Pre-Election
Rumor: Election officials don’t clean the voter rolls.
Get the Facts: Election officials regularly update their voter registration lists based on voter requests and data from varying sources that may indicate that a voter has died, moved, registered elsewhere, changed their name, or become otherwise ineligible. These data sources include motor vehicle licensing agencies, entities that maintain death records, confirmation notices mailed to voters, and interstate data exchanges. This helps election officials identify and merge duplicate records, and remove records for individuals who are no longer eligible.
Federal and state laws protect against the removal of eligible registrants from the voter rolls. These include federal prohibitions, applicable in most states, against removing some registrants in the 90 days prior to a federal election and removing registrants solely due to their failure to vote. Unless an election official has first-hand information that a registrant has moved, processes used for removing records for those who may have moved can take longer than two years due to protections to prevent registrants from being removed incorrectly. Such legal protections and the timing of data sharing can result in a lag time between a person becoming ineligible and the removal of their record. This can lead to some official election mail, including mail-in ballots in some states, being delivered to addresses of those who have moved or may be otherwise ineligible. Election officials often encourage people to notify the election office if they receive election mail for individuals who no longer reside at the address.
State and federal laws prohibit voter impersonation, including voting on behalf of an individual who has died, moved, or otherwise become ineligible yet whose record remains temporarily on the voter rolls. Additional election integrity safeguards, including signature matching and verification of other personal data, protect against people casting ballots on behalf of others.
The voter registration practices described in this entry do not apply to North Dakota, where voter registration does not occur.
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Reality: Safeguards protect the integrity of the mail-in/absentee ballot process, including relating to the use of mail-in/absentee ballot request forms.
Get the Facts: Election officials utilize various security measures to protect the integrity of the mail-in/absentee voting process, including those that protect against the unauthorized use of ballot request forms, in states where such forms are used, the submission of mail-in/absentee ballots by ineligible individuals, and eligible in-person voters being erroneously precluded from being able to vote due to being listed in the poll book as having received a mail-in/absentee ballot.
Mail-in/absentee ballot request forms typically require applicants to sign the form and affirm their eligibility to cast a mail-in/absentee ballot under penalty of law. Upon receipt of a mail-in/absentee ballot request form, election officials implement varying procedures to verify the identity and eligibility of the applicant prior to sending the applicant a mail-in/absentee ballot. Such procedures include checking the signature and information submitted on the form against the corresponding voter registration record, as well as ensuring that multiple mail-in/absentee ballots are not sent in response to applications using the same voter’s information.
Election officials further implement varying procedures to verify the identity and eligibility of those who submit mail-in/absentee ballots. Those who submit mail-in/absentee ballots are required to sign the mail-in/absentee ballot envelope. In some states, a notarized signature, the signature of a witness or witnesses, and/or a copy of valid identification is also required. Upon receipt of a mail-in/absentee ballot, election officials verify the signature on the mail-in/absentee ballot envelope and/or that the mail-in/absentee ballot has been otherwise properly submitted prior to retrieving the ballot from its envelope and submitting it for counting. Some states notify the voter if there is a discrepancy or missing signature, affording the voter an opportunity to correct the issue.
State policies vary on how to handle an in-person voter who is listed in the poll book as having been sent a mail-in/absentee ballot. In most states, the voter would be required to cast a provisional ballot that could be later reviewed by election officials. In others, the voter may cast a regular ballot and any corresponding mail-in/absentee ballot returned in the name of that voter would be rejected. In all such cases, instances of potential double voting or voter impersonation could be directed to appropriate authorities for investigation.
