Pennsylvania Rabbit Hole V

Unhackthevote December 16, 2017

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Pennsylvania Who is Watching Your Data?
This Can’t Happen.
But it did.

We started our analysis by simply looking at the numbers. How many voting records were added, removed, and changed in the months leading up to the election?

Even that simple exercise yields very interesting results. We found that in the seven months between April 4, 2016 and the election, the total number of registration records increased by nearly 460,000 voter registrations.

Looking at these records by party and by county, we found something striking. In that short period of time, there was an apparent decrease in Democrats by 0.7% overall. Up to nearly 3% in some counties.

Was their a party exodus?

We became curious about exactly what was causing this statewide change in apparent political affiliation. Were people actually making changes to their political party after the deadline for the primary, when such changes would make no difference at all?

To answer this question, we began looking at the records of individual voters. We wanted to know how many were added and how many were removed. How many showed a change in party? As long as we were checking, we looked for other changes, again tracking specific voters.

The increase in records between the April 4th and the November 7 data sets was caused by the addition of nearly 550,000 new voter IDs, the removal of over 93,000 voter IDs, and approximately 2000 additional, duplicate voter IDs. Duplicate voter IDs you ask? We will get to that later.

Oddly, 5000 of the voters added during this time period were marked as “Inactive” in the November 7 data set. This is something we didn’t want to see. If they were bad registrations, they should have been removed. Not marked Inactive.

Over 200,000 voters changed party in the seven months between April 4, 2016 and the election. This is 2.3% of the voting population. Nearly 120,000 of these changes occurring after August 15.

This is a head-scratcher. Party affiliation only matters for the Primary. Why would this many people want to spend their time to make this change?

What gives?

Looking at the “record changed” date for voters that appear in both the April 4th and the November 7th data sets, there were a total of nearly 1.5 million changes made to the 8.5 million (on average) voter registration records in this seven-month period.

In other words, more than one in six records was altered in some way during this time. Outside of moving or changing your name if you got married, how could this number be anything except suspicious?

As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in the weeks before the election, county officials reported a huge surge in the number of voter registrations being filed.

Although the deadline for registering or changing was October 11, election officials processed the registrations until the day of the election. The dates of registration shown in the November 7 data set reflect this surge. Interestingly, the data shows an even greater number of changes to registration information than to new registrations.

A mountain of changed records

In all, during this eleven-day period there were over 270,000 new registrations and over 615,000 existing registrations changed in some way. Think about that. 270,000 Record changes in 11 Days! It’s an overwhelming number, indeed. Of the voters who made these last-minute registrations and changes, over 20% weren’t marked as having voted in the election (February 27 data set).

Here are the counts of recorded new registrations and changed registrations for each two-week period between May 1st and the election.

Why would so many people flood the Registration System only not to place a vote?