Voter integrity teams started 2021 looking for sophisticated phantoms who moved elections in big ways. Many were shocked to find the dominant phantoms were not the few who changed their names a couple of times.
Nor were the big movers the ones who voted in their home state and the place they went to college.
Sure, all of this happens, at scale and the teams are finding it.
The most surprising phantom phenom was the hiding phantom and the sleeping phantom.
Who knew there were such colorful characters living in the voter rolls of every single state?
The hiding and sleeping phantoms share a characteristic – they were real people, with valid voter registrations, who registered to vote – at some time.
The phantoms who move elections are on the voter rolls, probably have been for years.
Election officials, political candidates, some tech firms track them and apply a percentage as to whether they are likely to vote. If you are a stat geek, this is a coefficient.
So the voter who registered in 1956, voted only once in 1958, becomes the seed for a future vote when it is needed.
Some of those people are sleepers. A sleeper has no idea a political group or election official is casting their ballot for them. They might not even care.
In 2020, lots of the sleepers woke up from their deep, electoral slumber and went to the polls. They were the ones, thousands of them, written up as having been told – “….you already voted, sorry.”
For years, election officials or political parties helped the sleepers by voting them when needed. It’s customer service on a whole new level.
Or they will assign an absentee ballot to them and vote it, when it is a tight race.
Sometimes they are quite alive, living in cognitive care facilities. They no longer remember their children, they clearly cannot vote, but the kind political party voter officials collect their ballots, vote them and elections are impacted.
This is like a slush fund, often 3% – 5% of the vote to pull in when needed. It almost always requires coordination with government agencies like the Post Office for returned ballots or election commissions for access to voter rolls, real time in elections.
Then there are the hiders. Hiders are much more interesting and far more colorful because they try to elude conventional technology.
They modify their name from William B Hernandez to Hernandes or Hernandas or some other close derivative for example. (This is just an example there, Bill, we made up your name!)
They hide in UPS boxes. Integrity teams found entire families living in a single UPS box – with not even indoor plumbing.
Election officials use ingenious ways to hide these folks. One of the more entertaining examples was in a large, swing, midwestern state where the voter IDs use special codes that cannot be seen by current technology.
So the voter ID 001234567 and 01234567 are picked up by conventional technology as the same number – dropping leading zeros. However, those leading zeros are codes virtually invisible to most widely used technology. That’s not the fun part!
This state creates two voter IDs, 01234567 and 1234567 and assigns BOTH to the same person, at a different address. The second address is then used for tight races. This is sovereign voter fraud – the government is doing it – but fortunately Fractal teams picked it up.
So are there phantom voters, phantom addresses in the rolls. Sure are!
About how many are there? Likely between 5% to as high as 18% of the voter roll.
Do they impact elections? Absolutely.
How are they cleaned out?
They have been on the rolls for decades. Legacy voter integrity teams, after they raise their dough and write reports have little impact on them.
The difference is that today new, vibrant voter integrity volunteer citizens are using Fractal analysis to find them, challenge them and get them off the rolls.
Fractal technology is now making its way into several states who are interested in giving their citizens real-time visibility to voter rolls – and every change in those rolls.