Why does this matter? Isn’t this old data?
It matters.
Yes it is older data.
The primary video for this website was created for the Republican and Democratic Primary in March 2022.
What we would have you know is that the problem persists. Granted, the state is being a little more careful with their database, but the problems remain. Here is just one example:
VOTING ROSTERS ARE MOVING TARGETS
When a person votes in an election, that event happens in time and space. Voter rosters records are kept as official Texas documents. It turns out that keeping tabs on past election results is not as easy as it might seem.
For each election, the SOS provides daily early voting and election day rosters. The official page looks something like this:
https://earlyvoting.texas-election.com/Elections/getElectionDetails.do
Note that these are official results. And yet, note that the claim is that these results were last updated 12-15-2022. This is an absolutely false statement. The underlying numbers in this voter roll are changing, sometimes daily, and for many months after an election. We will give one example from the November 2022 election as a sample of the things that you might find in this “official” record.
Since this analysis report shall become a public record, the names of the voter in question, the voter’s address, and the voter ID are modified to preserve the identity of this voter. The unredacted names and identity of this person (along with many others) can be revealed directly to law enforcement or to the SOS office upon request.
Step One: Download data regularly from the SOS website
We regularly download the public data from the SOS website for the federal elections in the past few years. In particular, we have snapshots of the early voting roster for the November 2022 election taken on the following days:
- 11/08/22 (Election day)
- 12/15/22
- 12/25/22
- Governor Gregg Abbott certified the federal races on 01/03/23 (no snapshot this day)
- 01/05/23
- 02/24/23
- 03/01/23
- 03/31/23
- 04/27/23
- 05/27/23
- 06/26/23
- 01/27/24
Step Two: Look for changes between roster snapshots
Since Governor Abbott certified the election on January 03, 2023, we thought it would be good to compare the rosters for January 05, 2023, with March 31, 2023. Surely, we would expect Governor Abbott to be certain that his certification is backed by true numbers.
And yet we find an anomaly as we look at this difference. This is blurred purposely, but you will see 3 yellow lines that have been inserted. This means that between January, 2023 and March, 2023, these 3 voters were added to the voter roll
But then we come to the main take-away. To protect PII, we’ll call him “Henry Sneed Glaton” from Bowie County.
Again, this is blurred but you see a red and yellow line – this difference is noted by one line being removed, and another (different) line added as a replacement. By changing the names, here is what it looks like:
Download-date/vote-date: “COUNTY”, “Full Name”, VUID, “Voting-Method”, “Precinct”
230105/20221010: “BOWIE”,”GLATON, HENRY SNEED”,”11111111111″,”MAIL-IN”,”2C”
230224/20221010: “BOWIE”,”GLATON, HENRY SNEED”,”22222222222″,”MAIL-IN”,”2C”
Here is how to read this:
Mr. Glaton is shown as a voter who mailed in a ballot, and it was processed on 10/10/2022. On 01/05/2023 it shows Mr. Glaton having a unique voter ID of 1111111111. However, on 02/24/2023, seven weeks later, it shows that Mr. Glaton’s unique voter ID is not that unique – it was changed to 2222222222. Who changed it and why?
However, it gets worse – it turns out:
- There is a Mr. Glaton in the Texas Voter Registration database with VUID of 1111111111 and voting status is Verified (V). That is where the good news stops.
- The Official State of Texas voting roster for the General Election 2022 does not list Mr. Glaton with VUID 111111111 as having voted.
- Further, there is no person in the state voter registration with VUID of 2222222222.
- And finally, there is no record of any person voting with VUID of 2222222222.
The County says that Mr. Glaton voted, but the state has no record of his vote. Then some person or entity (we do not know) changed Mr. Glaton’s VUID to a different number (contrary to federal law). Remember this is an official Texas election roster AND IT WAS CHANGED AFTER CERTIFICATION! That is bad enough, but it changed to a value that does not exist today in the voter registration.
Can we pinpoint who is responsible for this type of voter roll manipulation? No, we cannot.
Should this be concerning for all citizens of Texas? Absolutely.
Should this be a concern for Governor Gregg Abbott and for county commissioners throughout the state who certified elections not realizing that the state and county election offices are unable to agree on who voted?
The citizens of the State of Texas deserve better than this.
Note the data for this moving target analysis was downloaded over a period of time. All of the files are timestamped and preserved as originally downloaded. Then for this analysis, the files were sorted to ensure accurate comparisons and to spot differences quickly. Since these are time-based downloads, this exercise cannot be duplicated directly because it does not appear possible to go back in time and download what the database looked like on a previous day. That would be nice and that would be a way to get to the bottom of how these changes are being implemented, but it still would not answer why the changes were made.