In 2021, Heather Honey from VerityVote asked Lycoming County, PA, for their 2020 election Cast Vote Records. She was denied. Over five years, they have battled with the county Office of Open Records and three different court jurisdictions. Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that CVR files must be made publicly available. The CVR file is essentially a receipt of everything the tabulator machine scanned. The full opinion is here.
A short recap: Each election ballot is fed into a tabulator machine, which counts the voter’s intent by scanning. Election jurisdictions have several tabulators at counting locations. Each tabulator keeps an internal record of how many ballots it processed and other key data. This includes timestamps, precinct info, and other data like the number of bubbles it counted for President DEM, President REP, Senate1 DEM, Senate1 REP, Senate2 DEM, and so on. The CVR record serves a similar purpose to cash register close-out slips used by stores.
Typically, data from the tabulators flows to the county’s EMS server (Election Management System). From there, it goes to the State system and then onto Edison Research, which merges all the U.S data. Edison then provides it to the National Election Pool of news organizations. This group broadcasts the election results we see on TV. CVR files are the farthest upstream source of voting data. They can prove spikes in voting for a specific candidate, when they happened, and from which tabulators. They can prove if results were manipulated downstream, in the systems mentioned above.
Hellbound and Down 