections, I can imagine him saying with an Israeli accent, “Everything we do is completely legal and transparent. You have the proof before you. I showed you everything!” Maybe, but that fluorish of excess registration documents and illegally-generated numbers gives me, I’d like to think, a rational justification for being curious about the details.
Another curious pair of records are single registrations, meaning they are not clones, and yet they are (in a way). In the 2021 database, the voter has an SBOEID number that ends in the numbers 0812 but in 2022, her SBOEID number ends in 5973 (Table 3). She has the same CID number in both versions of the voter rolls. She also has the same name, address, and registration date. Both records are active and neither has been purged. How did this happen?
A check of the 2022 voter rolls shows that the original SBOEID number that ends in 0812 is no longer present in the database. It is completely gone. This reminds me of the more ambitious magician’s trick known as the disappearing closet. A woman walks in, the door is shut, then opened, and she is gone. The door is shut again, then opened, and she is back. In this case, the first SBOEID disappears and the new SBOEID appears with such precise timing that the voter herself isn’t somehow disintegrated in the process.
The good thing about the previous example is that the first SBOEID number might have been expertly extirpated from the voter rolls before the second SBOEID number was created. If so, double voting was never possible with these records. We may never know if they were simultaneously active because deleted records, like mobster victims at the bottom of the Hudson River, tell no tales.
Table 4 shows two simultaneously active SBOEID numbers for the same Clinton County voter. One of those numbers ends in 6035. In the 2022 database, that number has vanished, and is replaced by the other number the voter had in Onondaga County.
By 2022, the record that formerly had a different SBOEID number is now purged. A check of the purge date shows that it remained simultaneously active with this voter’s other record just long enough to cast multiple votes in the 2021 election. The voter history does not show that double votes were cast but it was possible. Also, as we know from hundreds of thousands of examples throughout the state, the voter history field cannot be trusted. Sometimes a vote appears in the county records but not in the state records. The records I am showing here are the state records. This leaves open the possibility that there are more votes than these records indicate.
I remember another magic show I attended in the Netherlands. It featured Hans Klok, who in my opinion had a much more exciting show than Uri Geller. Klok and his assistants ran around the stage, into and out of all sorts of contrivances, and always at top speed. Somehow, they managed to change clothes while they were running, and even exchanged places with each other as they went into and out of doors on opposite sides of the stage. The voter rolls remind me of that.
County commissioners are like the master of ceremonies in elections. As we the electorate watch all the strange things taking place in the voter rolls and the elections themselves, they wave their hands and confidently assert that everything we see taking place on the stage is perfectly natural, safe, and secure. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “that guy was over there (in the 2021 rolls), and now he’s over there (in the 2022 rolls) but he was wearing a tuxedo before and now he’s dressed like a sailor.”
Believe it or not, I have only just now arrived at the point where I wanted to discuss the deleted numbers. Comparing the 2021 and 2022 databases reveals some deleted SBOEID numbers but not all. It can only reveal those numbers removed in the time covered by those databases. Recently, I discovered another way to find deleted records: the Spiral algorithm.
My analysis of the Spiral algorithm has revealed strong evidence that there are missing SBOEID numbers, what those numbers are, and which CID numbers were attached to the now-missing SBOEID numbers. The same analysis indicates that the missing SBOEID numbers belonged to voters who now have a different SBOEID number in the state rolls (Table 5).
Sticking with Clinton County, partly out of convenience but primarily because it is the sample county I used to perform this analysis, I have found 367 deleted SBOEID numbers. There may be many more that escaped the net cast by my methodology.
The methodology used to identify these records is very complicated and time-consuming. The commissioners don’t seem to be aware that records like these ever existed. It is troubling to me that the people who are supposed to know the answers to voter questions are either so ill-informed, or so unwilling to share their secrets.
I don’t know about you but I prefer my magic tricks on a stage where they can’t hurt anyone, not in elections that can sway the course of a nation. All it takes is an iceberg in the wrong place and a change of course is enough to sink the ship. When it comes to the welfare of a nation, the danger of treating elections like stage legerdemain is too great to tolerate.
Our elections must be transparent and that means, among other things, that our election officials need to know what they are doing and the subordinates who work for them must do their jobs without breaking the law. If they can’t do that, the supervisors aren’t doing their job and must be held accountable.
So, we obviously have two issues, and we need to keep them separate and clearly delineated.
1. The process of administering the voter roles at the county level is manual and error prone. Clerks are overworked, incompetent, etc. And they have a stream of possible changes coming at them from various other agencies which they have to de-dupe manually and then figure out what database manipulations are required to make things "right." The issue here is bad process. In the best case, the clerks do what the law requires. If they don't, it opens up the opportunity for fraud. But it's not fraud by itself (could be, perhaps, but probably not).
2. The spiral algorithm indicates evidence that there could be large-scale fraud at play (algorithmic level fraud). The loose processes at the county level and the self-confidence exuded by the county personnel about their processes suggest that such fraud would never be discovered at the county level without the kind of analysis that you're performing, Art.
The big score here is unmasking number 2.
The clarity of the final paragraph, if implemented, would warm my heart.