QVF Change Report: October 2025 Edition

The data displayed in these reports is publicly accessible, obtained from the Secretary of State through Check My Vote.

Check My Vote is a QVF analysis and maintenance service present in a growing number of states, providing free QVF access to residents of the state. Volunteer users may contribute digital research of individual voter registrations to a shared knowledge-base and coordinate to find and remove invalid registrations. Check My Vote seeks to create transparency in U.S. elections by accounting for every registration on file.

October 9, 2025

The method of analysis this report uses has been updated in response to feedback given by a Michigan clerk.

The previous iteration of this report used an initial cutoff date of several months, placing a second, critical cutoff date at the beginning of the year. These thresholds were chosen as an initial "best guess" as to what a reasonable time frame between registry and addition-to-QVF would look like. This clerk was willing to review the list of registrations deemed "late additions" and offered details which update this time frame.

The first change in perspective is simply a shift towards allowing a few months for processing of registrations. While some registrations are added quickly, there is an expected average delay. This edition has been adjusted to account for this fact.

The clerk offered not a definite claim, but a strong hypothesis that the bulk of these "late additions" are actually the result of preregistration. Preregistration is a Michigan-specific policy that allows 16 and 17-year old residents to apply for voter registration in advance of eligibility so that they can be registered automatically as soon as they are able.

If preregistration is responsible for the significant number of registrations added roughly one year after the date of registration, that would imply, unfortunately, that the recorded date of registration may actually be the date of pre-registration. Per Michigan law, residents may be registered at 17.5 years of age in order to allow equal access to absentee voting for residents who will be of age by election day of the current cycle.

This edition has been adjusted to aggressively filter out registrations dates that may have been assigned a date of preregistration. The baseline threshold for a "late addition" has been adjusted to January 1st, 2025, and the critical threshold has been moved to January 1st, 2024. The remaining data, while much less numerically significant than the data in the previous report, is more focused on the outliers in particular, which are (in some cases) well beyond the two-year margin that preregistration offers.

This data is less numerically significant in the sense that there are fewer data points consider notable. These data points, however, are still distributed across 18 counties. The difference between registration date and date of addition to the QVF approaches several decades. With these new conditions of analysis, it is hoped that further feedback can offer an explanation.