There has been an interesting theory spreading across the election integrity universe that we felt needed some grounding in reality. It has to do with recognizing patterns, or the absence of patterns, within voter ID’s across a state. The primary thing to remember when deciding whether claims like these have merit is Occam’s Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

The claim centers around the idea that there is a hidden algorithm within state voter ID’s that prove there is some type of fraud taking place. We love a good conspiracy as much as anybody, but there are enough factually identifiable flaws within our voting systems that wild ideas like this detract from making substantive changes. We don’t want to discourage this type of investigation and the inquisitiveness that goes along with it, we just prefer to not make inflammatory claims based on an assumption without doing our research first.

There seems to be a basic misunderstanding of how ID assignment in a working database is handled, in particular one that has been subject to complete data migrations between older and newer systems. Below is an explanation of how ID’s are assigned and how the relation between sequential ID’s can shift over time. It is not uncovering any fraud, it is simply discovering in a very, very, roundabout way that these voter databases are functioning exactly as expected.