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How to Analyze and Determine Voter Fraud

Updated on February 16, 2017


The charges of voter fraud is very serious. We as a nation should insure the integrity of our voting system. How can we determine if there is fraud and the extent of it? The answer can be found with Big Data computer analysis. I am pretty sure companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM and SAP have the means and the resources to get to the bottom of this.

- Jan. 2017

What is Voter Fraud?

Voter fraud can take many forms. Some are deliberate and some may be clerical mistakes. Here is a list of possible fraudulent activities.

  • Voter is not a citizen of age 18 or over.
  • Voter is a convicted felon.
  • Voter voted more than once.
  • Voter voted using an alias or bogus name.
  • Voter is deceased.
  • Voting machines could be tampered.
  • Electronic voting could be hacked and votes changed.
  • Identity theft. Your name could have been stolen by criminals.

How to determine Voter Fraud?

This is a relatively simple computer program given the necessary "data" is accessible.

In order to sort this problem, there are 4 databases required.

1. The actual voting records.

2. The birth and death records kept by Social Security Administration.

3. The immigration and naturalization records by the INS.

4. The criminal justice system both national (FBI) and local state and cities criminal court files.

As you can imagine these databases are huge. They include data on all 320 million people that are living in the US as counted by our last census.

That is where "Big Data" processing come into the picture.

The Task at Hand

Once the program is given access to these databases, the solution becomes a simple sorting process. A flow chart can be created that look something like this...

1. take a vote from the voting record that voted (D), and look up the name and address for a match in the databases.

2. If there are one found, check to see if it appeared before (duplicate test)

3. Check if this person is age 18 or over and not deceased. (death test)

4. Check if person is a citizen (citizen test)

5. Check if this person is a felon (felon test)

6. If there is no match (name is a bogus)

7. Repeat process for next voted... till end.

8. Repeat same process 1-7 for votes for (R).

At the conclusion of this process, there should be sorted buckets of votes counted for each category and by Party affiliation.

It should be abundantly clear if any fraud activity resulted in a flipped election.

Another Consideration

What I described is a basic problem solving technique using big data. However, there is much more to this. For example, each of us who uses the web have a digital profile. This data is collected by companies like Google and Amazon and Apple for business reasons. They use this information to target their advertising campaign. For example, if you search on google a particular item such as sunglasses, the system records that and when you visit another webpage, you will notice ads about sunglasses. This was no accident.

Suppose you take that profile and match it against the voting data, guess what, you will find a high level of corrolation between the items you buy and the party you may vote for. Depending on the books you buy or read, you are most likely a conservative or a liberal...

This Big Data processing now extends to not only solving problems like voter fraud, but predicting what people may do in the voting booth. How powerful is that? For that reason, privacy and security and accuracy of data is paramount.

I don't know how prevalent identity theft is but it is a concern. I also don't know the extent some thieves will go to misappropriate someone's identity. They usually do this to steal money from your account or open new fradulent accounts in your name. Will that person go as far as using your name to register to vote and cast a ballot in your name? It is possible.

Having the big data processed will allow investigators to look into some specific area of intrution. For example, if a person bought conservative books only and showed up voting for Democrats, that would be a red flag. The opposite is truth also.


This problem, as you can see is not a real problem but an accepted one. The solution is very easy to get. The question is do we, as a nation, have the will and the courage to find out?


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