EPEC NEWS

From EPEC Team Newsletter:

Virginia’s 2024 Presidential Election — and trust in the results — would not be possible without thousands of election volunteers who augment the Department of Elections’ work managing the 45-day election marathon.

EPEC Team thanks all of them — and the volunteers who make EPEC Team run.

Over 4.8 million voters cast a ballot in the 2024 general election across thousands of precincts. That’s a lot of pollwatching.

For seven weeks during early voting, every day was Election Day. Volunteers and workers were up at 5 AM each day to set up precincts, ensure all was in order, to track it all as observers, manage the datasets, and then make sure all was in order each night for closing.

Dedicated election experts trained up volunteer observers, other volunteers worked the schedules, collected reports throughout the early voting period, as more than 2 million ballots were cast during in-person and mail-in balloting.

On Election Day, they did it again as voters cast more than 2 million ballots.

We salute them all for their critically important role in this exercise in self-government. They include registrars managing voter lists, Elections Officers running precincts during Early Voting and Game Day, enterprise technology officials making sure the machines are counting properly, and volunteers keeping watch on every aspect to ensure a fair and accurate count.

STATS TO CHEW ON:

EPEC Team’s volunteers and data analysts were also analyzing skyrocketing provisional ballots. By the end of Early Voting, about 27,000 Provisional and Same Day Registration ballots had been cast, and close to 100,000 came in on Election Day.

This is a big development.

Source: VA Dept. of Elections

By far, the majority of them were in Virginia’s college towns, as this graph from VPAP.org shows:

Source: Virginia Public Access Project

Election workers were swamped by SDR surges, as were Electoral Boards during the canvas portion of the vote. Teams of workers and volunteer observers worked around the clock to process and verify eligibility among the roughly 123,000 provisional and SDR ballots tallied so far, the first presidential election in Virginia with full SDR.

We are reviewing the results and will have much more to report. EPEC Team salutes election officials and volunteer observers for scrambling to handle the deluge.

We have learned a lot as a team since 2020, noted Ken Lubeck, who serves on the board of directors and is a founding member of EPEC:

“I’m grateful that we had some wins and moved the needle. We now have a clearer picture of what still needs to be done in election security. I’m grateful for all the help from all over Virginia and beyond.”

Jon Lareau, Executive Director and Chief Technology Officer (who volunteers his time and resources outside of his day job), offered a grace note on his “X” feed, writing:

I want to take a second and give a heartfelt thanks to all the tireless (and many nameless) volunteers across the country that have been “digital poll watching” this election, and have been paying close attention to various issues and bringing them to light.

The mere fact that members of the public are watching closely, running the numbers, and working with their election officials to address issues, is one of the reasons (I believe) we saw a much better run election this time.

Even though that work is sometimes confrontational, it is very much needed, and I highly encourage other members of the public to learn and to get involved in any way they can and feel comfortable. There are still a LOT of problems to be solved, to be sure, and the work is far far far from over.

But progress has been made. The ball has been moved downfield, at least.

Election integrity should not be a partisan issue. It touches aspects of law, philosophy, public policy, gov accountability, transparency, IT issues, administration, implementation, data science and analysis. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. To everyone that has been “doing the work.”

EPEC Team has also been blessed by the contributions of our newest board members, Chris Rohland and Rick Naigle. Like Lubeck and Lareau, both bring a wealth of expertise in networking, storage, high-security technology environments, data analysis, and knowledge of election law to their contributions.

They are key leaders of EPEC Team members and volunteers who toil each week, all year long, dedicated to election security, for which we are grateful.

We are also grateful to donors who see the value and importance of EPEC Team’s unique, tech-focused work, and have made generous contributions to help us grow this charitable, educational mission. We look forward to delivering a full report.

As we think about all our blessings on this Thanksgiving Holiday with family and friends, EPEC Team salutes all the tireless patriots working to ensure free, fair, and transparent elections. Until our next gathering to keep up the work, thank you! ##