With early voting entering its second day, the candidates running for office and the voters are expecting that all ballots are counted fairly and accurately. However an El Paso News exclusive review of the ballots cast by El Paso’s voters on November 5 shows that two people voted using the same voter identification number.
What we found in the data supplied by the El Paso County Elections Department brings up the question of whether the election’s department is accurately processing votes and whether the data they release to the public is accurate. Each election cycle, the Elections Department makes available a list of voters that are registered to vote in the county. In addition to the names and addresses of the voters, the list includes whether the voter voted in past elections. The latest data set includes ballots cast from November 5 through 2017.
This data is used by the candidates and consultants to identify the likely voters they wish to target with election paraphernalia. Researchers use the voter data to look at voting trends and, in some cases, analyze ballot integrity. An ACLU case recently filed alleging that Montana’s laws “hinder Native American participation” in the electoral process uses voter data to argue their case.
The Montana case included an Emory University and Bernard College, Columbia University research paper arguing whether strict voter identification requirements were keeping voters from the polls. The paper used the Texas Voter Unique Identifier Number (VUID) as an analysis tool to sample voters who filed a “Reasonable Impediment Declaration” to be allowed to vote when they did not have the proper identification.
The VUID has been used to perform racial analysis of voter participation in other lawsuits including the 2014 Marc Veasey, et al., v. Rick Perry, et al., challenging the state’s requirement to cast a ballot in elections.
The Texas Voter Unique Identifier Number
The Texas Voter Unique Identifier Number (VUID) is used by Texas officials to uniquely identify each voter that casts a ballot in Texas elections. Each Texas voter has their VUID listed on their voter registration cards.
Texas voters wishing to update their voter registration online are required to use the VUID to access their record.
Because the VUID is supposed to be unique to each voter, having two individuals with the same VUID should not be possible. Moreover, when two or more voters use the same VUID and cast ballots in an election it raises the question of the integrity of the ballot box and introduces errors into any election analysis.
What We Found
In preparing for our data analysis we ensure that our data sets are as accurate as possible. As we introduce data to our data sets, one of the processes we follow is to scrub the duplicates from the data. Over the years we have found data discrepancies in the voter data the County provides the public. In most cases we can clean up the data with algorithms we have created over the years that allows us to ensure the data’s integrity before adding it to our data sets.
We have occasionally noted voters having the same Texas Voter Unique Identifier Number (VUID) but have not seen a case where both voted in an election. Although we noted the discrepancy, for our purposes it did not affect our voter datasets because we had not seen an instance of two voters with the same VUID voting in an election – until the November 5 election.
We discovered that two voters share the same VUID number: 1094395483. (see note below about privacy)
In investigating the discrepancy, we discovered that the two voters appear to be a father and son who live at the same address. We base this on their dates of birth and the fact that one uses the “Jr” in their name.
Because of their birthdates and the county’s internal identification number for each voter we know that these are two individuals and not one.
After discovering that two voters used the same VUID two cast ballots, we reached out to the election’s department for confirmation of our findings and an explanation. We also looked at the voting history of the two voters.
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What The County Says About The Two Voters
In two email exchanges yesterday with Lisa Wise, the El Paso County Elections Administrator, she explained that the “both individuals were assigned the same VUID.” Wise also confirmed to us that it is the Texas Secretary of State that assigns the VUID.
We asked Wise if both voters voted in the November 5 election. She replied that “only the father voted in the November election.”
However, the County Elections Department releases a data set after each election showing who voted, where they voted, the date the voter cast their ballot and whether it was a mail-in ballot or if it was an in-person voter.
The County’s data shows two people casting a ballot on October 27 at the Marty Robbins early voting polling station. The data shows two ballots cast that day using the same VUID but because the data does not include a birthdate, we cannot determine whether it was one voter casting two ballots or both voters – the likely scenario – each casting a ballot.
We asked Lisa Wise about this discrepancy.
Wise reiterated that the younger voter “did not vote a regular ballot or provisional ballot.”
We asked Wise to explain what happens when a second voter appears at the polling station using a VUID that had already cast a ballot. Wise wrote that “he would have had to vote a provisional ballot and been assigned a separate VUID.”
However, the voting data does not support this and Wise, herself, reiterated that only the older voter had cast a ballot even though the county’s own voting data shows two ballots cast at the Marty Robbins facility on October 22.
Wise insists that only one ballot has been counted even though her department’s data sets show that two ballots were cast.
In her emails to us, Wise wrote that when a provisional ballot is used a “separate VUID” is assigned to the younger voter, adding that a “provisional ballot would flag this [duplicate VUID] in the system.”
This does not appear to be correct because our analysis discovered that the same VUID was used to cast ballots in 2022. Had the system “flagged” the two VUIDs in 2022, as Wise wrote to us, then it would not have been possible for the younger voter to cast a ballot in the last election with the same VUID.
We asked Wise to explain what would happen if both voters showed up to the polls during the ongoing runoff election. She replied that “both voters will be allowed to vote and would have been allowed to vote previously with the younger voter needing to vote provisionally so that any discrepancies could’ve been remedied and that vote counted.”
Important Unanswered Questions Remain
In her responses to us, Lisa Wise insists that only one vote was counted because “the record does not indicate two ballots were actually cast.”
Yet the County’s voting records data contradicts this because they show two voters using the same VUID casting a ballot at the Marty Robbins facility.
Left unanswered are the questions of whether two votes were counted, or only one vote was counted? Both scenarios lead to questions about the integrity of the El Paso vote count because either one voter was disfranchised – if we accept Wise’s answers – or the unique voter identification number cannot be trusted to accurately count the ballots cast in El Paso County.
As of the latest county voter rolls released by the El Paso County Elections Department on November 19, both voters, using the same VUID, continue to be listed on the County’s voter rolls. We also identified around 19,000 other errors in the County’s latest dataset that do not necessarily impact the ballots cast but are concerning for data analysis when examining voter data.
We will continue to investigate this by reviewing our data sets against the County’s voter records to determine whether other discrepancies exist in the voter data used by El Paso County for elections.
Privacy note: Although we do not believe that the voters did anything wrong, we nonetheless used their VUID because the data is readily available to the public in the data released by the Election’s Department and online at both the Texas Secretary of State and the El Paso County Elections Department.