Spokane County

In November 2020, Spokane County had 356,926 registered voters. For the general election, they issued 382,560 ballots. 4,558 ballots were issued through VoteWA, the online voter registration management system used throughout the state. When a registered voter needs to request a new ballot, either because theirs was lost, damaged, or never arrived, the online portal allows voters to request a new ballot, and even print a new ballot online, if the election is within a certain number of days, and mailing the ballot will take too long. In order to do this, all the information that is required is first name, last name, and date of birth. Read more about that HERE.

Broken Chain of Custody & Missing Signatures

There is supposed to be more than one person present whenever anyone is handling ballots. When someone goes to pick up ballots at the drop boxes, there are supposed to be two or more people. There is a form or log which the team fills out and signs attesting that they picked up the ballots from a drop box, or broke the seal to open the ballots for processing back at the elections office.

We requested these logs from the 2020 general election. Among the many records, we found 16 which were missing a signature. Only one person signed, leaving the second signature line blank.

Dates range from the 16th of October to November 2nd.

ClearVote 2.1

The system used to count the votes in 2020 was ClearVote 2.1, which is a Clear Ballot product. The 2.1 version was never certified by the Election Assistance Commission. There is no record of Clear Ballot’s 2.1 on their website. The system was certified at the state level by the SOS, but should never have even been tested, as it was not federally certified.

Medical Lake

According to meeting minutes from Medical Lake councilmembers, which we found online, the population was 5,055 on or around June 21st, 2021. In the November 2020 election, there were 5,210 votes from people who were registered in Medical Lake.

Included in the Medical Lake voters were 32 people with a registered address of 850 Maple St, Medical Lake, WA 99022. Many of them shared PO Box 800 in Medical Lake. These were residents at Eastern State Psychiatric Hospital.

According to Washington State law, these people are still eligible to vote unless a judge revokes their right to vote specifically. This is a hole in the system. We believe these residents are likely being taken advantage of. We don’t know if they are actually filling out these ballots, or if they even are aware they are voting. At minimum, their ballots are being harvested and who knows what happens to them.

Tabulation

Counting the votes is referred to as tabulation. In the case of Spokane County, tabulation happens when the ballots are scanned in. In 2020, ballot scanning began October 20th, at 9:18 am.

Ballots are scanned in batches of 200 or less. There were 1905 batches of ballots scanned and counted for the presidential election. It appears scanning happened every day from the 20th through election day, starting around 10am and ending before 4pm.

Using records we obtained from the Spokane County Auditor’s office, we reconstructed a timeline of the election. Below is part of an analysis we did on that data. Keep in mind, that these are in the same order they were processed, according to the records we received.

Presidential Vote Totals

Biden was ahead in the vote count for a long time before Trump took the lead. Biden had a quick lead, which peaked on 10/27 at 3:22 pm, when Biden had his largest lead of 22,622 more votes than Trump.  At that point, the lead starts to steadily narrow, until Trump takes the lead on 11/2 at 4:41pm for the first and only time.

The Governor’s race was the same way. See the comparison. Notice that the Democrat votes are very close to identical for the Presidential and Governor’s races, but the Republican vote count for President is less than the Republican Governor candidate, Culp.

As a matter of fact, many of Spokane County’s races were similar to this, which also matches what we have seen in several other counties, large head start for the Democrat candidates, even in the counties that were republican strong holds.

Vote Totals by District

Cumulative Ratio of Democrat to Republican Votes

Using the same data we analyzed the cumulative (total over time) ratio of democrat votes to republican votes for each batch, and created a plot. We used 9 races in Spokane County’s 2020 election. They all show the democrat jump start, and most of them were republican victories. According to the law of large numbers, these should have flattened out after a few thousand ballots were scanned. But that never happened. Instead they eventually sort of smoothed out, some more than others, but with a downward trend suggesting manipulation. The races we used had between 290 thousand votes and 66 thousand votes. Yet they all had ratios which strongly resemble each other, also suggesting manipulation. See below. They are grouped by district or state wide races.

Central Tabulator

The reason this is alarming is because in Washington we use central tabulation systems. This is a result of the vote by mail method we are captives of. The ballots aren’t sorted by precinct and are processed upon receipt.

These charts cover a 3 week period. Somehow the majority of democrat ballots consistently came in during the earlier stages of the election, and the majority of republican ballots consistently came in later. Either this is a coincidence or manipulation.

With all the arbitrary aspects of mail in voting coincidence seems highly unlikely. It seems further unlikely that this pattern would be consistent across the state, over the different demographics. It’s much more likely to be cause by manipulation of the voting systems.

Margin of Victory Per Batch

Using the same data, we looked at the margin of victory for each batch. The blue lines going up represent a democrat victory for the batch, and the red lines going down represent a republican victory for the batch. The longer the line, the larger the margin of victory for that batch. Each batch is represented by one line. There were over 1900 batches total. These are grouped in the same districts as the above images. These are illustrated in the same order which they were scanned by the county during ballot processing of the 2020 election.

Resolver Tool

Spokane County provided the logs from the election equipment in response to a records request. On the logs, we discovered that there were 19,961 resolver tool entries. The resolver tool is what Clear Ballot calls the adjudication tool used to decide or edit a vote on a ballot that the machine cannot read clearly. So that means there were 19,961 adjudicated ballot selections in the 2020 General Election.

Voter Registration

Looking in a copy of the voter registration data from the 2020 election, we discovered there were at least 3,843 ballots mailed out of state for the General election, and 998 sent to people with mailing addresses in a different country. 2,456 of the out of state voters were credited a vote in 2020, and of the out of country voters, 836 of them were credited a vote in Novemeber 2020.

For the out of state voters, the most frequent were California, Idaho, Texas, Arizona and Virginia. Among the out of country voters, Canada was clearly the most frequent among these registered voters, with 306 people in Spokane County using that as their mailing address. Then Germany, UK, Austrailia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand and France. The list goes on, those are just the most common.

ERIC

The Secretary of State provided a list of people who were flagged by ERIC to be removed in response to a records request that took over 6 months for them to respond to. On that list, there were 53,531 people in Spokane County who had most recently voted in 2020, 2021, or 2022. Of those, 41,049 of them still have an “active” status, despite ERIC flagging them for removal.

Its possible that the program returned some false positives. It’s also possible that the county has chosen not to act on these reports, or even read them. If there was any concern about the accuracy of the voter registration, we would hope they would follow up on the reports ERIC produced for the county. Especially since they use it as a talking point, and tell citizens that they use ERIC to maintain their registration data.

To learn more about ERIC, click HERE.

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