As they scramble to prepare for November’s general election, election officials across the country said they have been inundated in recent weeks with what they consider frivolous public solicitations from supporters of former President Donald Trump.
The requests range from broad demands for all records related to the 2020 election to copycat letters seeking voting records — obscure reports generated by voting systems that show how election management software recorded each ballot. Experts said the voting records do not provide evidence of voter fraud sought by Trump-aligned activists.
But some election officials said the avalanche appeared to be aimed at another goal: straining busy election offices as they prepare to prepare ballots, hire workers and perform other essential functions related to midterm elections. Some states have already begun sending absentee ballots to certain categories of voters, such as those serving in the military.
“You have to worry a little bit that some of this is primarily an attempt to break the system or put the system under pressure,” said Chuck Broerman, the clerk and recorder in El Paso County, Colorado, which includes Colorado Springs.
Broerman, a Republican who has overseen elections in this GOP stronghold for eight years, said his office is receiving up to 20 requests a week, up from about one a month before the 2020 election. Some are asking for “all the election records,” while others seek all email communications between county election officials and their vendors or the secretary of state’s office, he said.
He added an additional staff member to help manage the requests.
Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Employees Association, said applicants often tell employees, “I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what he’s doing. I just know I have to ask for it.”
“It’s crazy. Mass requests like this are a denial-of-service attack on election offices,” Crane added, referring to his practice of flooding websites with fake traffic. “It’s trying to create chaos and confusion and ultimately force people to mistakes”.
Some election officials trace the recent surge in requests to an August rally in Missouri organized by Trump ally and MyPillow CEO Mike Liddell, who urged people attending the event to request the records.
In a phone interview with CNN, Lindell said he first learned of the cast’s voting records in June and sees them as a way to “detect machine manipulation” in the 2020 election.
Asked how they would do it, he said: “You’d have to talk to a cyber guy… It’s the sequence and the patterns.”
Lindell has spent nearly two years spreading lies about the 2020 election. Dominion Voting Systems, a frequent target of his attacks, has sued Lindell and his company for defamation.
Lindell said the records will bolster his effort to rid the voting system of machines. Some of the applicants, he said, are taking what they find to local county officials and sheriffs to demand the machines be removed from their counties.
“I want the computers and voting machines gone,” he said.
Voting registers, election experts said, are useful tools for risk-limiting election audits — allowing officials to hand-count a batch of randomly selected paper ballots and check those results against election records to confirm that the vote counting system accurately interpreted what was on the ballots.
However, voting and computer science experts said there is no basis for Lindell’s claims that voting records have or can reveal fraudulent behavior.
Dan Wallach, a professor of computer science at Rice University and an expert on voting systems, said: “As far as I know, nobody has ever found anything in this data. Period.”
Some patterns detected in the records have simple explanations, he added. If ballots, for example, were scanned in the order they arrived at a central sorting facility and not randomized, votes from a single precinct could be lumped together and that pattern would be detected by a voting record, he said. But that’s not evidence of fraud, he added.
“It’s not news that people in my neighborhood are a lot like me in the way they vote,” Wallach said. “This happens all the time.”
“These things that Lindell is doing are just making smoke,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”
In Arizona’s Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county and the seat of Phoenix, public records requests have increased this year to more than 830 through the end of August, compared with 369 in all of 2021, officials said.
In one week last month, county officials received about 300 identical requests for digital records, which are digital records of all the votes on each ballot that was scanned.
The requests were granted — though once they received the data, some requesters said they didn’t know how — or didn’t have the software — to open the file, said Ilene Haber, who oversees public records requests at the county office. He said records show the official account was correct.
In the nearly two years since the 2020 election, results skeptics are “grasping at straws” as they try, unsuccessfully, to find widespread fraud to cast doubt on the results, Haber said. (Last year, Maricopa County was the focus of a widely derided partisan vote ordered by Republicans in the state Senate that, in the end, confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory.)
Voting records are “definitely the shiny object of the moment,” added Haber. “Now, we await the next shiny object.”
Laws on public access to these records vary by state.
In North Carolina, where the state’s top elections official recently told CNN that counties are “inundated” with requests, the State Board of Elections has instructed local officials that both ballots and voting records are confidential under state law. legislation.
But this did not stop the demands for them.
John Lyman, a Republican who lives in High Point, North Carolina, recently sent a letter to the state board, asking to inspect or obtain copies of public records between the state and any local officials since May 1 “discussing terms.” Voting Record’, ‘CVR’ or ‘Mike Lindell’.
In an interview with CNN, Lyman said he turned to the state after he was unable to get the information from officials in Guilford County, where he lives. He said he learned about the cast voting records by listening to Lindell. “He is the one who pointed out the need to take these,” he said.
Lyman, 67, said he believes the 2020 election was “stolen” by Trump and doesn’t trust the vote counting machines. And he said he doubts the current wave of public records requests is a drag on the work of local election officials, whom he described as “hooked” into election management machinery.
“I don’t think it has any effect on them because I don’t think they do anything but use the machines,” Lyman said.
In Colorado, where it’s legal to share images of ballots and release voting records with the public, Broerman, the El Paso County Clerk, has created an online portal where voters can log in to view ballots — with redacted personally identifiable information — along with the voting record produced by the voting system to compare the two. “You’re like your own citizen auditor,” he said of the tool.
It also publishes the entire voting record in spreadsheet format online for anyone to download.
Broerman said he has made “hundreds and hundreds” of calls about the 2020 election. “I understand where these people are coming from,” he said. “They are passionate and concerned about the direction of our country.”
He said election officials in Colorado and other states have “done their job to try to show that our elections are fair, accurate, transparent and verifiable.”
But, he added, “there are some people we’re never going to reach.”
