EPEC NEWS

Commissioner of Elections’ recent briefing to VA General Assembly shows a difference of over 35,000 ballots compared to Daily Absentee List ballot totals. EPEC Team breaks it down.

By Rick Naigle, Senior Data Analyst

When Virginia’s Commissioner of Elections Susan Beals briefed the Virginia General Assembly’s Privileges & Elections Committee last month about the 2024 Election, she presented a few slides summarizing the 2024 Election year.

Among the data points:

• Virginia managed 175 days of voting, which translates to polls being open for 48% of the calendar year, spanning five elections.

• About 70% of the electorate cast 4.5 million ballots: 48% on election day and 52% who voted early or by mail. In Virginia’s 2020 presidential election, 63% of voters cast an absentee ballot.

• In the 2024 election, 95,354 individuals used a drop-off location to deliver their mail-in ballot; about 200 had a “designated representative” drop off their ballot.
• Virginians cast more than 123,000 Same Day Registration (provisional ballots), which accounted for 3% of the 2024 results. That is way up (by over 4000%) since 2022 when SDR allowed people to register and vote through Election Day.

EPEC Team’s analysis of early voting data leads us to this question:

Why Does Early Voting Data Show a 35,344-Ballot Discrepancy?

The early voting ballot numbers cited in the Commissioner’s report are 35,344 more than the total number of early voting ballots in the final Daily Absentee List (DAL) received by EPEC on 19 November 2024.

Why do we see a 1.5% difference in the ballot totals?

The Commissioner’s report includes a category not previously seen in the data: Drop Off ballots. We assume, from the color scheme in the slide above, that the green columns reflect ballots issued during the early voting period. Drop Off may mean ballots issued in response to approved early voting ballot requests, but returned (in person) by absentee voters on election day.

If Drop Off ballots are absentee ballots issued during the early voting period, then 86,535 By Mail ballots reported as received in the DAL data are not included in the Commissioner’s totals.

Early Voting totals from the Commissioner’s 13 Jan 2025 presentation vary from the final DAL totals issued by Department of Elections on 19 Nov 2024.

We cannot account for the 35,344 ballot discrepancy.

See chart below of Early Voting data:

Chart shows differences between Early Voting totals reported from Dept. of Election’s 13 Jan 2025 presentation compared to final DAL totals issued by Department of Elections on 19 Nov 2024.

We assume the Drop Off ballots were received during early voting, so they should have been in the DAL By Mail total. If the Drop Off ballots were early voting ballots not recorded as having been returned in the DAL, then we have an 86,535-ballot difference between the Commissioner’s Report and the DAL data, which has not been explained.

What do you think? Leave a comment if you think this warrants more information.

Finally, if you haven’t seen EPEC Team’s just-released Survey of General Registrars and Electoral Boards about their experience with SDR in 2024, the results can be viewed here.

EPEC Team is grateful to the GRs and EBs who took the time with survey responses to help the Commonwealth understand SDR’s impact on the voting process.