SAN DIEGO — San Diego County’s Registrar of Voters Office has been inundated with near identical requests for "vote cast records." It’s a trend happening across the state of California and the country.
The goal for those asking for the record is to detect fraudulent voting patterns, ultimately questioning the integrity of the 2020 Presidential Election.
The requests to the San Diego County Registrar of Voter’s Office says their “vote cast records” requests jumped from about three a month to 64 in August alone.
The requests came just days after The Moment of Truth Summit hosted by Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO and supporter of former President Donald Trump.
Supporters of the requests say, they just want to understand the voting process better. Critics say the requests are just getting in the way.
Urson Russell says he supports the effort to request cast vote records for elections officials in California. Russell adds, addressing what might be the cumbersome work to produce the records.
"You run it once, you got the report there,” said Russell. “If you want to send an email and blind copy 20 people, there are obviously some efficiencies that could be achieved there,"
“This is part of the effort to undermine trust in American elections. The vote cast record is not going to add up to the total vote counts and so it might be something that confuses the issue more than it clarified,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at the University of California San Diego. “The final tally is made up of lots of ballots including provisional ballots that the registrar has to determine if they're real or not,"
"It's very important that people know the transparency and accountability in our election process,” said Russell. “Where are the discrepancies so that we can learn more about it? If we understand them, we're happy to promote things do align. We'll correct those statements just like the news media tries to do. We think we should be able to ask those questions."
We took those questions to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters Office where Cynthia Paes says she was surprised to see so many requests.
“It's a pretty quick turnaround to get the report out to the requester. All of our election processes are open, transparent to the public,” said Paes. “We welcome the public to come and observe and we welcome requests."
When asked if the vote cast records could detect fraud in an election, Paes responded, "I can't speculate on what individuals are using the reports for, but I stand behind our voting system and our election results 100%."
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