The midterm
is a knife fight
for the seats still open.

ERIC and this election

AK, ME, MI are the only Cook toss-ups still on ERIC’s member list. Iowa, Ohio, and Texas left in 2023. New Hampshire was never on the current list. ERIC’s year table is national. It does not say how many of those records sat in Alaska, Maine, or Michigan, and it does not say anyone voted twice in 2026.

• AKMember · On the current member list.
• IANot a member · Withdrew June 2023.
• MEMember · On the current member list.
• MIMember · On the current member list.
• NHNot a member · Not a member.
• OHNot a member · Withdrew March 2023.
• TXNot a member · Withdrew July 2023.

The newest public row is 2025: 13 members reporting, 78,570 cross-state movers, 10,112 in-state duplicates, 2,548 deceased matches. Membership grew again in 2026 when New York joined and Virginia rejoined. That is not a 2026 double-vote count. ERIC’s participation report, the one that can flag a ballot in two states, is not in this table.

Gold bars are the expected share of each second digit, from log10. A 2026 test would compare precinct totals with that shape. The 95% line for a chi-square with 9 degrees of freedom is 16.919. Crossing it would mean the digits do not match the curve. It would not, by itself, mean the count was fabricated. No precinct statement of votes is published, so no state is over the line and no state is under it.

17 · Sonar

The same seven leads, read as distance from a tie. The inner ring is about 2 points, the middle ring about 4, the outer ring about 8. Michigan, at 7 points for El-Sayed, sits near the rim. Iowa, at 1 point for Hinson, stays close to the center. A gold ring marks the desk’s current state. Nothing on this dial is a counted ballot.

18 · Margin dials · Sep 30

Seven dials, one per toss-up. The arc is the absolute poll lead on a scale that tops out at 8 points, so Michigan nearly fills its dial and Iowa barely leaves the start. Color still says which party holds the lead. Use it when you want the size of the lead without reading a table.

19 · Toss-up orbit

Each toss-up is a node on a ring, tied back to the center. The line to the desk’s current state turns gold. Color is the party ahead. This is a locator, not a new measurement. The number beside the code is the September 30 lead.

20 · Beacon height · Sep 30

A column chart of the absolute lead. The axis runs from a tie at the bottom to 8 points at the top. Taller means the published survey is farther from even. It does not say the lead will hold, and it does not include North Carolina or the other rated races. Those are outside the seven.

21 · Second digit

Benford’s expected share for the second digit of a number, from 0 through 9. The bars are the mathematical curve, not a test of any county’s vote. A real test needs a precinct statement of votes, which is not published yet. The gold bar is only the digit the desks are pointing at. The 95 percent line for a later chi-square test is 16.919 on 9 degrees of freedom. That line is a threshold, not a result.

22 · Lead mass

Every Democratic lead in the seven is added together, and every Republican lead is added the same way. The bar is that mass, not a seat count and not a vote share. On the September 30 file the Democratic leads sum higher, because Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Texas, and Alaska outweigh Iowa and Maine. Adding points is not the same thing as winning seats.

23 · Points on the books

The same two sums, set as figures so the bar in the chart beside them can be read without squinting. Democratic points on the left, Republican points on the right. A desk change does not move these totals. They describe the whole file.

24 · Mail rejection · 2022

Mail ballots rejected in the 2022 general election, from the Election Administration and Voting Survey, as read by Ballotpedia. The gold line is the national rate, 1.5 percent. Texas sits above it. Michigan, Maine, Ohio, and Iowa sit below it. Alaska and New Hampshire were not in the extract stored here, so they are absent rather than drawn at zero.

25 · Pendulum

A semicircle from an 8-point Republican lead on the left to an 8-point Democratic lead on the right. The needle is the focused state’s September 30 lead, and the figure under it names that state. When the desks move, the needle moves. Parked at the bottom would mean a tie.

26 · The reading

The focused race, written large: the postal code, the party ahead, and the lead in points. The thin bar under the figure is that lead on the same 8-point scale as the columns. It is the number the other instruments are pointing at.

AK

D +2.3

31 · Aperture

A signature trace with two gold jaws. The gap between the jaws widens with the focused state’s 2022 mail-rejection rate. Where that state has no 2022 rate in the extract, the jaws use Texas, the highest rate among the states that do. The picture is a scale for a rate we have. It is not a county’s machine pass-threshold.

32 · Caliper

Sixteen timing marks. The gold ones count up with the focused state’s poll lead, two marks per point, so a 7-point lead lights most of the row and a 1-point lead lights two. The rest stay slate. This is a ruler for the lead, not a printer-calibration log.

AK · 5 of 16

33 · Chronometer

A ring that fills clockwise from the top. Full would be an 8-point lead. The number in the center is the focused state. The fill is the size of its poll lead and nothing else. There is no memory-card timestamp in this snapshot, so the ring is not a courier chronometer.

34 · Four feeds

Four of the seven, the ones with the most mail and the most attention on election night: Alaska, Michigan, Ohio, and Texas. Each tile is that state’s September 30 lead. The gold border is whichever of them the desks are on.

35 · Alaska primary · Aug 18

Alaska’s August 18 primary, the shares Ballotpedia recorded: Peltola 49.5, Dan S. Sullivan 41.4, the other Dan Sullivan 2.5, Heikes 1. Leslie’s 1.1 percent withdrew and Heikes advanced. These are primary shares. Ranked-choice rounds for November are not tabulated, so this is not an exhausted-ballot waterfall.

36 · Barrier

A gold barrier and a colored dot. The dot starts at the left and moves right as the focused lead grows, on the same 8-point scale. It shows how far that lead sits from zero. It is not a count of same-day registration cards returned as undeliverable.

37 · Spectrum

The seven leads as a spectrum of bars, left to right in file order. Height is the absolute lead. Color is the party. Gold replaces the color on the focused state so you can see which bar the desks are describing.

38 · Overseas and military · 2024

The last published overseas-and-military file, the 2024 EAVS, not this election. The big figure is ballots transmitted. The bar splits the classified share: about 70.7 percent overseas civilians in blue, about 26.3 percent uniformed services in gold. The two shares do not add to 100 because some transmissions were unclassified. Returned and rejected counts sit under the figure. No 2026 arc is drawn.

1,327,324

Transmitted

Overseas 70.7%Uniformed 26.3%

806,743 returned · 30,401 rejected

39 · Night clock

A 24-hour face. The pale wedge is midnight to dawn, the hours a drop-box allegation would have to explain. The hand is not a clock time. It marks the focused state’s lead, from a tie at the top toward the right as the lead grows. No transfer sheet is in, so nothing on the wedge is an overnight harvest.

40 · Boundary

Two crossing boundaries, one blue and one red, and a gold mark whose position is the focused lead. The mark sliding right means a larger lead, not a ballot cast in the wrong district. No county has filed a split-precinct or wrong-ballot-style count on this board.