Trump backers inundate election offices with requests for 2020 records
In Wisconsin, one recent request asks for 34 different types of documents. In North Carolina, hundreds of requests came in at state and local offices on one day alone. In Kentucky, officials don’t recognize the technical-sounding documents they’re being asked to produce — and when they seek clarification, the requesters say they don’t know, either.
The use of mass records requests by the former president’s supporters effectively weaponizes laws aimed at promoting principles of a democratic system — that the government should be transparent and accountable. Public records requests are a key feature of that system, used by regular citizens, journalists and others. In interviews, officials emphasized that they are trying to follow the law and fulfill the requests, but they also believe the system is being abused.
“When you are asking for every single document under the sun, it becomes difficult for us to do our job,” said Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission.
Many administrators said they suspect that may be the point.
They believe that those organizing the effort are not out for information but rather are trying to cause chaos as their fall crunchtime approaches, making it more difficult to run smooth elections and giving critics new openings to attack the integrity of election administration in the United States. They point to the identical nature of the requests as well as the number of duplicates individual counties have received — each one of which they must respond to, by law.
“It’s the public’s right to transparency, and I understand that,” said Chuck Broerman, the Republican clerk of El Paso County, Colo., who has hired an additional employee for the 10-person elections division to handle public records requests. “But at the same time, it’s been reported to me that some of this has been done perhaps deliberately to break the system. And you have to ask yourself, why do they want to do that?”
The surge of inquiries reflects the latest example of the extraordinary pressure that election officials have faced since the 2020 election. Since then, state and local election administrators have dealt with the fallout from a concerted campaign by Trump and his backers to undermine confidence in U.S. elections, including a barrage of threats and personal attacks. Hundreds of officials have left their jobs as a result, administrators say.
Many of those submitting the requests say they are following the call of several leading election deniers allied with Trump, including MyPillow founder Mike Lindell. Some claim that there is more to be known about voting machine use in the 2020 election, and the data they are requesting will provide one piece of the puzzle.
“We believe those who have nothing to hide, hide nothing,” said Carol Snow, one such activist in Burke County, N.C., in text exchanges with The Washington Post. “Their lack of transparency causes distrust of the electronic voting systems we are required to use to cast our ballots.”
Trump contested the election in numerous battlegrounds nationwide, with state and federal judges rejecting dozens of lawsuits claiming the result was not valid. Post-election audits failed to identify widespread fraud. Since then, dozens of election-denying Republicans have won their party’s nominations for elected office with authority over election administration.
The latest flood of requests began immediately after Lindell, a prominent Trump ally, exhorted his followers at a mid-August gathering in Springfield, Mo., to obtain copies of what’s known as “cast vote records” from every election office in the country. Lindell live-streamed his “Moment of Truth” summit on his own social media platforms and got a boost of viewership from former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who broadcast his podcast from the event on both days.
A cast vote record shows how an individual voted across the ballot. Ballots themselves are cast vote records, but some voting machines can also generate the data in report form — enormous spreadsheets that academics have long used to track split-ticket voting and other voting patterns.
Lindell, who has spent the past two years spreading unfounded claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, said in an interview he learned about cast vote records this summer and soon after began urging people to request them and send him copies, so that he could make the case that voting machines should be abolished.
Federal law requires governments to keep election records for 22 months, and Lindell said he was trying to obtain as many of the cast vote records as he could before that period expired for the 2020 cycle over the Labor Day weekend. He said copies of the records have “poured in by the thousands” since he put out his call to action.
“These machine companies have played out the clock, so to speak,” Lindell said. “But people can request them and then obviously we can preserve them.”
Lindell disputed the claim that the blast of requests was intended to disrupt election offices — and questioned whether administrators were trying to keep information from the public.
“This is to save our country,” Lindell said. “They don’t want to do work? That’s what they’re paid to do.”
Election officials and their advocates said they are dispirited that Lindell continues to encourage his followers to distrust the voting process. Many counties have already published electronic images of their ballots, giving skeptics all they need to conduct their own hand recount of the 2020 election. The fact that offices are nonetheless being inundated with requests, some officials said, raised questions about the true motives of those who are instigating them.
“The only way to look at it is as a denial-of-service attack on local government,” said Matt Crain, who leads the Colorado County Clerks Association, using the term for an intentional bombardment of a computer network for the purpose of shutting it down. “The irony is, if Lindell wanted the cast vote records, he could have just put in a request to get them. They don’t do that. They put out this call to action for people to do it, and they know it’s going to inundate these offices, especially medium and small offices who are understaffed and overwhelmed already. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
Many of the requests include demands that counties retain the records because the requester is contemplating litigation. In one such email sent Friday to the elections director in Forsyth County, N.C., a woman who identified herself as Mona Faggione wrote: “I AM CONSIDERING SUING YOU FOR YOUR AND/OR YOUR ORGANIZATION’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE FRAUDULENT ELECTIONS THAT WILL SOON BE PROVEN TO HAVE TAKEN PLACE SINCE 2017.”
That same phrase, written in capital letters, appears in several other requests sent to other North Carolina counties and provided to The Post by the state board of elections. The requests, including the names and email addresses of the senders, are public records in North Carolina and some other states. Faggione did not respond to a request for comment.
“We’ve gotten hundreds of requests today alone across the state,” Patrick Gannon, a spokesman for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, said in an interview on Friday. “It’s overwhelming.”
Gannon said local election officials are already deep into their election preparations: hiring poll workers, securing polling locations, mailing absentee and military ballots and finalizing plans for early voting, which begins Oct. 20.
Trump defeated Biden in North Carolina by less than two points — his narrowest victory in any state.
Around the country, requests for election records began to surge when Trump contested the 2020 result. The Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office has received nearly four times as many requests for election records this year compared to the same point in 2018, according to that office. Michigan’s Bureau of Elections has spent 600 hours processing records requests this year, which it…
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