Records requests are good, but the torrent flowing into election offices is doing real harm

Our investigation into the torrent of public records requests that elections offices across the country are fielding from activists searching for a way to boost baseless narratives of a stolen election shows they are doing real harm.

Like so much in county government (and especially elections), the work to fulfill a public records request is invisible. We journalists also love a good public records request! This project about how overwhelmed these offices are by public records requests, ironically, relied on records requests to answer our initial questions. It wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

So we understand the temptation of sending in a request— even a massive one, or one for data you aren’t even sure the county actually has. But every Votebeat reporter and editor has been trained to target requests more carefully than that.

Nonetheless, counties across the country are drowning in requests from conspiracy theorists searching endlessly for that ever-elusive proof of fraud, which can overwhelm an elections office to the point where other, vital responsibilities are given short shrift.

We have another piece of our investigation coming next week, but know there are a lot of converging problems here, and no single solution.

Counties are using deeply outdated information management systems and often have no public records tracking system. The offices are understaffed, and serially underpay workers responsible for responding to increasingly hostile requests. The flood of bad-faith and nonsensical requests have made all of this worse, resulting in what many election officials have characterized to me as an in-person denial of service attack for their offices. Then, when an office responds, the activists seeking to push theories of fraud sometimes mischaracterize the records, forcing local election officials to work even harder to respond.

Of course, reporting on records requests has the potential to be just as tedious as filling them. We also had to figure out how to manage our investigation on top of our normal commitment to covering voting news every day. It started with three part time freelancers, sending our own records requests to every county in Arizona — we knew, based on our own reporting, things were particularly acute there — and major counties beyond. Then, these freelancers, Jen Fifield, and I combed through the records, identifying particularly aggressive requesters and interviewing local administrators to better understand the impact of the requests. Jen took all of this information and shaped it into two stories we felt were representative of what we’d learned.

From start to finish, the effort took almost a year.

A project this wide-ranging takes up a lot of resources in a small newsroom and costs a lot of money. Still, we knew — because we talk to election administrators every single day — that we uniquely understood this really was shutting down whole offices. We also knew we were the only newsroom likely to comb through Freedom of Information logs and payment stubs to trace records requests back to a small group of activists operating in Arizona. Now that Jen Fifield has molded all of that work into fascinating stories, I know the effort was worth it.

And we aren’t done.

We know that these stories only scratch the surface of the problem, and we are eager to keep shedding light on this.

So, talk to us!

Is there a local activist group overwhelming your office with bad faith records requests? Has your county implemented a public records tracking program that has expedited its ability to process requests you wish others knew about? Reach out to me or Jen and let us know.

Before there was Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, there was New Ashford, Massachusetts. For years, that town held the distinction of being the first place in the nation to report its election results. With few residents, the town could open polls before 6 a.m., count the fewer than 40 ballots, and report results to the newswire before 8 a.m. The town’s dedication to this practice led to Phoebe Jordan being the first woman in the country to have her ballot counted in a presidential election on Nov. 2, 1920. She was one of 12 women to vote in New Ashford that day. Here is a picture of her!

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Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

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