June 2, 2018 9:20 am Update
After spending too many hours with a soldering iron and a ohm meter I figured out why this dang display was having logic errors… Too fast of a data transfer speed. I think the capacitance of the long wires running to the sign was causing it to read high when it shouldn’t have been pulled high. Changed one variable in the code to reduce transfer speed and it works fine (and reducing the data transfer speed had no impact on the display speed).