The deliberate or negligent destruction of election records is the clearest and most legally salient break in the chain of custody, because it permanently removes the very evidence needed to confirm or refute competing claims about an election. Federal law, notably 52 U.S.C. § 20701, requires that all records relating to a federal election be preserved for 22 months, and parallel state statutes impose comparable obligations; when critical logs, ballot images, surveillance footage, or other records are erased or altered within that window, the legal presumption shifts toward the inference that potential wrongdoing cannot be fully investigated.

This subsection catalogs documented instances of record destruction or non‑preservation across multiple jurisdictions—including deletion of EMS logs during vendor “trusted builds,” missing adjudication records for 2020 when prior years remain intact, and the absence of key surveillance video segments—and analyzes their implications under federal and state law. In each case, the missing records correspond to essential links in the audit chain: logs that would show unauthorized access or configuration changes, images needed to validate ballot‑handling claims, or chain‑of‑custody documents that would reconcile physical and digital counts. Where those links have been severed, the report concludes that a “meaningful audit” in the legal sense is no longer possible, and that any assertion of election integrity in the affected jurisdictions rests on trust rather than verifiable evidence.