Handling duplicates

Here are the three patterns that show up in this docket:

1. Same-day resend — the same person submitting essentially the same letter twice within hours. Usually a click of Submit that misfired, or a typo fixed on a second try. It also covers someone who submits the same comment twice the same day through two different channels — once through the SEC website's comment form (including from a phone), once by email.
2. Cross-date submission — the same person mailing in the identical letter, word for word, on a different day, sometimes weeks apart.
3. Repeat commenters — someone commenting more than once, writing a new letter each time rather than resending the same one. In one sense this is a kind of duplicate too, the same person showing up more than once, but I do not count it as one. More on this below.

For the first two to count as a duplicate, the text has to be very similar between submissions, close to word for word. If the wording differs meaningfully between two letters from the same person, it falls into the third category instead.

In both duplicate cases, one copy counts toward the headline totals (the fuller or better-written version when the two differ, otherwise the earliest). The other copy stays visible on the letters page, marked excluded duplicate, with a link to the copy that counts. Nothing is deleted, the letter is just excluded from the tally so the same person's comment is not counted twice.

Short excluded duplicates show their full text right on the page, the same as any other letter. When the letter is long, the text collapses behind a "show it" link instead, so a person with several near-identical resends does not repeat a long paragraph down the page five times. Here is an example.

Repeat commenters are not held out. Michael Fox commented twice on this docket, in his own words each time, and both letters count toward the totals. Here's an example.

Treating each repeat commenter's group of letters as one vote, instead of one vote per letter, barely moves the final headline count: holding out every extra letter across the 421 confirmed repeat-commenter groups would drop the total in-corpus count (Oppose, Support, and Conditional combined) from 167,796 to 167,080 letters, and move the headline Oppose share specifically from 99.5298% to 99.5296%, about two ten-thousandths of a percentage point. The full breakdown, group by group, is on the repeat commenters page. Since the number barely moves either way, I count every letter someone actually wrote and just mark the pattern.

Repeat commenters are matched by name. A distinctive name, like "Janett Franks," is enough to treat two letters as the same person. A common name is not: "David Smith" or "Susan Taylor" could easily belong to two different people. I keep those separate from repeat commenters. Each letter stays an ordinary, individually counted entry, tagged shared name instead: