PILF mined numbers compiled by the federal Election Assistance Commission , an entirely neutral outfit set up by Congress to provide voting guidelines and a clearinghouse for election information and statistics. The numbers are reported to the EAC by the states themselves, and PILF did no extrapolations of its own. In other words, these are not biased guesstimates but hard numbers, virtually irrefutable.
By “unaccounted for,” PILF means that EAC reports the ballots “were not returned as voted, were undeliverable, or were otherwise ‘unable to be tracked.’” Nobody knows whether someone actually tried to vote with those ballots only for the Postal Service to lose them or whether would-be voters decided not to bother or whether the ballots were mishandled by “ballot harvesters” (including well-intentioned ones) or whether some were part of a fraud scheme.
PILF isn’t claiming some massive vote fraud, and it is not trying to relitigate the presidential election. Its point is that a combination of human error, systemic sloppiness, and perhaps even a bit of skullduggery together make it almost impossible to know if some close election counts actually were accurate.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/sixteen-million-mystery-ballots-demonstrate-the-need-for-vote-integrity-efforts
