Crunching through the statewide database with my exquisitely fast server, I find 31,214 pairs that match exactly for birthdate, last name and first name.
1,824 of these pairs are within the same county. 1,408 (77%) of the intracounty duplicates are in King County. Go figure. (1,113 of these are at the same street and house number. Perhaps Dean Logan is still investigating whether these might be identical twins).
Sideshow Bob Terwilliger is in second place with 110 perfect pairs of matching name, address and birthdate.
Unfortunately, the SoS didn't include the county voter ids, so it's going harder to determine which if any of these duplicate registrations voted twice.
UPDATE: I'm finding more evidence of probable double voting than the Secretary of State is letting on. Details on Monday.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 03, 2006 12:46 PM | Email ThisIt would also be interesting to know if the dupes in KC are the same ones that the Republican party turned over to Dean Logan weeks before the last election.
Posted by: sgmmac on February 3, 2006 01:12 PMLet me get this straight - you've had this database for barely a day, and you've already found over THIRTY ONE THOUSAND dupes?!?!?
What are we paying those so called "professionals" over at Sam Reed's office for, exactly? Give Stefan Sharkansky this man's job!
Posted by: Erik on February 3, 2006 01:50 PMhttp://rollcall.com/issues/1_1/breakingnews/12015-1.html
No wonder Sharansky bans so many liberals. The truth hurts.
Posted by: JDB on February 3, 2006 02:02 PMhttp://rollcall.com/issues/1_1/breakingnews/12015-1.html"
So what your telling us that they should have just ignored the discrepency and counted the votes like urban liberals do.
Kinda tell's us where your coming from I guess.....
The point of Stefan's post has to do with finding anomolies the annointed ones have insisted aren't there. In fact, if you went to the challenged registration hearings, you would have been handed a sheet of paper before you went in that stated the county rolls had been cleaned up. Talk about bird cage liner.
Posted by: Burdabee on February 3, 2006 02:24 PMI believe there are over 31,000 duplicate voters - but I have a hard time believing that such a "small" amount was discovered in KC!
Can you give a county by county list of the 31,000 dupes? I'd like to see what they've been up to in this state.....
Posted by: Deborah on February 3, 2006 03:43 PMThe lion's share of the potential duplicates are mixed counties, e.g. a John Smith in Spokane County and a John Smith in Thurston County who have the same birthdate. Of the potential duplicates where both members of the pair are in the same county, King County had a disproportionately large number.
The reconciliation form is supposed to be based on two _different_ methods of accounting. When it didn't tally, they said "Well, these numbers are _supposed_ to be identical, so... assume that they are!". Which is amusing when more ballots show up (Leading to the impossibility of more votes counted than paper ballots in hand.)
You can't discover accounting fraud if one of the steps is assuming that you've correctly accounted for all the sources of error - instead of actually measuring.
Posted by: Al on February 3, 2006 04:22 PMAs my acquaintance had not moved recently, I went and looked at the list again, and noticed that the oldest registration was a poll voter, and the newer registration was a permanent absentee voter, and the poll voter stopped voting when the absentee voter started voting.
So I suspect that my acquaintance submitted an application to switch to permanent absentee and got mistakenly entered as a new registration.
Since she didn't vote twice, no harm was done -- BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN. By her, if she realized what had happened, or by some clever cheat who noticed this trend and started showing up at the polls to vote as her.
Anyway, I suspect a lot of the duplicate registrations are due to the fact that they use, or used, the same form for new registrations as for changes to registrations; weary data entry folk making mistakes.
P.S. -- Despite the fact that I told them about her, she was still registered twice the last time I looked, late last year.
Posted by: Legast on February 3, 2006 04:53 PMThat makes more sense...(if any sense can be made of this madness...)
Posted by: Deborah on February 3, 2006 06:38 PM"I think what's been troubling about this whole experience is that the Republicans have been trying to challenge our entire democracy by casting doubt on our entire system," he said."
