Analyst Finds Same Phone Number Used to Register Multiple Voters in Different PA Counties

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Election data analyst Bobby Piton has defined a subset of voters as “phantom sleeper voters”. These voters are defined as voters who don’t really exist, are dead, may have used a maiden name and married name to register, used variations of a name (Bob Piton and Bobby Piton), or are in some other way an anomalous group of individuals.

https://twitter.com/BobbyPiton3/status/1339507512337436675

Piton has found an interesting feature that correlates with their voters. By analyzing voter records he found the same phone number is often used for the registration of these phantom sleeper voters. Interestingly, the same numbers are used multiple times and often in multiple counties.

https://twitter.com/BobbyPiton3/status/1339929894982201346?s=20

When Piton analyzed voter records from Pennsylvania he found that a single phone number might be used in as many as 4 counties across the state. According to Piton, he had to organize the data in such a manner that allowed for 800,000 names to be run through an incredible number of calculations – 640 billion to be exact.

Piton found that there are 3,417,183 unique phone numbers being used in the 67 counties in Pennsylvania. Nearly 8% of all voters, or 288,220, had phone numbers that overlapped in the data set, meaning these phone numbers were used more than once. He discovered that 12,186 individuals throughout the state have their phone numbers overlap with people in Philadelphia.

PA COUNTY/CITYTOTAL
PHONE #
#UNIQUE
NUMBERS
# USED MORE
THAN ONCE
Allegheny33189331740814485
Berks18771316392423789
Bucks17516016098914170
Cameron15311339192
Chester22183118984631985
Cumberland70752665734179
Dauphin64108615172591
Delaware99826972192607
Erie94499867087791
Forest12791115164
Fulton39863590396
Lancaster1491481399419207
Lehigh82340786353705
Luzerne85356788456511
Montgomery1671551616795476
Northhampton76053724053648
Philadelphia58286554766035205
Potter49064329577
Sullivan19961662334
Washington63014586584356
Westmorland1131391041778962
York93993900683925
Sampling of of counties where phone numbers were analyzed.

While some of the overlap of phone numbers to multiple voters may account for individuals living in the same household who use a landline or VOIP home phone, it is difficult to explain those phone numbers which overlap to voters in different counties or residences. Piton believes these correlate to voters who do not actually exist.

His team is in the process of using a team of volunteers to call these multi-use numbers to determine whether they correspond to real voters. Preliminary results lend credence to the suspicion that these phone numbers correspond to phantom sleeper voters.

A threadreader unroll of the original tweet thread can be found here.

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