Useful Sources
- Mail-in Voting in 2020 Infrastructure Risk Assessment, CISA
- Mail-in Voting in 2020 Infrastructure Risk Infographic, CISA
- Mail-in Voting Integrity Safeguards Infographic, CISA
- USPS Election Mail Information Center, USPS
- How States Verify Absentee Ballot Applications, NCSL
- How States Verify Voted Absentee Ballots, NCSL
- States That Permit Voters to Correct Signature Discrepancies, NCSL
- 52 U.S.C. § 21082
- Provisional Ballots, NCSL
- State Policies on Voting In-Person or Changing Vote After Requesting a Mail/Absentee Ballot, NASS
- Election FAQs, NASED
- Your local or state election officials. EAC state-by-state directory
Get the Facts: Election officials utilize various safeguards to protect ballots returned by voters via drop boxes from being tampered with, stolen, or destroyed. Drop boxes located outdoors are typically made of heavy and high-grade metal, bolted to the ground, and include security features such as locks, tamper-evident seals, minimally sized ballot insertion slots, and fire and water-damage prevention features. Drop boxes located indoors are typically staffed and protected by existing building security measures. Many election offices monitor their drop boxes via 24-hour video surveillance. Ballots returned via drop box are retrieved by election officials or designated individuals, often in bi-partisan teams, at frequent intervals.
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Get the Facts: State and local election officials implement varying testing practices to help ensure voting system hardware and software function as intended. These practices include federal and state testing and certification, testing prior to procurement, acceptance testing, and/or pre- and post-election logic and accuracy testing. Such testing helps detect and protect against malicious or anomalous software issues.
Under federal and state certification programs, voting system manufacturers submit systems to undergo testing and review by an accredited laboratory or state testers. This testing is designed to check that systems function as designed and meet applicable state and/or federal requirements or standards for accuracy, privacy, and accessibility, such as the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines set by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Certification testing usually includes a review of a system’s source code as well as environmental, security and functional testing. Varying by state, this testing may be conducted by a state-certified laboratory, a partner university, and/or a federally certified testing laboratory.
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Get the Facts: State and federal laws prohibit voter impersonation, including casting a ballot on behalf of a deceased individual. Election officials regularly update their voter registration lists, removing voter records for those who have died, moved, registered elsewhere, or became otherwise ineligible. Removal of deceased individuals is based on death records shared by state vital statistics agencies and the Social Security Administration. While there can be lag time between a person’s death and their removal from the voter registration list, which can lead to some official election mail, including mail-in ballots being delivered to addresses of deceased individuals, death records provide a strong audit trail to identify any attempts to cast ballots on behalf of deceased individuals. Additional election integrity safeguards, including signature matching and information checks, further protect against voter impersonation and voting by ineligible persons.
In some instances, living persons may return mail-in ballots or vote early in-person, and then die before Election Day. Some states permit such voters’ ballots to be counted, while others disallow such ballots and follow procedures to identify and reject them during processing.
Taken out of context, some voter registration information may appear to suggest suspicious activity, but is actually the result of an innocuous clerical error or intended data practices. For example, in rare instances when a registrant’s birth date is not known (e.g., a voter who legally registered prior to modern voter registration practices), election officials may use temporary placeholder data (e.g., 1/1/1900) until the registrant’s birth date can be updated. In other instances, a voting-age child with the same name and address as their deceased parent could be misinterpreted as a deceased voter or contribute to clerical errors.
Useful Sources
- 18 U.S.C. § 1708
- 52 U.S.C. §§ 10307(c), 20507, 20511(2), 21083(a)(2)(A)
- Mail-in Voting Integrity Safeguards Infographic, CISA
- Election Infrastructure Cyber Risk Assessment and Infographic, CISA
- Election Infrastructure Security, CISA
- Election Security, DHS
- The National Voter Registration Act of 1993: Questions and Answers, DOJ
- Election Crimes, FBI
- Election Mail Information Center, USPS
- Your local or state election officials. EAC state-by-state directory
- Maintenance of State Voter Registration Lists, NASS
- What If an Absentee Voter Dies Before Election Day?, NCSL
- Voter List Accuracy, NCSL
- Election FAQs, NASED
Get the Facts: Some voter registration information is public information and is available to political campaigns, researchers, and often members of the public, frequently for purchase. According to a joint FBI and CISA public service announcement, cyber actors may make false claims of “hacked” voter information to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions.
