By David Robb ——Bio and Archives--April 16, 2024
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The primaries are generally behind us now, and we are moving into campaign season. Preparations are being made for the November election, including preparations for fraud. Things have gotten a bit more challenging for the fraudsters, given that we don't (at least for now) have a new pandemic to justify universal voting by mail.
We can expect that there will be a greater emphasis on dirty voter rolls and absentee ballots, although machines will play a great role as well. For now, though, we can look at the voter rolls and how they are likely to be used.
Voter rolls are a key piece in elections. They contain lists of people who are eligible to vote, registration and mailing address information, and history data for each voter. For those states where ballots are sent to all eligible voters, the mailing address is critical, as it is when absentee ballots are sent.
In past elections, voter rolls were often inflated prior to an election, and excess entries removed after an election. From analyses by Dr. Douglas Frank, voter rolls in every state were inflated by as much as 25%. That inflation was a rather obvious indication that elections were being manipulated since those added "voters" would provide the votes needed to determine the outcome of an election.
Removing the added voters after an election makes it harder to investigate fraudulent voting, but the large additions and removals also make it obvious that something is wrong.
Recently, in order to avoid setting off alarms by adding and removing lots of registrations, we are seeing a more subtle approach. For the past year and more that we have been analyzing voter rolls, we see something we call "churn".
With churn, large numbers of registrations are slowly added and removed over time. The total number of registrations remains about the same so the process is not obvious, but the composition of the rolls change substantially.
The process works something like this. Imagine you have a bin with 100 sweet, juicy,........