Federal law requires that the records of a federal election — the ballot images, the tabulator memory, the system logs, the chain-of-custody paperwork, the drop-box surveillance video, the paper tapes, the voter-history records — be preserved for twenty-two months. These records are not a formality. They are the only way, after the count, that a public or a court can reconstruct what the machines actually did, who adjudicated which ballots, whether the totals reconcile, and whether the rules were followed. The thirty-six findings grouped under Record Destruction describe a 2020 cycle in which, in the jurisdictions that decided the result, those records were erased, overwritten, torn up, wiped, deleted, or simply never produced. In Antrim County, Michigan, every adjudication log for the 2020 election cycle was manually removed from the Election Management System server while logs for prior years running the identical software remained intact. In Fulton County, Georgia, approximately 316,000 advance-voting ballot images were destroyed, and the cryptographic SHA authentication files for 132,286 of the county’s 148,318 absentee ballot images were, in the words of the contracted forensic examiner, “intentionally deleted”; statewide, 74 of Georgia’s 159 counties failed to produce ballot images, and more than 1.7 million were lost. In Michigan, approximately 500,000 voter-history records were deleted from the statewide Qualified Voter File after the 2020 election cycle. In Pennsylvania, 440,781 mail ballots were classified “unknown” — the chain of custody unresolvable — more than five times the state’s 81,660-vote certified margin of victory. In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, a named witness observed county attorneys tear election data into pieces and say they would “have a campfire to burn the data”; the Director of Elections ordered the Blue Crest ballot sorter wiped in May 2021 immediately before public-records production. In Milwaukee, not a single drop-box surveillance video was produced from fifteen drop-box locations in a city where nearly half the vote was cast by mail.
The 36 findings consolidate into a small set of destruction mechanisms; the ones below carry most of the national-security weight.
- The digital records — logs, images, cryptographic hashes — were wiped. Antrim County’s Election Management System had all 2020 adjudication logs manually removed while prior-year logs remained intact; the 68.05% tabulator-log error rate that triggered mass adjudication cannot be audited because there is no record of who adjudicated what. Maricopa County’s EMS database and Windows security event logs were deleted or overwritten, and 284,412 ballot images were found corrupt or missing. In Mesa County, Colorado, a state-supervised Dominion “trusted build” deleted 28,989 files from the EMS server — including at least 695 log and event-log files required by federal and state law to be retained for 22 months. In Fulton County, Georgia, SHA authentication files for 132,286 of 148,318 absentee ballot images were intentionally removed; 17,852 ballot images were missing from the official recount; and the county admitted in federal court it did not preserve the majority of in-person ballot images for the November 3 original count.
- The physical records — tapes, return sheets, drop-box video — were destroyed or never produced. In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, a named witness observed county attorneys physically tear election data into pieces and state they would “have a campfire to burn the data”; the county’s own Right to Know response confirmed 244 of 428 precincts were missing legally required return-sheet documentation at certification. In Milwaukee, zero drop-box surveillance videos were produced in response to open records requests across fifteen drop-box locations in a city where nearly half of all votes were cast by mail. In Fulton County, Georgia, State Farm Arena’s pre-5:22 a.m. November 4 surveillance video is missing; drop-box chain-of-custody was absent on more than 100,000 ballots; and thirty-five tabulator memory cards were swapped mid-election with seals cut and fraudulent returns printed on surrogate machines. In Floyd County, Georgia, Election Day system log files are simply missing.
- State directives and vendor processes were used to destroy records within the federal preservation window. Michigan’s Secretary of State issued a February 12, 2021, memorandum to county clerks — well inside the 22-month federal preservation window — directing that electronic pollbook software and associated files “must be deleted.” Analysis of the Michigan Qualified Voter File subsequently showed approximately 500,000 voter-history records deleted, with official ballots cast exceeding QVF voter-history records by 104,138 individuals. Dominion’s Michigan subcontractor, ElectionSource, directed clerks to remove batteries from ImageCast Precinct tabulators, a procedure that resets the device’s internal configuration data. The Colorado “trusted build” deleted records mandated by federal and state retention law. The Georgia Secretary of State’s post-election bulletin omitted any directive to preserve the original count.
- The Pennsylvania chain-of-custody gap exceeded the state’s margin of victory. The Public Interest Legal Foundation documented that Pennsylvania distributed approximately 3.1 million mail ballots in 2020 and that 440,781 of those ballots were classified “unknown” — meaning election officials had no record of what happened to them, whether they were returned, not returned, counted, or discarded. Pennsylvania’s certified presidential margin of victory was 81,660 votes. The number of mail ballots whose chain of custody could not be reconstructed exceeded the certified margin by more than five to one. In Delaware County specifically, officials destroyed election-night paper tapes, ordered the Blue Crest ballot sorter wiped of all November 3, 2020, data immediately before open-records production, and failed to produce required return sheets from more than half the county’s precincts.
- Where the records are gone, the election cannot be independently verified. Philip Stark, UC Berkeley statistician and the inventor of risk-limiting audits, stated on the Fulton County record that “the electronic records of the election are not intact” and that the county’s “lack of basic accounting controls make it impossible to determine who really won.” That is a description, by one of the country’s most respected election-audit authorities, of a federal election whose records are in a condition that precludes independent verification. The same condition — no reconstructable chain of custody, no intact adjudication logs, no intact ballot images, no intact surveillance video, no intact tapes, no intact voter-history file — recurs across Antrim, Fulton, Maricopa, Delaware, Milwaukee, and Mesa. The 22-month federal preservation window exists precisely so that a closely contested federal election can be audited afterward. The record describes a 2020 cycle in which, by the time anyone could look, much of what the law requires to be there was gone.
Read as a national-security question, the Record Destruction record describes a federal election that, in the jurisdictions that decided it, cannot be reconstructed after the fact. Elections are a federally designated critical-infrastructure component, and the integrity of that component rests on a specific premise: that after the polls close, the records required to verify the count — the ballot images, the tabulator memory, the adjudication logs, the chain-of-custody paperwork, the surveillance video, the paper tapes, the voter-history file — remain available for the 22 months federal law requires. In the jurisdictions described here, that premise did not hold. Adjudication logs were manually deleted from an EMS server while prior-year logs remained. Over a million ballot images were lost across a single state. Cryptographic authentication files for the large majority of one county’s absentee images were intentionally removed. A half million voter-history records were deleted from a statewide voter file. A state-supervised vendor upgrade deleted tens of thousands of files including hundreds of legally mandated logs. Paper tapes were torn up in a county office. Drop-box video simply was not produced. Mail ballots whose chain of custody could not be reconstructed exceeded a state’s margin of victory by more than five to one. An adversary shaping a future U.S. election does not need to alter the count if the records that would prove the count is wrong are not going to exist by the time anyone is allowed to check. That is the attack surface this record describes, and it is the posture any future adversary will plan around whether the United States chooses to address it or not.
Supporting Evidence