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Get the Facts: Outages in online voter registration systems occur for a variety of reasons, including configuration errors, hardware issues, natural disasters, communications infrastructure issues, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. As CISA and FBI warned in a public service announcement, a system outage does not necessarily mean the integrity of voter registration information or any other election system has been impacted. When an outage occurs, election officials work to verify the integrity of voter registration information.
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Get the Facts: Hacks of state and local IT systems should not be minimized; however, a compromise of state or local IT systems does not mean those systems are election-related. Even if an election-related system is compromised, a compromise of a system does not necessarily mean the integrity of the vote has been affected. Election officials have multiple safeguards and contingencies in place, including provisional ballots or backup paper poll books that limit the impact from a cyber incident with minimal disruption to voting. Additionally, having an auditable paper record ensures that the vote count can be verified and validated.
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Get the Facts: Claims are easy to fake and can be used for disinformation purposes. If voter registration data were to be manipulated, states have several safeguards in place to enable voters to vote, including offline backups of registration data, provisional ballots, and in several states, same-day registration.
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Get the Facts: This is false. Committing fraud through photocopied or home-printed ballots would be highly difficult to do successfully. This is because each local election office has security measures in place to detect such malicious activity. While the specific measures vary, in accordance with state and local election laws and practices, such security measures include signature matching, information checks, barcodes, watermarks, and precise paper weights.
Useful Sources
- Mail-in Voting Election Integrity Safeguards Infographic, CISA
- Election FAQs, NASED
Reality: Safeguards are in place to protect against fraudulent voting using the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB).
Get the Facts: Changing an election using fraudulently submitted FWABs would be highly difficult to do. This is because election offices have security measures in place to detect such activity.
The FWAB is primarily used as a backup ballot for military and overseas voters who requested but did not yet receive their absentee ballot. FWAB users must provide their signature and meet varying state voter registration and absentee ballot request requirements, which can include provision of full or partial social security number, state identification number, proof of identification, and/or witness signature.
Since only military and overseas voters are eligible to use the FWAB, relatively few of them are submitted each election. In 2016, states reported that only 23,291 total FWABs were submitted nationwide, with all but six states receiving less than 1,000 FWABs statewide. Since use is relatively rare, spikes in FWAB usage would be detected as anomalous.
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Election Day
Rumor: Problems with ballot scanners at my voting site mean that my ballot won’t be counted.
Get the Facts: Like all digital systems, ballot scanners can malfunction. Similarly, properly functioning ballot scanners may be unable to scan ballots that are damaged, misprinted, or have ambiguous markings. When a ballot cannot be read by a scanner at a voting site, election officials apply procedures to securely store the ballots until they can be counted at a later time. Because the paper ballot itself is the official record of the votes, there is no impact on the accuracy or integrity of election results.
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Reality: Election officials provide writing instruments that are approved for marking ballots to all in-person voters using hand-marked paper ballots.
Get the Facts: Election jurisdictions allow voters to mark ballots with varying types of writing instruments, based on state law and other considerations such as tabulation system requirements. Poll workers are required to provide approved writing devices to voters.
Although felt-tip pens, like Sharpies, may bleed through ballots, some election officials have stated that ballot tabulation equipment in their jurisdictions can still read these ballots. Many jurisdictions even design their ballots with offset columns to prevent any potential bleed through from impacting the ability to easily scan both sides of ballots.
If a ballot has issues that impact its ability to be scanned, it can be hand counted or duplicated, or adjudicated by election officials, who use defined procedures such as chain of custody to ensure protect ballot secrecy and integrity. Many states additionally have “voter intent” laws that allow for ballots to be counted even when issues such as bleed-throughs or stray marks are present, as long as the voter’s intent can still be determined.
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Get the Facts: While most states have a process to permit a limited number of credentialed or registered observers at in-person voting locations to observe the voting process, state and federal laws offer voters general protection from threats and intimidation, including from observers. States use varying terms for observers, including “poll watchers,” “challengers,” and “poll agents.” In general, observers are prohibited from violating ballot secrecy, campaigning, collecting private voter information, and obstructing or interfering with the voting process. Observers in some states may report potential issues to election officials, such as questioned eligibility of a voter, suspicious behavior, or suspected rule violations. Intimidation or threatening behavior is never permissible.
