Unique form of election data manipulation in N. Carolina

FPI / January 17, 2021

By David W. Goetze

While the media is full of reporting on foreign interference in our recent election and the vote shifting between President Trump and Joe Biden, there was a far different shifting of votes that took place in the North Carolina election data that clearly altered the outcome in several key statewide races.

Trump won NC. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis won re-election to his seat in Congress. Every Republican incumbent member of the U.S. House won their seats for another term. Every statewide judicial race was won by a Republican. It was a red wave of epic proportions — except for the four Council of State seats that just happen to have a statutory or constitutional role to play in the conduct of elections in NC or the investigation of any election fraud: Governor, Attorney General, State Auditor and Secretary of State.

Coincidence you say?  The data suggests otherwise, just as I reported previously on a similar outcome in NC in 2016.

Because I was downloading election data files on a daily basis from the State Board of Election's website throughout the election period, I was able to track any changes in vote totals from day-to-day. As this graphic reflects, following Election Day, every Republican Council of State candidate saw their vote totals from By-Mail ballots decrease by 27,000 or more votes while their Democrat challengers saw theirs increase by a slightly lesser but similar amount.

The bottom listing on this chart is for the two candidates for Attorney General, Josh Stein, the Democrat incumbent, and Jim O'Neill, his Republican challenger.

This vote shifting not only gave Stein the victory, but swung the votes just enough to increase his margin of victory beyond the 10,000 vote threshold to keep O'Neill from demanding an automatic recount at state expense.

We saw a similar shift in 2016 that gave Roy Cooper his win over Pat McCrory for governor.  Neither challenger had the funds to pay for the cost of a recount to dispute the outcome and we can be sure the Democrats knew that.

Just to give you a taste of the many other irregularities I've found in the data, there are over 23,000 more voters now being reported as having voted during Early Voting than was being reported on Election Day.  There are ballots reported for one voter on Election Day that now show up as having been cast under an entirely different NCID#, the unique voter registration number assigned to each voter.  There are nearly 6,000 ballots that to this day still show as status of "Pending" including more than a few that despite that status do not reflect any date of return to the County Board of Elections at all.

But how is this all possible?

Some may recall from 2016 that I identified 505 missing lines of Over Vote and Under Vote totals from that election's Results Data File.  (An Over Vote is when you vote for more choices than allowed, and an Under Vote is when you don't choose enough or leave it blank.  This is essential to reconciling the total possible votes with the total number of ballots cast.)  The State Board's response to my finding was not to investigate how those lines went missing, but rather to simply stop reporting those numbers publicly at all!

In response, the Legislature included in HB 1169, passed into law earlier last year, a mandate that they resume making those numbers part of their public data reporting.  These are all vote totals I believe were manually redirected to selected candidates to increase their overall vote totals.  But the State Board has failed to comply with that law even as I write this some 70 days after Election Day, so we can't know if they were doctored again as well or not.

If you would like to see a more detailed explanation of all of this, I have produced a 21-minute YouTube video that shows you the actual numbers and sources of my data that to me prove the data manipulation that took place and who benefited from it. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/DTBirZj9SVc

This didn't take fancy vote switching software or suitcases of ballots being dragged out from under a table in the dead of night.  All it took was someone with direct access to the raw data to make the necessary changes to keep Republicans from having any direct control over elections in NC.  I have been promised an opportunity to brief the Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee in the near future once they gavel into session for the 2021-2022 term, and will be making several specific recommendations to them to insure this can never again happen in the Tarheel State.

David W. Goetze, Major (Ret), U.S. Army Military Police Corps. is an international business development consultant who has been analyzing election results in North Carolina in recent years as part of what he considers his civic duty.

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