The key to stopping identity fraud – Medicaid, voter lists, government programs – is the address – not the person’s name.
People come and go but addresses stick around – and accumulate different types of fraud. When our team first started investigating insurance auto ring fraud we found it intersected with Medicaid fraud. The same doctor-lawyer-chiro rings working out of the same or close UPS boxes.
Addresses are key and they are massively complicated from a computer point of view.
Where do addresses come from?
If you are under 50, you probably guessed an app. If you are over, you guessed the U.S. Postal Service.
Let’s go with the Postal Service.
How does the U.S. Postal Service update its address lists?
A U.S.P.S. supervisor, kind of a whistleblower, contacted the Fractal team to introduce us to the process.
One of our members is a former VP of the U.S.P.S. and he validated these points the Postal person made:
“The responsibility of keeping this (address) information current falls on the letter carrier as well as local Post Office management (supervisors like me).
Well it isn’t being done.
I can confidently state that of the changes presently needed to bring each carrier route edit book accurately up to date, maybe five percent have been completed.”
It simply isn’t being done. Nobody has time.
Supervisors have no time and carriers have no time.
It is not essential to getting the work done even though it can control if an address even gets mail or is properly addressed.”
As America hurtles into mail-in balloting at scale, think what that means! There is NO ACCURATE ADDRESS LIST FOR OUR COUNTRY!
We can say, with 100% certainty, there is no database in existence, even from the Postal Service, that accurately represents every mailable building in America. None!
Yet, America will choose its next president, its legislatures, all the way down to dog catcher, via mail-in balloting.
What could possibly go wrong?
Meet the UnDeliverable Ballot Database.
How does one build the most accurate address list for every building in America? Most people have better things to think about but we don’t so we looked into it.
First, you need every address. A great place to find them is the county property tax records. They are accurate to a pristine level. Why?
County tax records are how county employees get paid – via taxes. Guys drive around to see if that field is vacant or if you put up a Wendy’s.
County tax records are visible to everyone.
They are challengeable – a citizen can march into the county tax office and say “…hey, why am I paying $8,600 tax on my house when the guy next door has the same size house paying $7,800?”
The description of each property is vast – commercial or residential, multi-family or not, square foot size, type of business, rooms, baths and scores of other important data.
The problem is addresses change all the time. A lot is subdivided. A Fedex office has an apartment building built on top of it. The sushi restaurant closes and a three-family condo replaces it.
The county knows this information instantly – their guys walk around jotting it down. The Post Office, well, as our supervisor notes above – they are busy doing other stuff.
We aren’t.
The innovation was doing this frequently – to reflect the changes in each data source.
Around election time, in Nevada, voter rolls swell up to election day.
Cross searching the voter rolls and the property tax rolls shows exactly where swelling takes place. We even have cool graphics showing it.
It is not enough to compare voter rolls and tax rolls.
Both are changing every day.
Comparing property tax rolls with voter registration rolls – repeatedly – delivers two convenient outcomes.
One is an accurate database of every building in America, updated frequently. This we use for commercial customers – always nice to have better data than the Postal Service!
The second outcome is the UnDeliverable Ballot database.
Knowing every address that is mailable but SHOULD NOT receive a mail-in election ballot is politically interesting. Comparing that list with the current voter registration list indicates where ballots are going to be mailed but cannot find rightful owners.
The goal here, as the team proved in Wisconsin in 2022, is to get these addresses off the voter registration list.
If an address is a Firestone Tire Shop, with 6 registered voters ostensibly there – the local team challenges the address as an UnDeliverable Ballot address. The tax rolls are inconsistent with the voter rolls – so change one or the other!
Why didn’t anyone do this before?
There are 3,200 counties. Each has voter files and property files. A snaphsot needs to be taken every couple of weeks, maybe 20 or 25 times a year.
This kind of compute is economically unviable – requiring a massive data center, taking weeks to run once, costing millions of dollars each time it is processed. It was never done.
With Fractal technology, it is a viable endeavor with lots of commercial possibilities.
For state governments, having a highly detailed view of every property in their state, then cross searched against every government program, constantly, gives unprecedented visibility to what addresses are collecting government program funds and perhaps shouldn’t.
This was never possible with ancient SQL relational technology.
With Fractal, we are demonstrating it to state legislatures – right down to their own district!