Under certain circumstances, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division may monitor polling place procedures for the protection of voters under federal voting rights laws. International observers, including delegations from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe or the Organization for American States, who have been invited by the U.S. Department of State, may also observe in-person voting processes in some states.
If you feel that you’ve been a victim of, or witnessed, voter intimidation or threats, please report the experience to the DOJ Civil Rights Division’s Voting Section by phone 800-253-3931 or through its complaint portal at https://civilrights.justice.gov/. If you experience an emergency, please call 911.
Useful Sources
- 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(1)(A), 18 U.S.C. § 594, 52 U.S.C. § 20511, 18 U.S.C. §§ 241 and 242
- Election Crimes and Security, FBI
- Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, DOJ
- About Federal Observers and Election Monitoring, DOJ
- State Laws on Poll Watchers and Challengers, NASS
- Poll Watchers and Challengers, NCSL
- Policies for Election Observers, NCSL
- OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation USA 2020 Factsheet, OSCE
- Election FAQs, NASED
Get the Facts: Ballot secrecy is guaranteed by law in all states. Election officials implement various safeguards to protect voters’ choices from being viewable or knowable by others, including the election officials themselves. With few exceptions, these security measures ensure that individual ballots, once cast, cannot be traced back to the voters who cast them. For in-person voting, privacy measures include dividers between voting stations and requirements that poll workers maintain distance from voters while they are casting their ballots. For mail-in and provisional voting, election officials follow strict procedures to ensure ballot secrecy when ballots are retrieved from mail-in and provisional ballot envelopes.
Ballot secrecy rights may be voluntarily waived by voters in certain circumstances, and waiver may be required in some of these, such as military and overseas voters that vote by fax or e-mail.
While ballot choices are secret in almost all circumstances, a voter’s party affiliation and history of voting generally are not. Information contained in voter registration records, such as name, address, phone number, and political party affiliation (in states with party-based voter registration), is generally available to political parties and others. This data also regularly contains information on whether a voter voted in a particular election, but not their ballot choices.
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Get the Facts: Polling place lookup sites, like all websites, may experience outages for a variety of reasons, impacting their availability to voters. Polling place lookup sites are not connected to infrastructure that counts votes and are typically segmented from infrastructure that enables voting, such as the voter registration database. Election officials will point potential voters to alternate tools and resources for this information in the event of an issue.
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Post-Election
Rumor: Vulnerabilities in election technology mean that elections have been hacked and hackers are able to change election results.
Get the Facts: Like all digital systems, the technologies used to administer elections have vulnerabilities. Election officials use varying technological, physical, and procedural controls to help safeguard these systems and the integrity of the election processes they support. Identified vulnerabilities should be taken seriously and mitigations implemented in a timely manner. Identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities is a key part of ordinary cybersecurity practices. Mitigations include installing software patches, implementing physical and procedural safeguards, and applying compensating technical controls. These safeguards and compensating controls include measures that seek to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities prior to potential exploitation as well as those that help detect and recover from a malfunction or an actual or attempted exploitation of known or zero-day vulnerabilities. It’s important to note that there is no indication that cyber vulnerabilities have contributed to any voting system deleting, losing, or changing votes.
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Reality: Ballot handling procedures protect against intentional or unintentional ballot destruction and related tampering.
Get the Facts: Election officials implement varying ballot processing and tabulation safeguards designed to ensure each ballot cast in the election can be correctly counted. These safeguards include chain of custody procedures, auditable logging requirements, and canvass processes. Election officials use these security measure to check that votes are accurately accounted for during processing and counting.
Federal law and varying state laws and regulations govern election officials’ retention practices for ballots and other election records. Per federal law, ballots, applications, registrations, and other records related to elections for federal offices, such as those for President and Vice President, Members of the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives, must be retained and preserved for 22 months from the date of the election Beyond retention, many state, local, and territorial jurisdictions require specific security protocols for stored ballots and other election records, such as storage in a secure vault featuring double lock systems that can only be opened when authorized representatives from both political parties are present. This type of common requirement is intended to ensure all ballots and relevant records are preserved in their post-election state in case they are needed for recounts, audits, or other post-election processes.
