Identifying Voting System Weakness

Voting systems in this country have come under a lot of scrutiny in recent elections. People are beginning to question the integrity and security of our voting processes, so we decided to look into this issue and do something about it.

This tool was the result of two retired US Naval War College war gamers who reunited after many years during the Madison WI 2020 Presidential election recount. Reflecting on that experience caused them to form a small team in early Fall 2021 to war game how a threat actor could potentially infiltrate and disrupt America’s voting process here in Wisconsin. The critical weakness identified was the vast numbers of inactive, ineligible, deceased and/or fictitious names on State voter rolls associated with real addresses, unknown to the registered voters who actually lived there. And the very real risk that these names could be compromised and clandestinely used by threat actors to influence an election without the knowledge of the residents or the Clerks.

This caused the team serious concern, so it motivated them to create an online voter self-search and challenge tool to help close this loophole by making it easy for registered residents to report non-existent ghost voters registered at their homes, helping their Clerks update the State databases with only up-to-date, eligible voter names. And if the Clerks are not allowed legally to update the databases themselves, it could help generate enough voter concern to motivate State Legislatures to change the laws so these names can be removed. Because in the end, elections are ultimately decided through the processing of BALLOTS, not VOTES. And BALLOTS could potentially be easily created for names who are on the rolls but don’t really exist, and have their votes counted too.

We call them Ghost Voters.

What are Ghost Voters?

Ghost Voters are the names of people who may have once lived at an address but no longer do or were otherwise incorrectly associated with a specific address. While these names are usually marked as Inactive, their status can be easily changed by someone with access to county/municipal passwords to the State voter database. So in theory, an unscrupulous actor could make selected Inactive, Deceased, or Incapacitated voters Active prior to an election and potentially use these names to fraudulently obtain or create printed ballots. During the election cycle, once these ballots are injected into the system and fed into the machine tabulator, the fake votes would be counted. The voter names could then later switched back Inactive with no one the wiser. Hence a Ghost Voter.

For example, the State of Wisconsin has 7.1 million registered voters on the rolls but only roughly 3.6 million people are actually eligible to vote. However, there is little effort to remove these names from the official database, which presents a major security flaw in our voting system.

As a result of millions of excess names on the voter rolls in all 50 states, Ghost Voters could be a powerful tool to potentially obtain illegal ballots and swing an election – by any political party, domestic or foreign organization, or other unscrupulous actors wishing to influence our elections. Because while candidates work to obtain the people’s VOTES, a nefarious organization might instead try to influence the results through the manipulation and counting of BALLOTS. And once a ballot with a ghost name/address is injected into the system (i.e. 3:00 am), it then becomes anonymous and cannot be traced back to a name, and are thus indistinguishable from genuine ballots. So recounts or audits would still match up between paper and machine.

Clerks are required by law to maintain the accuracy of voter residence and eligibility in the State voter databases, and most do a great job but do not have first hand knowledge of every household in their district. Canvassers make some progress by going door to door to ask for voter verification from residents and then relay it to the Clerks. But the best and most effective method is to allow State residents to canvass themselves – en mass. Residents are in the best position to identify names on the rolls who live or don’t live with them, and then file updates to assist our Clerks. Without an address to affiliate a name, the Ghost Voter should be removed or made homeless and disassociated in the State voter databases, thus rendering it harmless.

Enter GhostFinder

GhostFinder is a party-neutral, online self-canvassing voter search engine and ghost voter challenge tool that local residents can use to easily identify and request removal of any names associated with their home address who either don’t live there, or are otherwise ineligible to vote. GhostFinder enables this by using a legally obtained copy of your State’s official voter database.

In short, GhostFinder can be considered as Voter Self-Canvassing on a massive scale using the power of the Internet to enable everyone to easily identify and help their Clerks eliminate Ghost Voter names from their own homes and the homes of their loved ones.

Simply choose your State and County, then type in your address and see how many names are officially associated with your home. You will also be able to search by last name shortly. Select the names of those who don’t belong to add them to your Challenge list, fill out your contact information, then print. Pre-filled challenge letters will be autogenerated that you can then notarize and send copies to the correct authorities, including your Clerk, Legislative representative, your State Election Commission or Secretary of State, and even your Sheriff if you feel a law has been broken. And if your Clerks do not have the authority by law to make these changes, enough of these grass root voter challenges could be used to motivate our Legislatures to change the law so they can. Why? Because nothing will get an elected official’s attention quicker than a massive avalanche of highly vocal registered voters demanding that names be removed from their home addresses. Note that we do NOT collect or keep your inputted information, it is only used to populate the Challenge letter form.

In Summary

It’s up to us to clean up the voter rolls, and what better place to do so then at our home address? By challenging and removing and/or disassociating incorrect names from our homes, we can make a difference and restore some of the voter integrity that has been taken from us. Election integrity is something we should ALL be concerned about, and we are providing GhostFinder to give people a powerful tool to bolster election integrity.

GhostFinder can be used by poll watchers to identify and challenge name/address associations on the voting rolls as well.

Note: Using this site as an inspiration for new voter integrity efforts is highly encouraged. A copy of the code for this site is available for any interested voter integrity organization free of charge.Technical support may also be requested from the site’s third party IT developer on a contract basis to stand up your page and integrate your State’s voter data. Navigate to Contact and submit a request.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. ”

PLATO – paraphrased quote from The Republic, (Book 1, 346–347)