Conversations with Election Officials

If you don’t have a Cast Vote Record (CVR) from the machine scanners/tabulators, then you don’t actually have an audit of the machine-tallied vote.

Which means you don’t have an audit of your voice.

You can’t know for sure whether the school board candidate you wanted actually won.

19 Months

After 19 months, no audit in Minnesota.

At 22 months, election materials and data can be destroyed.

Crow Wing County asked for an audit and Secretary of State Steve Simon refused.

Now, we are entering primary election season (election day is August 9) and we are still using software and hardware to record, tally, and report our votes.

But if you don’t turn ON the cast vote record (CVR) and don’t share that file publicly, I can’t trust the election was legitimate because it wasn’t transparent.

If the machines run perfectly, as one election official told me this morning, then where’s the problem in turning ON the cast vote record?

If it was up to me, we wouldn’t use machines to tally votes because humans can do that just fine. Enough people working together would make short work of tallying paper ballots. If you reduce elections to 1 or 2 days then election officials, election judges, and volunteers don’t need to work the 46 day absentee/mail-in election.

Cast Vote Records Let the Machine Tell On Itself

The bottom line is Minnesotans have not seen a single cast vote record (CVR) report from any county in Minnesota.

The election was 19 months ago.

So far none have been given over to the people, in part because the functionality was turned off in at least some counties during the 2020 election.

In conversations this morning, June 27, 2022, with five county election officials, the level of awareness on how crucial CVRs are varies.

Last week, I learned from one county election official that their vendor, Hart, had done a software upgrade which archived the 2020 election (audio link) making a CVR export impossible, potentially a violation of the 22-month retention laws on election materials.

The good news is I believe we may well get one from the 2020 election, and if we don’t, we have a chance to try to turn them on for the August 9 primary election.

For any other election officials that would like to know exactly how to extract the CVR from their equipment, please email erikvanmechelen@protonmail.com

Call to Action

Get in touch with your county election official and ask this simple question:

Will you turn on the Cast Vote Records (CVR) for the 2022 primary election?

Parting Thought

If We the People don’t have access to a machine audit of the election, when a machine is tallying our votes, should our elections at the county level be certified?

To learn more about cast vote records and their significance to a machine audit, read this free book.