Virginia Dems’ Ballot Harvesting Manual Instructs Going After Dead People, ‘Bad’ Addresses

The Virginia Democratic Party is instructing activists to include deceased citizens and “bad” addresses when generating voter contact lists, The Federalist has learned.

A pivotal tool Virginia Dems use to target voters for their ballot harvesting and get-out-the-vote efforts is VoteBuilder, an online database of all registered voters in Virginia operated by the Virginia Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee. In the words of the Virginia Democrats themselves, “this database contains the names and other important information about registered voters – information that we can use to target likely voters for Democratic campaigns.”

Democrat activists who use VoteBuilder can look up specific information about each registered voter and group them into likely Democrat voter outreach lists, which they then use for GOTV outreach, including phone banking and ballot harvesting.

On the Virginia Democrats’ VoteBuilder website, there are instructions for how activists can use the tool to generate voter contact lists for absentee ballot chasing, a.k.a., ballot harvesting. The website describes it as generating absentee ballot “labels,” a process which also functions to collect a list of voters’ addresses.

In the instructions on the web page, however, there are screenshots of the VoteBuilder database that show activists can generate an expanded outreach list by adding voters (under “Suppressions”) with “bad” addresses, National Change of Address forwarding addresses (residents who have moved), and even those who have died to the baseline list of active and inactive registered voters with accurate addresses. From there, activists can create lists of these voters’ phone numbers and addresses so they can contact them and collect their mail-in ballots.

These instructions vary from another place on the Virginia Democrats’ site that appear to be tips on how to use VoteBuilder from the DNC itself, saying the “Suppressions” filters are “the automatic settings to prevent bad addresses from showing up on your lists.”

If the DNC itself is telling activists that the “Suppressions” filters are used to prevent “bad” addresses from being included in the voter contact lists, why is the Virginia Democratic Party instructing its users to include them?

“I don’t know how you can in good conscience instruct your workers to solicit votes from people in those categories,” Clara Belle Wheeler, former vice-chair of the Virginia State Board of Elections and senior fellow at the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, told The Federalist. “They’re instructing people to solicit votes from people who are not legally eligible to vote — they’ve either moved, are not a citizen of the United States, or [are] dead.”

When asked about the deceased or NCOA filters on its database, a spokesman for the Virginia Democratic Party told The Federalist they are filters to help users weed through the voter registration data and that incorrect or deceased registrants are removed. But when asked why the instructions on their website for creating voter contact lists specifically tell users to include addresses of those who have died or moved, the spokesman told The Federalist he would respond later.