Should You Use Property Records to Check the Voter Rolls?

Not all data is created equal

I get a lot of requests to add property tax records to The People's Audit. I want to make it clear. We DO NOT RECOMMEND using them as a PRIMARY SOURCE.

It is our opinion to always go to the primary source of all mailing addresses, and that is the United States Postal Service (USPS).

This video summarizes the reasons why.

When SOEs tell me they also use 911 data because it is better than the post office, I just ask if they have ambulances delivering mail in their county.

We do use the property tax records as a SECONDARY SOURCE, but in our experience in Florida, it does not reach 50% at matching names on the voter rolls.

We spent multiple months last year exploring the home sales data which had BETTER data on residential homes and possible moves. However, when we evaluated the work needed to find a matching person there, it was far easier and more accurate to use a full-service NCOA provider (NCOA= National Change Of Address) that gets their data directly from the United States Postal Service (USPS).

The NCOA data would also immediately tell you if someone new moved into a house and who moved out of state. The sales data just told you who was involved with the home sale. Sometimes it was being purchased by an LLC to be used as rental property.

In the end, the property tax records will just tell you who owes the taxes on the property and where they mail that bill. And in some states, that address could be just as bad as some of the addresses we have seen on the voter rolls.

When we go directly to the USPS, we can check every US-based address. Also every resident of the home, regardless of them living there as a renter, which includes children, extended family, and even friends with different last names, can be checked with both the USPS and their nationally recognized NCOA.

The NCOA is key to finding out when people are moving from their current residence and most importantly, tells you where they are moving to. This same list is typically used by the Election Offices to maintain voter rolls. The key flag is when the new forwarding address is out of the state. If this happens, the Election Office should send out a notice to try and communicate with that voter and if they don’t hear back, they will typically move them to an inactive status voter. After a few years of being inactive, the voter will eventually be deleted.

The NCOA is very accurate because it uses a combination of the name of the residence AND the person’s address. A good example of something the NCOA would detect vs. the property records would not, is a person leaving for college or the military. For that matter, it could be any situation where one or more of the residents is leaving the home, but the home is NOT being sold.

A person leaving for college may have a typical bill like a cell phone bill, bank statements, car payment, or car insurance, and would have to notify the post office of a “Change of Address.” This will forward that person’s mail for about 12 months. We would then see a person who may be registered to vote from that address communicating they are moving to a new address which might be out of state.

The NCOA would spot this change and tell you details about the person’s new destination. Whereas the property records would tell you NOTHING about this event happening.

One the other big reasons we abandoned using property records as a primary source is apartment complexes. As you approach any high-density living area, for example, the city of Miami, you have a higher number of renters in apartment and condo buildings than people owning their homes.

If you were to check those locations with the property tax records, you may see a +300-unit apartment complex fall under a single LLC that is managing the property. You will not find anything about the individual addresses and nothing about the current or past residents.

Apartment complexes pointed to a huge voter problem in the state of Florida. For example, we could see due to poor voter list maintenance and people moving in and out of the same address, a 2-bedroom apartment with more than 10 people registered to vote there. Checking the voters and location with NCOA would have better results in finding registrants that moved away.

Lastly, there was a claim by someone talking about the superiority of using property tax records to find people registered to vacant land or a business address. That same information is returned from the UPSP when you ask to confirm the address…FOR FREE. You don’t have to load all the property in the entire state to find out where the vacant and business properties are located. The USPS returns this information along with a confirmation if the address is correct or not.

So for speed and cost, we developed a system that can check both the residential and mailing addresses of all the over 15 million registrants in our current voter rolls. We have a greater than 99% response rate on these addresses when we query the USPS API and can do about 100,000 addresses a minute. Because of the ease, we can do this every month to check if addresses break or get corrected.

If you were to build a system to use the property records, you would have to first load this enormous database because there is no available API system to query a specific address. And you would have to continue to maintain this enormous data list on a periodic basis.

Our USPS API is updated daily without any impact of cost to our systems. I’m assuming it would take a few days of labor just to update the property records on the system BEFORE you could even try to check them against your voter rolls. We can do the entire state of Florida in less than 5 hours and that includes loading the new month’s data and additional analysis. Checking both the Residential and Mailing addresses for every single voter in the state now takes about an hour and a half.

If you are interested in bringing our system “The People’s Audit” to your state to have your monthly voter rolls monitored, please visit this link: https://the-peoples-audit.org/checkmate/

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