Guest AuthorDid the 2012 Florida election have a mysterious appearance of 238,764 ‘Ghost Voters’? That’s what the voter data may indicate. Obama beat Romney by just over 74,000 votes in a surprise Florida election upset. Could the Ghost Voters have been the difference in the presidential election in Florida?
In the State of Florida, as in other states, you can get a complete copy of the voter file sent to you from the Department of State. This voter file has a complete copy of the Florida voters and election history. The monthly file release is designed to meet the requirements of the Florida Sunshine law. This voter information is what I display on my website VotersDNA.org. The monthly file is a snapshot of the voters as of the end of each month.
I use the voter file to help candidates with their elections and for analytical purposes. In analyzing the 2012 presidential general election I found a very troubling occurrence. The records in the October 31, 2012 voter file dropped out 238,764 voters that voter history said voted in the 2012 general election. These voters are part of the December 31, 2012 version of the voter file. The Ghost voters are included as part of the voter file submitted to the legislature in compliance with Section 98.0981 of Florida Statutes. These voters are missing again from the January 2013 version of the voter file. That is why I call them Ghost Voters. They seem to appear and disappear from the voter file and the official statewide voter database.
To try to resolve this matter I sent an email to all the Supervisors with the emails listed on theSecretary of States website. That email included the following:
A very strange occurrence in the voter file is 238,764 voters that voted that do not appear in the voter file until 2 months after the election (Dec 31, 2012) and then disappear the next month from the voter file. There is a total of 424,530 voter records that are in this strange group. The biggest concentration of these voters are in Broward and Duval counties. (see column: Only Matching Voter Record 12/31/2012) You can download the voter ID for this group from ghost voter id.
As you know Florida statute requires in s. 97.053(7) F.S. that a registration will be entered in the statewide voter registration system within 13 days after it is received. s. 97.055(1)(a) F.S. says registration books are closed 29 days before an election.
I am calling these voters that only appear in the December 31, 2012 voter file Ghost votes. You can see many of them with the link provided. They are the ghost icons. You can click on these to get the name and address of the voters. The Ghost voters with the green line under the ghost icon are the ones that voted.
So far I have not received an answer to the reason for the Ghost voters in Duval and Broward counties. Are the Ghost Voters from a computer bug? If so, what will be done to fix the bug? Is the problem a mistake by a staff person? What will be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Or did someone in two Supervisor of Election offices change history by putting their finger on the scale of the 2012 election. Did someone try to make sure the results came out their way? We can only regain confidence in the Florida election process by finding the cause of the Ghost Voters and making corrections in future elections.
Will the Ghost Voters show up again in 2014 and call into question the campaigns and will of millions of Floridians. Will these Ghosts determine the results of our next Governor and Cabinet elections?
Floridians may go the website Votersdna.org and look-up their address. Click on the icons and see the list of registered voters for the different places on the map. Then click on a voter and see their voting history. Post a comment at the end of this column if you see anything that is not correct. There is a form provided on the web sites’ voter history page found when you click on a voter’s link.
By doing this, you can hold your election officials accountable and help clean-up the voter file. I believe the Supervisors of Elections want to do the best job possible. You can help them! Your bank has to balance their accounts down to the penny. Supervisors need to balance their totals down to the vote!
Florida has many excellent, informed and dedicated Supervisors of Elections. I believe that each of them believe it is their sacred honor and pride to run fair, open and accurate elections. This article is not to question their integrity. For the sake of all Florida voters it is critical to get to the bottom of who the Ghost voters were. Floridians need to know why they were NOT listed in the official statewide voter file. This file was produced during the very time when absentee and early voting was actively going on.
Florida voters must take charge of the process and know that their vote was counted and Ghost votes be investigated and resolved.
EDITORS NOTE: Kathy Dent, CERA, Supervisor of Elections for Sarasota County, states, “The writer was correct on one thing – that a number is a snapshot in time. The Florida Voter Registration System is fluid in nature. The numbers change daily as voters move from county to county. Just because book closing numbers are one number does not mean that by the time voter history is given that those numbers should match. Even on election day, voters move from one county to another which reflects voter history.”
One comment
Diana Demarest
November 16, 2013 at 2:35 pm
The Division of Elections screwed up this data, not the SOEs. I too get voter data from the state.
We found 7800 voters who were recorded by the state to have voted more than once in an election (One voter “voted” 18 times in the Deutch special election for congress in April, 2010). We also found more than 233,000 voter history records with no corresponding voter in the information file to match them.
Yet, when we compared the state’s data to our local SOE’s data, the SOE’s data was correct and did not display any voter as voting more than once and the ghost histories were voters who moved, died or lost their voting rights.
The state has received $200 million dollars of HAVA money, claims to have spent $40 million of it on voter file maintenance with a staff of 54. This is the best they can do?
The state needs to wrap its arms around this problem especially since they are raking in a ton of federal taxpayer dollars to “maintain” the voter rolls.
This is their core responsibility.
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