- The Civil Rights Act of 1960 requires the retention and preservation of “all records and papers which come into [election official's] possession relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting in such election.
After requesting data on both the state and county level from the top 100 most populated counties of the traditional 14 swing states, many officials only responded with current voter records (i.e., as composed at the time of the request, not as of the last election) or a general voter roll to reflect when someone in their district moved or died. The findings of this report confirm that
virtually no one (only 6% of county election officials and two Secretary of States of the states and counties reviewed) on the state or county level are correctly retaining the data they are required to preserve regarding voter rolls on the day of each election. As the Civil Rights Act of 1960 stipulates, ballots are part of the records and papers meant to be retained and preserved. In the vast majority of cases, data from the general election was not timestamped nor saved separately. While this may be with the best intentions by election officials to maintain updated voter rolls, it clearly goes against the aforementioned federal law, which mandates election data must be retained and preserved for 22 months after all federal elections. The Civil Rights Act is not outdated or arbitrary; it is a vital safeguard to prevent bad actors from covering up their tracks and to bring transparency to our system, thereby ensuring trust and confidence that everyone’s vote is accounted for in the vote totals.
Even in the six counties that did keep records,
there was on average a 2.89% discrepancy between the number of people voting and the number of ballots cast. Below is the list of discrepancies found by county:
- Miami-Dade County, FL: 1.6% (12% of the precincts are missing)
- Orange County, FL: 3.82%
- Cobb County, GA: 8.8% (Secretary of State data 0.68%)
- Woodbury County, IA: 3.06%
- Buncombe County, NC: 0.14%
- Johnston County, NC: 0.07%
In the vast majority of cases, the information necessary to compare the number of ballots cast with the number of people who voted does not exist. In other cases, when that data is available, the numbers don’t match.
