Electronic Registration Opens Door to Fraud

Bots Love Electronic Voter Registration

This is the first in a series of articles exposing problems with Electronic Voter Registration. Other articles include Phantom Voters and Digital ID , Phantom Election Management , and Data Collection Disguised.

In 2016 the Idaho legislature passed a bill allowing for Electronic Voter Registration, and since that time there has been a large increase in the number of newly registered voters. For example, between 2016 and 2024 registration in Kootenai County of the voting-age population (VAP) jumped from about 65% to 78%. During this same period the number of new registrations per year more than doubled. (These numbers show increases that are much higher than can be explained by real population growth).

But isn't this good news? What is wrong with having more people registering to vote?

If we could be sure that the reason voter rolls were swelling was because real Idaho residents with authentic identification were the ones registering, then online registration would be a boon. But there is overwhelming evidence that it is computerized fraud-bots rather than actual humans that are super-sizing Idaho’s voter rolls. How do we know this?

This three-minute video entitled How Every State's Elections Have Become Centrally Controlled, explains how the extremely regular addition and deletion patterns Dr. Frank sees in every state’s voter rolls could only have been done by a computer. He shows that these patterns are certain proof that voter rolls are being manipulated in every state. Dr. Frank's short video is well worth watching, and once you see the patterns they are impossible to ignore.

The problem is not just that electronic registration inflates voter rolls. This is obviously a problem, and in Kootenai county, voter rolls often grow by over 20% in a single year. But after every federal general election—just after the fraud-bots have spiked voter rolls—the Secretary of State's office runs Election Management software that removes tens of thousands of voters all at one time. What we are seeing is a sophisticated software program that systematically inflates, and then cleanses voter rolls, and it is happening nationwide.

Dr. Frank's short video referenced above explains the problem of nationally-rigged voter rolls, but it uses data from Wisconsin and Wyoming, not Idaho. But in 2022 Dr. Frank actually visited Post Falls and presented Idaho's election data from 2020. A link to Dr. Frank's presentation in Post Falls is here, and the data specific to Idaho starts around 41:00. In the Post Falls video he goes into much more detail and shows the registration and ballot casts data from each Idaho county.

Additional evidence that bots, rather than people, are taking advantage of Idaho’s electronic registration system, can be seen from the statistics on Idaho’s SOS website regarding online registration. It appears that in the 60 days before the election, over 250K attempts were made to register to vote online, about half of which appear to have been successful.

But given that Idaho has only 1.1 Million registered voters, it is hard to believe that 250K new voters attempted to register in two months.These numbers are clearly out of proportion, and the 50% failure rate seems to indicate that many attempts were made with incomplete or inaccurate data. We would expect fewer attempts, and a higher success rate from real people with authentic credentials.

But of course there is no auditable paper trail for electronic registrants, since those who register electronically are not required to fill out a registration form or provide a signature. And Tenex, the company that provides the Voter Registration software, is private and not subject to public records requests.

Is Fraud Really Happening in Idaho?

This graph of Ada County's 2020 election data shows that voter registration rolls followed an impossible regular pattern of enrollment that was uniform across all counties in the state. Even more alarming, Dr. Frank proved that the ballots cast in the 2020 election perfectly followed the registration data by a given percentage for every single age cohort, across ALL Idaho counties. This could not have happened by chance, and it is evidence of computerized election fraud, not just voter roll fraud.

Additional evidence that electronic registration has corrupted Idaho’s elections can be found by taking a look at Kootenai County’s voter rolls and voting patterns over the last 20 years. The following chart illustrates the increase in both annual voter registration, and in election day ballots cast over time. There has been a significant jump in both registrations and number of ballots cast, since e-poll books and e-registration were introduced in 2018.

More Evidence of Corrupted Elections

This chart shows both "official turnout" (ballots cast as a percentage of registered voters), and actual turnout (ballots cast as a percentage of the voter age population). A significant increase in actual turnout without a compelling explanation could indicate fraud.

Notice that for Kootenai County, the "official turnout" in the general election remains exactly the same at 87% for the 2020 election, in spite of large increases in the "percent of registered voters" and "actual turnout". These numbers are consistent with Dr. Frank's numbers, and they show that the suspicious elevations in both registrations and ballots cast are disguised by "official turnout" numbers.

While it is true that 2020 was an unusual election, this data shows that the disturbing trends for 2020 persisted for the 2024 elections. An examination of the registration data for 2024 shows that over 20,000 new registrations were made in Kootenai County in the two months leading up to election day and over 10,000 registrations were removed (by the Secretary of State's office) in the two months following election day.

We have seen proof that electronic registration has led to corrupted voter rolls, and it is especially disturbing that Idaho allows residents to register on line and then request an absentee ballot online without EVER appearing in person before an elections official. This seems to undermine all safeguards for voter integrity and makes us question why voters who register online are held to lower standards than those who register in-person or by mail.

The information that must be provided for a valid registration is given in Title 34-411, and can be summarized as follows:

• Elector must complete a written voter registration form that includes name, birthdate, address, DL or SSN (last four digits), and political party.

• Elector must sign and date an oath testifying that the applicant is a) a legal U.S. resident, b) over 18, c) not a felon, and d) a resident of Idaho for 30+ days.

• Elector must provide proof of identity and proof of residence, in person, to a county election official.

However, according to Idaho Statute 34-409, which provides for Electronic Registration, almost all of these requirements for a valid registration are waived for entities who register to vote online. In short, because the because the DMV's DL residence data is assumed to be accurate, electronic registration short-circuits the whole process of in-person verification and auditability. This is very convenient for BOTS.

Electronic Registration is not secure; it opens the door to election fraud, and it is entirely unnecessary. There are three other ways to register to vote in Idaho that uphold higher standards for valid registration and are more secure: 1) In-person Registration at the elections office up to two weeks before an election. (34-407, added 1970), 2) Election Day Registration (34-408A, added 1994), and 3) Mail-in Registration (34-410, added 1994).

As the chart below shows, electronic registration waives almost every check put in place by Idaho election registration codes (34-411).

Online Registration Held to Lower Standards

Online Registration is Unfixable

As much as we like to believe that Idaho is immune from election fraud, programs that corrupt voter rolls and steal elections are run by sophisticated fraudsters at a national level and they have access to illicit personal information of Idaho voters. And Idaho needs to do everything possible to protect its elections from them.

Idaho legislators should simply revoke 34-409 and disallow online registration. Attempts to make electronic registration more secure by establishing multi-factor authentication or doing more verification after-the-fact are half-measures that could be gotten around. And it is futile to attempt other measures to "clean-up" voter rolls as long as new fraudulent registrations can be easily It re-introduced.

Where elections are concerned, convenience and integrity are at cross-purposes. Almost every recent “reform” intended to make registering and voting easier has made elections LESS SECURE. And the only thing that legislators can do to protect Idaho elections is to transition to a less computerized, more transparent, and in some ways less "convenient" manner of conducting elections.