Comparing Votes to Voters in Pennsylvania

Those following the Biden election fraud conspiracy theories will be familiar with the claim made by a group of Republican Pennsylvania legislators that there were more votes than voters in the election. President Trump himself tweeted it, putting the number at 205,000.

The (exaggerated number) comes from comparing the Pennsylvania Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE). It would make sense on the surface that the number of people who voted as recorded in the state voter registration system should equal the number of votes cast. The problem is that the Vote totals are carefully counted and certified, and the SURE database is something that appears to be aggregated over time, and not up to date.

I purchased a copy of the SURE data released on December 28, 2020 and I found that it’s still being updated, based on the record change dates in the file for people who voted in the 2020 presidential election. Here is the recent record change summary:

Record change dates for Pennsylvania SURE data for persons recorded as voting in the 2020 Presidential Election

I looked at those voters in SURE that voted in the 2020 election and compared it to the current (January 1, 2021) unofficial election results from the Secretary of State’s website and found that at the county level, there were sometimes more votes than voters, and sometimes more voters than votes. In short, the two databases really don’t correspond well. My results are here.

Trump dumber than many of his followers

When looking at the 2020 election fraud conspiracy theories, some are dumber than others and some are more simply debunked than others. One of the dumbest and simplest to debug is the claim that there were more votes than voters in Pennsylvania.

The claim takes the number of absentee ballots requested in the Pennsylvania primary election and compares it to the number of absentee votes cast in the general election. Oops. If one takes the number of absentee ballots requested for the general election, then it is smaller (as it would have to be) to the number of absentee ballots cast.

This was of course debunked by the journalists who do this for a living:

These debunking articles are a month or more old today, as Trump continues to repeat them

And just in case it gets deleted, here’s a picture:

Open letter to Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee

Dear Senator Graham:

I was extremely troubled to hear press reports that President Trump was considering appointing Sidney Powell as a special prosecutor to investigate fraud in the 2020 election.

As you are probably aware, Powell was responsible for filing lawsuits fancifully called the “Kraken” in four states. In the Georgia lawsuit, signed by Powell, a false statement appears in the complaint describing an affidavit filed with the suit as that of “a former US Military Intelligence expert” when in fact, the affiant Joshua Merritt was never in military intelligence. Further the affidavit included with the Kraken lawsuits also contains the same false statement. Powell attempted to conceal the identity or Mr. Merritt even from opposing counsel.

Either Powell suborned perjury or she was grossly negligent in vetting her affiant. In either case, such a person is unfit for a position of trust under the United States, and particularly unfit for the job of investigating such a sensitive issue as election fraud.

Sidney Powell unleashes the #Kraken

After weeks of Trump attorneys alleging fraud in press releases, but not in court, we finally have a lawsuit that alleges specific fraud from Attorney Sidney Powell and L LinnWood in Georgia representing Republican elector candidates in the 2020 Presidential election.

Powell has billed her 104-page filing in US District Court, Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division the “#Kraken” and the interested reader could try reading it. It’s painfully bad in places; for more on that, see Mike Dunford’s “The Kraken Lawsuit Was Released and It’s Way Dumber than You Realize.”

It is somewhat confusing exactly where this lawsuit was filed.

I will expand this article when I have had a chance to dig into the specifics, but there is one wildly implausible claim in it. It claims that Dominion Voting Systems adulterated the results of the election by switching votes in at least sufficient quantities to change the outcome. The scheme involves the ghost of Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez connecting to voting machines through the “internet of things” and flipping voters from Trump to Biden. It also claims that the hand recount was adulterated by election workers, who sorted ballots into piles for different candidates and put Trump votes in the Biden piles. Now someone explain to me how the machine totals end up closely tracking the manual recount across the state. There is no mechanism through which the totals could be made to match without controls and conspiracies so large that it strains the imagination.

Dunford notes that the Georgia lawsuit made repeated references to Michigan, an obvious failure to proofread when using one state’s complaint as a basis for another.

Rudy Giuliani and “The Kraken” (not an authentic image)

The Kraken – Michigan (aka King v. Whitmer) suffers from similar production problems. One of the affidavits in the Michigan suit reportedly details fraud in Edison County, a county well known for fraudulently claiming to be in Michigan rather than New Jersey.

All in all, #Kraken lawsuits were filed in four states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. They were all dismissed.