Election officials may destroy or discard ballots and other election records required to be retained following applicable retention periods set in federal, state, and/or local requirements. Election officials may discard other election materials that are not subject to retention requirements at any time.
Images or video of election officials discarding papers may appear suspicious when taken out of context, but they are likely depicting legal disposal of election materials.
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Get the Facts: Variations in vote totals for different contests on the same ballot occur in every election. For example, this can occur as a result of “undervotes.” These variations by themselves are not indications of issues with voting technology or the integrity of election processes or results.
An undervote occurs when a voter intentionally or unintentionally does not make a selection in a given contest on their ballot (e.g., a voter votes for a presidential candidate, but not for any candidates in other contests on their ballot) or, where a voter selects fewer than the maximum number allowed for a particular contest. Undervotes commonly occur on so-called “down-ballot” races. For example, a voter may choose to vote for president, senator, and governor, but not for other offices or ballot measures that are lower down on their ballot. Even if a ballot includes an undervote in a particular contest, properly marked votes on their ballot are counted.
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Get the Facts: The systems and processes used by election officials to tabulate votes and certify official results are protected by various safeguards that help ensure the accuracy of election results. These safeguards include measures that help ensure tabulation systems function as intended, protect against malicious software, and enable the identification and correction of any irregularities.
Every state has voting system safeguards to ensure each ballot cast in the election can be correctly counted. State procedures often include testing and certification of voting systems, required auditable logs, and software checks, such as logic and accuracy tests, to ensure ballots are properly counted before election results are made official. With these security measures, election officials can check to determine that devices are running the certified software and functioning properly.
Every state also has laws and processes to verify vote tallies before results are officially certified. State processes include robust chain-of-custody procedures, auditable logs, and canvass processes. The vast majority of votes cast in this election will be cast on paper ballots or using machines that produce a paper audit trail, which allow for tabulation audits to be conducted from the paper record in the event any issues emerge with the voting system software, audit logs, or tabulation. These canvass and certification procedures are also generally conducted in the public eye, as political party representatives and other observers are typically allowed to be present, to add an additional layer of verification. This means voting system software is not a single point of failure and such systems are subject to multiple audits to ensure accuracy and reliability. For example, some counties conduct multiple audits, including a post-election logic and accuracy test of the voting system, and a bipartisan hand count of paper ballots.
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Get the Facts: While DHS and CISA assist states and localities with securing election infrastructure, DHS and CISA do not design, print, or audit ballots. State and local election officials manage ballot design and printing, as well as the auditing of results.
Local election offices have security and detection measures in place that make it highly difficult to commit fraud through counterfeit ballots. While the specific measures vary, in accordance with state and local election laws and practices, ballot security measures can include signature matching, information checks, barcodes, watermarks, and precise paper weights.
DHS and CISA operate in support of state and local election officials, and do not administer elections or handle ballots. CISA’s role in election security includes sharing information, such as cyber threat indicators, with state and local election officials, as well as providing technical cybersecurity services (e.g., vulnerability scanning) upon the request of those officials. CISA funded an independent third-party to develop an open-source election auditing tool for voluntary use by state and local election officials. (Note: The previous sentence was updated 9 November 2020.) CISA does not audit elections and does not have access to the tool as states use it.
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Get the Facts: The timeline for reporting election results may be impacted by a number of factors, including changes to state or local level policies that affect how the election is administered, changes to when ballots can be processed, or additional protocols implemented to make voting and vote processing safer during the pandemic. Election results reported on election night are always unofficial and are provided solely for voters’ convenience. In fact, no state requires that official results be certified on election night itself. Fluctuations in unofficial results reporting will occur during and after election night as more ballots are processed and counted, often including military and overseas ballots, and validated provisional ballots. Variations in state processes may also mean ballots cast through different methods (e.g., early in-person voting, mail-in voting, and election day voting) are counted and unofficially reported in different orders. Official results are released after rigorous canvassing (verification) and certification by local and state election officials.
