New York
How the findings of a citizen's group can inform our efforts to secure Idaho elections
For the past two years, I have interacted quite extensively with my counterparts in other states. Considerable work has been done in those states with respect to election integrity that receives either no coverage from major media or it is biased in support of the ‘most secure election in history’ narrative.
Much of that work deserves to be heard and can be quite informative with respect to our elections here in Idaho. So, I figured I would showcase some of these research efforts on a state-by-state basis.
Arizona was at the top of my list. There are court cases going on in Arizona about the 2022 election, and their Legislature recently sent a letter to all of the counties in Arizona informing them they cannot use voting machines in the 2024 federal election.
As remarkable as those developments are, I have big footed Arizona for New York. The New York Citizens Audit (NYCA) group made news this past week for its analysis of New York voter rolls.
NYCA first presented research on their analysis last August at an event called ‘The Pit’. Since then, they have been busy spreading the word, including presentations to over 140 state, county and city level legislative bodies.
What pushed them into the limelight this past week was the research they submitted to the Journal of Information Warfare where it was peer reviewed and now published in their most recent issue. Last Thursday, Rasmussen Reports picked up on this development and sent a tweet about their research which has now garnered over 3 million views.
The Allegation
What they allege to have found is an algorithm (actually, four separate algorithms) that was apparently unknown to election officials and seems to be manipulating the voter rolls. This manipulation includes:
Creation of millions of invalid registrations
Assignment of votes cast to illegal registrations
Deletion of over 500,000 cloned entries
The end result is NYCA claims that 95 state and federal races were impacted by over 700 thousand ineligible votes. The research effort was spearheaded by Dr. Andrew Pacquette of NYCA, and you can delve into more detail via his Substack as well as this recent article.
No Investigations
It has been about 9 months since the information was first released. To date, there has been no official investigation into their claims and there has also not been any refutation of their allegations. NYCA CEO Marly Hornik said that the information was also turned over to the FBI but they have yet to respond. Now with the peer-reviewed publication, it should make it that much harder for the findings to be ignored.
Does This Affect Idaho?
Did the situation in New York happen in Idaho? Hornik said they are working with other states, but Idaho is not one of them. From my own research into our voter rolls and that of others that I am aware of, I am not seeing the ‘New York Algorithm’ impacting Idaho. The relevant research that was done in Idaho had two parts - a cast ballot list comparison and canvassing.
Cast Ballot List Comparison:
A cast ballot list (CBL) is essentially a big spreadsheet where each row represents one voter who voted in that election. Election Integrity Idaho obtained a cast ballot list from Ada County from the 2020 election.
I began to compare the CBL to a voter roll pulled in March of 2021. For the vast majority of voters, the voterID in the CBL will match to a voterID record in the voter roll. However, when someone shows up to vote who is not registered, they are allowed by law to register at the polls and vote. But their permanent voterID does not get assigned until sometime later and meanwhile in the cast ballot list, they are given a temporary voterID. The painstaking part is matching that temporary ID in the CBL to the permanent one assigned later in the voter roll. I was able to get within about 1200 voters (out of over 260,000 ballots). Spot checking a few of those 1200, they are most likely matchable but due to misspellings, they would each have to be manually reconciled. Deceased voters, protected voters and perhaps those that moved would also serve to narrow the difference, but in essence, there weren’t any significant discrepancies.
Canvassing:
Canvassing is knocking on doors and asking people if they voted in 2020 and how they voted. If it does not match what the CBL or registration roll says, then we have a discrepancy. While the canvassing that Election Integrity Idaho did after the 2020 election was not extensive, we did not find any discrepancies. We found several people who no longer lived at the addresses we knocked but none of them had voted.
Our Pending Voter Registration System in Idaho
The news out of New York is disturbing because of the potential fraud and the lack of any investigation by the FBI, state and local law enforcement, or the major media. It is also concerning because of what we are not hearing. We are not hearing the election officials saying that this allegation could not be true because we have checks X, Y and Z that would prevent such things from occurring or would alert system managers if it did.
This does touch upon a concern in Idaho. Idaho uses the Tenex voter registration system. Tenex is not alone among registration vendors in that they have no effective way of tracking changes to the voter roll. If they did, we could submit Public Records Requests (PRR) for the transaction log for a given date range and get a list of every voter record that was changed along with who made the change, when they made the change, and why they made the change. With a transaction log we can query, finding the New York situation would be greatly simplified and perhaps more importantly, we would know who to talk to for accountability. And any records that did not reconcile with the transaction log would also stand out and be unmistakable proof of the voter roll being compromised.
The Tenex system is slated for replacement and the Idaho Secretary of State’s Office obtained $10 million in the recent budget to make that happen, likely after the 2024 election. The expected Request for Proposal (RFP) process represents an opportunity to shore up our registration system here in Idaho. We can press for features like the transaction log and also to put the X, Y, and Z types of checks in place to prevent what appears to have happened in New York from ever happening in Idaho. As a starting point, you can contact your legislators and make sure they are aware of this story.
Excellent work, thank you Tim.