The mission of Vote Sleuth is to investigate American election results and voter registration databases, summarize our findings, and publicly publish our data and findings quickly and accurately. We gather publicly available data sets from multiple state-level agencies and explore it using data visualization tools and scripts. This allows us to look at the data in unique ways. We can take a bird’s eye view, look at trends in the data taken as a whole, look at strange localized trends, and watch individual voter records change over time. This type of national assessment of election integrity in America has either never been performed, or it has never been made available to the public. We are here to change that.
What We Do
Vote Sleuth obtains election data and voter registration files directly from official state election boards, and performs multiple reviews and analyses of these data. Some of the analyses are simple statistics, and others are metrics commonly used for reviewing changes to election data sets or the integrity of election results. We seek published academic papers and resources to use as guidelines for our work.
We publish the data and findings here at VoteSleuth.org, and on my Medium page, and collaborate with journalists to publish our findings through news media. We are committed to performing our work in a scientifically rigorous, methodical, transparent, and fully documented manner.
We are actively seeking experts in applicable scientific fields to partner with Vote Sleuth as advisors.
Transparency
We believe this work is critically important. For far too long, election results have been obscured by local jurisdictions and bureaucracy, and nation-wide public investigations of election integrity have not been performed. It is time to shine a bright light on these data and election results, and we should all be paying attention to anomalies.
We deserve fair elections. Every vote matters, and every vote should be counted, tallied, and reported accurately.
Thus, we are completely committed to transparency in our work. Vote Sleuth was founded by Saill White in May of 2017. All of the work reported on this VoteSleuth.org website was personally performed by Saill, with occasional assistance from volunteer researchers. Any volunteer researchers who want to be publicly identified are named with their associated work. Names of any volunteers who want to remain anonymous are redacted. All of the data provided on this website were personally obtained by Saill, and any associated fees for the data and for the computing power necessary to analyze the data were paid by Saill. Saill is self-employed and has donated 100% of the time she has spent on VoteSleuth endeavors. She has not received or accepted any donations for this work. Saill and VoteSleuth are fully independent and are not associated with any corporations, big “dark money” donors, or other groups.
Quality Assurance and Quality Control
Saill is responsible for quality assurance and quality control of the Vote Sleuth work. She is actively seeking additional experts to join Vote Sleuth in an advisory role.
Some of the analytical metrics used for review of election data sets fall within the field of statistics. Saill collaborated with two PhD professors at University of Washington to identify appropriate use of these metrics for Vote Sleuth analyses.
About Saill
I have been working to make complex data easy to understand for the past three decades. With a degree in Physics from UC Berkeley, my first job after college was helping scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory make sense of stellar search and supernova data.
I have since worked in the fields of building energy efficiency, artificial intelligence, operating system virtualization and web interface development.
In April 2017 I became aware of a very odd and pervasive statistical implausibility with respect to election data. Statisticians were reporting that in many counties in certain states there were a higher percentage of votes for the Republican candidate in precincts where more ballots were cast.
This article about a statistician’s denied request to audit Kansas voting machines based on some statistically anomalous results she had found when looking at precinct-level election returns vs. precinct size led me to some extremely alarming papers by statisticians who have noticed odd-looking data when they tally precinct-level votes starting with the smallest precincts and moving to the largest.
I found this quite shocking. Their results looked bizarre:
How Trustworthy are Electronic Voting Systems in the US? (Beth Clarkson)
Republican Primary Election 2012 Results – Amazing Statistical Anomalies
A Statistician’s Review of “Republican Primary Election 2012 Results: Amazing Statistical Anomalies”
NSA Analyst Proves GOP Is Stealing Elections
I decided to investigate this myself.
Believing that this implausible correlation must be due to cherry-picked counties with unevenly distributed demographics, I applied my programming and data visualization skills to the task of performing this analysis for ALL the counties and precincts participating in a given race.
This website is a record of of my ongoing work.
My brief resume is here.
Team
Technical Advisors:
Our deltaM and deltaMxV metrics were developed with much guidance and feedback from Dr. Laura Little and Dr. Tracy Simpson of the University of Washington.
Editing, Late Night Brainstorming, and Moral Support Team (in order of appearance):
erika
@mikefarb1
@milenaac
Jenny
@realShawnEib
Eric
@kottipillar
@NikaTheAdvocate
@rosesansthorns
@quatraingleam
Thanks to all of the above for their support, their love, and for always having my back even when the going has been tough.