Useful Sources
- FBI-CISA Public Service Announcement: Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results
- Election Results Reporting Risks and Mitigations, CISA
- Mail-in Voting 2020 Risk Assessment, CISA
- Mail-in Voting Integrity Safeguards Infographic, CISA
- Mail-in Voting Processing Factors Map (Updated October 29, 2020), CISA
- Post-Election Process Mapping Infographic, CISA
- Checklist for Securing Election Night Results Reporting, EAC
- USPS Election Mail Information Center, USPS
- Federal Election Results FAQs, CRS
- State Election Canvassing Timeframes and Recount Thresholds, NASS
- After the Voting Ends: The Steps to Complete an Election, NCSL
- Election Security State Policies, NCSL
- Changes to Mail in Voting in 2020, NCSL
- Election FAQs, NASED
Get the Facts: All provisional ballots are reviewed by election officials in every election regardless of result margins. Provisional ballots cast by individuals whose eligibility can be verified are counted. Additionally, election officials are required to provide individuals who cast provisional ballots written information regarding how they can determine whether their vote was counted and, if it was not counted, the reason for its rejection.
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Rumor: Witnessing election officials marking ballots means that fraudulent voting is taking place.
Get the Facts: Voters do not always submit ballots that can be accurately interpreted by a ballot scanner due to issues, such as damage, misprinting and/or ambiguous markings on the ballot. Election officials apply the jurisdiction’s rules for determining voter intent regarding the marks on such ballots and capture the ballots’ valid votes in election results via varying electronic and/or manual processes.
Ballot duplication is a process by which election officials carefully transfer a voter’s choices from an unscannable ballot to a duplicate ballot so it can be read by a ballot scanner. Both the original and duplicate ballot are labeled and logged so that the two ballots can be tracked and audited. Many jurisdictions require bipartisan teams of two or four personnel to complete this process and verify that votes are accurately transferred to duplicated ballots. The process is often open to public observation.
In some jurisdictions, ballot duplication is referred to as ballot remaking, ballot replication, or ballot transcription.
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Get the Facts: Election officials use websites to share unofficial results with the public as votes are being counted and other results management processes are taking place. The results displayed on these sites are unofficial and may be updated, as necessary, until official results are certified. These sites may experience outages due to a variety of issues including a high volume of Internet traffic or cyber incidents. Cyber incidents, as well as human or technological error, may also lead to inaccurate information being displayed on these sites. As these websites are not connected to any portion of the voting system, such disruptions would not impact the ability of election officials to count ballots or the accuracy of official certified results.
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Get the Facts: Malicious actors often use fake personas and impersonate real accounts to trick the public into believing disinformation, including election-related disinformation.
Popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and others provide an indication, such as a checkmark that is either blue or grey, to indicate that an account is verified by the platform. If an account claims to be a well-known person or official organization but is not verified, they may be an imposter.
There are multiple things to look for if you think an account is fake or spoofed. Is the account brand new? Do they create content or merely re-share? Do they have a coherent profile description and does it match what they are sharing? Do they have a real profile photo? A best practice when looking for election-related information is to go to trusted sources, like your local election official.
If you find a suspicious social media post or account, consider reporting the activity to the platform so others don’t get duped. Most platforms have a “report” function built into posts, so it’s easy to report suspicious items, such as misinformation about election infrastructure. If an account is posting election disinformation, consider reporting to your state or local election official.
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Get the Facts: Cyber actors can forge emails to look like they came from someone else. This common tactic is called email spoofing, where attackers send an email pretending to be from a specific domain or organization in an attempt to harvest personal data or spread malware. Such spoofed emails can also be used to disseminate false or inflammatory information. To send realistic-looking emails, cyber actors may forge the sender address to hide the origin of an email or set up spoofed domains that have a slightly different name from the real domain. Always be wary of out of the ordinary emails and look to trusted sources, such as the organization’s official website, in order to verify. Never provide personal information or download files from suspicious emails. If you receive a suspicious election-related email, consider reporting it to your local election official or local FBI field office.
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