New York Citizens Audit (NYCA) has just made a huge leap from being a volunteer organization advocating for election integrity, to having their findings validated in a peer-reviewed article published in the current edition of the Journal of Information Warfare (JIW).
“The Caesar Cipher and Stacking the Deck in New York State Voter Rolls” confirms the fact that “NYCA’s research has uncovered enough anomalies within New York’s voter rolls to warrant further investigation.”
Andrew Paquette is NYCA’s director of research and one of their 2,000 volunteers. He’s been documenting his journey through the voter database via his Substack account, where he regularly blogs under the pseudonym Art Zark. With the publication of his article in JIW, he’s reluctantly coming out from the shadow of anonymity to the not-so-friendly political spotlight.
Paquette wrote that it took him six months to usher his article through the peer-review process, but added, “that doesn’t include its first submission to a different journal, which rejected it for politicized reasons.”
At the center of Paquette’s findings are algorithms discovered after NYCA received its first copy of the state voter roll database, known as NYSVoter, in October 2021. Then, using FOIA requests, NYCA asked every county board of elections for copies of their local databases (not all complied). According to NYCA Executive Director Marly Hornik, this was important because election law is clear that county boards of elections maintain their own databases, with the state database basically acting as a compilation.
This cleared the way for a full investigation of the databases, but it took Paquette over a year and thousands of hours before he started blogging about his findings.
His first entry was titled, “The Number People: Finding #1: You don’t have to exist as a corporeal human being to vote in New York.” He started out simply, explaining to the reader that in New York, each voter is given a county voter identification number (CID) and a state voter identification number (SBOEID). At this point, his biggest discovery was that it was “possible for the numeric version of each voter to become detached from the voters themselves, and to take on lives of their own.”
Ten days later in “The Voter Matrix,” Paquette detailed how he and a colleague found different algorithms while sorting the CID and SBOEID numbers. He concluded:
“I couldn’t stop wondering why anyone would create an algorithm to assign or manipulate SBOEID and CID numbers in this way. All of the data in the records received by NYCA is public, and this particular algorithm doesn’t conceal any of that data. All it does is reorder the ID numbers in a highly unusual pattern that is highly unlikely to be discovered.”
