Repeat commenters

What if these were excluded instead?

Here is what would change if every repeat commenter's extra letters were held out the way a duplicate is, keeping only the first letter from each person and dropping the rest.

Across the 4,224 confirmed repeat-commenter groups in the docket (2 or more letters from the same person, 9,229 letters in total), 5,005 letters are "extra" beyond one per person.

Most of those extras are already out of the count. 3,893 of them are duplicates — the same letter sent twice — which have never counted toward the totals, and another 26 state no position or are off topic, which are also held out. That leaves 1,086 letters that count today and would stop counting under the stricter rule: 1,084 Oppose, 0 Support, 2 Conditional.

The headline Oppose share moves from 99.5630% to 99.5616%, a change of about two thousandths of a percentage point.

It moves so little because those 1,086 letters look like everyone else: 99.82% of them are opposed, against 99.56% for the docket as a whole. Removing a slice that mirrors the whole lowers the count and leaves the ratio where it was. Note also that the stricter rule keeps one letter from every commenter — nobody drops out of the count, only the extras beyond a person's first letter are at stake.

Since it is close to numerically free either way, the choice comes down to which option is more honest about what people actually submitted, not which one protects the topline.