Sequel to How Election Laws Are Being Broken…
It appears the logic that’s being used in the State’s VoteWA system programming is flawed. When comparing the results with the evidence on the ground things don’t match up. Following is in essence what’s being claimed about how certain aspects of the programming works by The Office of the Secretary of State (OSOS).
A voter submits a change of address (COA). The OSOS receives the data and loads it into VoteWA for processing. The programming logic in VoteWA tells it that the COA should not be processed because there was a change to the voter’s registration (VRDB) record after the date in the USPS National Change of Address (NCOA) database of when the COA was submitted (effective date).
How this happens is there is approximately a one-month period between the effective date of the COA and the time the NCOA data reaches the OSOS for processing. If in between that time there is any change to the voter’s record in the VRDB the COA is “bypassed”, meaning it doesn’t get passed on to the counties for processing.
However, what the data is showing, is that at the time of the effective dates of COAs that are bypassed in many cases the voters sold their properties at the registered address and bought new properties at the COA forwarding address. By the logic being used in VoteWA, many times the voters end up remaining registered at the sold properties where the voters no longer reside.
We’ve recently been told that included in the process are OSOS staffers who are inspecting bypassed NCOA records to see if the more recent change to the voter’s record in the VRDB warrants the bypassing. We’re presently looking into this. But even if so, as mentioned above, there seems to be many records that are still being incorrectly bypassed.
In the end, thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of COAs are not processed, each of those unprocessed records potentially being a violation of RCW 29A.08.620 (a class c felony). And in the process, this potentially ends up creating a host of opportunities for fraud to occur. This is another good reason why the voting process needs to be transparent and auditable by outside third parties.
“We the people” shouldn’t have to depend on the government’s word that “everything is OK”, especially when it’s fairly obvious that it’s not OK. Most importantly, when laws are potentially being violated it shouldn’t be swept under the rug like what happens in many cases throughout the country. But those responsible should be held to account for it. What will it take for this to happen?
