Lauren C. Moye, FISM News
Six members of the House Election Integrity Caucus are calling on U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to enforce election integrity laws after a recent report found the majority of counties they contacted failed to keep 2020 election records as required by federal code.
The letter, spearheaded by the committee’s co-chair Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), was signed by five other Republican members.
“A majority of the most populous counties in key swing states were unable to produce documents to demonstrate their compliance with the Civil Rights Act. We therefore ask that you take immediate action to investigate non-compliance with the Civil Rights Act in the 2020 election and take all steps necessary to ensure compliance in the 2022 election and beyond,” the representatives wrote in the letter originally obtained by the Daily Caller.
The letter was sparked by a recent report by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) in which they found only two states and six counties out of a list of 100 of the most populous counties from traditional swing states properly preserved their 2020 election records as required by federal statutes.
Instead, records were either not available or were corrupted by bad record-keeping practices, such as updating voter rolls on one file instead of keeping distinct files for record-keeping purposes.
“The Civil Rights Act is not outdated or arbitrary; it is a vital safeguard to prevent bad actors from covering up their tracks and to bring transparency to our system, thereby ensuring trust and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,” wrote John Lott and Steven Smith in the report summary.
AFPI found “there was on average a 2.89% discrepancy between the number of people voting and the number of ballots cast” per the counties that did comply with a records release. This includes an estimated discrepancy of 16,617 votes in the Miami-Dade, Florida precincts for which data is available and a 34,893 vote discrepancy in Cobb County, Georgia.
In the 2020 election, President Joe Biden won Georgia by a margin of 11,779 according to Politico.
The Civil Rights Act of 1960 says under Section III, Title 301 that election officers should “retain and preserve, for a period of twenty-two months from the date of any general, special, or primary election” in which candidates are running for a national office all records “relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, or other act requisite to voting in such election.” States can designate a custodian to retain the records in place of election officers.
Additionally, Section III, Title 302 specifies that any person “who willfully steals, destroys, conceals, mutilates, or alters any record or paper required by section 301 to be retained and preserved” shall also be prosecuted under a different charge.
Violation of both legal codes bears the same specified penalty: up to a $1,000 fine or one-year incarceration, or both.
“Failure to comply with this law also undermines faith in our elections at a time when confidence is already at an all-time low. After all, once an election is conducted, the public and elected officials should, pursuant to law, be able to verify that the number of votes is consistent with the number of voters in each election,” the congress members wrote.
They added, “This is simply unacceptable. The public deserves better, and state elections officials must work quickly to ensure the accuracy and integrity of all elections.”