Working for your Stalinist cabal, as Mr. Pelz was once a part of the canvassing board, who lived Stalin's quote about being of those who counted the votes... His quote above was taken from the Howard Dean playbook - he avoids the real issue and makes a durogatory and bull$___ statement. We are trying to fix the system, much to your dismay, so that the leftist side will have less of an unfair advantage in future elections. They can go to he!! if they think we the people are going to stand for status quo corruption - which understandably casts doubts on our system and clowns like you - take it away Mr. Cynical ! Keep up the good fight, Stefan !
Posted by: KS on February 3, 2006 07:32 PMDivorced females who remarry.
My wife gets two ballots every election. One is an absentee ballot in her previous surname with her former husband and one is an absentee ballot in her current marriage with my surname.
Of course, she does not use the ballot with her former name. Being a cranky old geezer, I vote at my local polling place like the Founding Fathers did.
The $64,000 question is: Just how many other females out there in a similar situation are getting double ballots?
And while we are on the subject, just how big is the pool of identity theft victims whose names are stolen so they can be used to defraud? Who is to say that the fraud stops with merchants? Any reason to believe that these thieves are not using the stolen identities to register to vote?
Could they be voting Demon-crat, the party of lax punishments for crime?
Say it ain't so. Go ahead, I double dog dare ya.
Posted by: platypus on February 3, 2006 09:21 PMThis is the kind of problem that would be solved in about a day if this database was important private company data, but will take years and years of "treading lightly" for the government to fix.
It won't matter either way, Dean Logan will still throw batches of unchecked provisionals and absentees in with the other anonymous ballots and count them if they help the Democrat. And if there are any problems, he'll just fire the current Huennekens who will oafishly tell his staff, "we shouldn't have counted those."
Gregoire is the Hester Prynne of voting.
Posted by: Jeff B. on February 4, 2006 02:01 AMDupes at the same address are, of course, almost certainly errors by the voter and/or the county. There is no excuse for them. However, they are unlikely to be deliberate cases of fraud. If I were interested in registering fraudulently, I would invent names of nonexistent people at my home or work address rather than submit an obviously fraudulent duplicate registration for myself.
Many of the remaining dupes are probably cases of people moving and incorrectly registering anew, and your math on these is too simplistic. To the extent that moves are random, voters from large counties are far more likely to move within their county than voters from small counties, because there are more places within their county to move to. Therefore the number of intracounty dupes should be proportional to the square of each county's population.
King County has 29% of the state's population, but if you look at the square of each county's population, King County's figure is 68% of the state's total. (I used 2000 census data for total population by county.) So, assuming moving patterns are random, King County should have 68% of the intracounty dupes that are due to moves.
Posted by: Bruce on February 4, 2006 11:52 AMNow that you mention it, when I went to a town hall meeting in Kent where I met Stefan, Jim and others, Sam Reed said the same thing.
And I also recall Bob from EFF saying that there would be no law violated, so I think you are right, and that means we need to simply throw out the entire voter registration DB and start over. It would really not be that big of a deal from a technical standpoint.
Of course this would cause Democrats to take to the streets with shovels, guns, knives or whatever they could find because they know damn well that if we actually required people to re-register that by in large, conservatives would make the concious effort to do so and Liberals would not, so this would put them at a serious disadvantage. Which is exactly why we should do this asap.
Any Liberal who's not yet fully hypnotized by rhtetoric from places like HA would admit that the database is so burdened with historical errors and duplicates from the way that it has been handled for so long and so poorly in the infancy of the information age, that it makes a lot of sense to simply start over. But most Liberals are hypnotized with hatred and unwilling to look at what makes sense. They don't want a level playing field because they know that they lose when the everyone is playing by the same rules.
So, we'll get more fawning rhetoric from Reed, Terwillerger and others.
The best solution is to let the Dems hang themselves with overreach, which they do all too well. Then, when we get a Republican controlled legislature, we can begin to pass laws to clean all of this mess up.
It really is a Nanny State. And we will eventually have to clean up after the Democrats and their childish ways.
Posted by: Jeff B. on February 4, 2006 12:08 PMWhat do you get when you have inaccurate registrations and add in a lack of signature validations plus require mail only ballots?
Posted by: April Coggins on February 4, 2006 08:29 PM