Florida - Red Belly Road

Citizen Researchers Find Fictitious Street in Voter Rolls

I wrote previously of evidence of voter roll manipulation in New York. In this article, we delve into further evidence of manipulation in Florida. Many are holding Florida up as the ‘gold standard’ for how elections are run. They might reconsider after reading this article.

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Background: No Transaction Log Flaw

As a database person, I see a fundamental flaw in voter roll systems. There is no transaction log. Whenever an update is made to a given voter, there is no record of what was changed, who made the change, when they made the change and why they made the change. This is not only the case in Idaho, but it seems to be the design of every voter roll management system across the country. If you want to get a list of all the voter records that have changed in the past 30 days, you are out of luck. A simple transaction log could maintain this information and provide a valuable tool for ensuring our voter management systems are secure.

Correction to the above paragraph: The basis for my statement about the transaction log was from public record requests made to the State and was told ‘no such report exists’. However, I have been given proof it exists at the county level and I want to acknowledge that what I said above is not accurate.

What some researchers have done to work around this shortcoming is to download voter rolls on a periodic basis - say once a month. Then you can run comparison reports that show you what records have changed since the last download. It is rather painstaking, but this is what Kris Jurski has done in Florida and his findings are quite remarkable.

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Red Belly Road

37 addresses in Florida were changed to a fictitious street - Red Belly Road. Absentee ballots were sent to those fictitious addresses then their addresses were changed back to the legitimate addresses. None of the people at these 37 addresses had requested an absentee ballot.

Kris says the Red Belly Road discovery was near miraculous. One of the couples who lived on the real street was known by the postal carrier and received their voter information card showing the Red Belly Road address.

While the number of affected voters isn’t that many, it suggests a means by which the voter rolls may be getting manipulated to create fake ballots and phantom voters. The term ‘Red Belly Road’ has now become synonymous with a specific type of election fraud.

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Additional Findings

But that is not all that Jurski found in his research. Kris has posted his research at the-peoples-audit.org and has recently started his own substack. Amongst his findings:

1. Additions: 100s of thousands of voters were being activated and moved to different parts of the state. These were not just ordinary relocations as many of these records had name changes (beyond marriage name changes) and DOB changes.

2. Insertions: Thousands of records show voters who were added to the voter roll and removed soon thereafter.

3. Deletions: Kris found 10s of thousands of records deleted in November and December of 2022, very close to the election. Not only is the number of deletions a concern, but the timing as well. Purging that many voters from the rolls may be warranted, but it is usually done several months after an election once everything has settled down.

4. Changes: Odd changes such as names being converted back and forth from upper case to lower case, first names being switched with middle names, and even new names added to the record.

Once Kris began discussing his research, it meshed with research that another group had been doing in another part of the country.

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The Printer-Pollbook-Tabulation Complex

Imagine you wanted to rig an election and available to you was a ballot printing company, an ePollbook company, and a vote tabulation company whose systems all integrated with one another. The election could run its course but if the outcome was not to your liking, you could create phantom voters via the ePollbook software, print up extra ballots via the printing software, and/or manipulate the vote in the tabulation software.

In essence, you have a stranglehold on the election system. If this situation had existed in the 50s, you might have gotten a warning from President Eisenhower in his farewell address. This is precisely what Jurski and others are not only concerned about, but believe they have evidence of it happening.

While I don’t see evidence of this taking place in Idaho, we should nevertheless be on guard to make sure it never does. Putting checks and balances in place can go a long way to ensure it cannot happen.

For example, we do have random hand counts after each election, and we have yet to see any result that was out of line with the tabulation. Many of our counties perform precinct level counts, meaning that tabulation tapes and ballot inventories are tracked at the precinct level and any discrepancies would be glaring so long as someone is checking. At least one clerk also prints out precinct totals before posting to the Secretary of State and checks them after doing so to make sure they are correct. We also have poll watchers that should be trained to keep a rough count of the number of people that show up to vote and square that with the ballot inventory at the precinct as well as the official in-person vote totals for that precinct.

The one area where controls are lacking is absentee voting, which I wrote about separately.

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Conclusions For Idaho

Election Integrity Idaho developed a transparency white paper that identified 13 areas where transparency in our Idaho elections could be improved. Item 11iii specifically addresses access to the voter roll management system currently employed in Idaho. There is no independent oversight of this access, and this should be corrected in order to increase confidence in the system.

Second, the Secretary of State had a $10 million budget approved for updating various election related systems and one of those systems is the voter roll management system. This was discussed in a prior article but bears repeating - we must implement a transaction log an effective transaction log in these voter roll systems so that there is accountability for any changes made. What Jurski and others have done is a creative workaround, but even if issues are found there is no data that helps ascertain who made the changes and why. Without that accountability, our voter roll management systems will continue to be vulnerable to manipulations such as Red Belly Road.

I encourage everyone to contact your legislators and your county clerks to raise awareness of these issues so that they will become priorities and so that proper checks and balances can be implemented to reduce or remove the vulnerability.