Election officials said that records requests, which are designed under the Freedom of Information Act to make the vote-tallying process transparent to the public, have increasingly been used by election deniers to disrupt the system.
In this Nov. 4, 2020, file photo, election workers work on counting absentee ballots for the 2020 general election at TCF Center, on Nov. 4, 2020, in Detroit.seeking evidence of 2020 election fraud have flooded some county offices with so many records requests that officials say they have been unable to perform their primary duties.
last week in Springfield, Missouri, activists instructed attendees on how to request election-related records, and pointed them to templates to make it easier to submit the forms. "Election officials are clearly getting, like, a copy-and paste-job of a FOIA request from some centralized entity," she said. "They can see in the FOIA request because it'll be bracket, insert county here, close bracket -- and the requestor doesn't insert the name of the county."
"We are under obligation to respond to these records requests in a very proactive way -- but the volume and the nature of these requests are such that it's difficult to just keep track of it all," Early said. "And it's become a big problem, because we have elections to conduct but we also have our obligations ... to take these requests seriously. And we are, but it's a difficult environment to live under.
Colbeck, however, told ABC News the information he is seeking is not programming data, but timestamp information associated with cast vote records already provided by the township. Election workers have been followed to their cars and threatened with rhetoric like "Traitors are dealt with," county spokesperson Bethany Drysdale told ABC News.
In Otero County, New Mexico, David Clements, a former college professor who gained national prominence for pushing baseless claims of voter fraud, has been attending town hall meetings and confronting officials about the 2020 election. "It was almost a joke to me," Askin told ABC News. "I'm serving my community, and then you have 50,000 people that voted for me. All he does is feed my determination."
Contacted by ABC News for comment, Clements replied with a list of poll results from the conservative polling company Rasmussen Reports showing the percentage of likely voters who believe cheating affected the results of the 2020 election, and other related statistics.
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