Cast vote record

Cast vote records have existed in various forms since electronic voting systems were introduced. Los Angeles County began making CVRs available to the public in the 1980s when members of the public could rent magnetic tapes containing what are now called CVRs. The development of modern CVR standards began in earnest in the 2010s as part of efforts to improve election transparency and auditability. Most voting machines support the export of CVR data, including systems by Dominion, ES&S, and Hart.{{cite web |last=Risk-Limiting Audits with Arlo |title=Cast Vote Records (CVRs) |url=https://docs.voting.works/arlo/jurisdiction-manager/pre-audit-file-uploads/cast-vote-records-cvrs |accessdate=May 25, 2025 |publisher=Arlo}}

In 2015, NIST established a public working group to develop common data format specifications for CVRs.{{cite web|title=Cast Vote Records (CVR) Subgroup|url=https://www.nist.gov/itl/voting/cast-vote-records-cvr-subgroup|publisher=National Institute of Standards and Technology|date=August 28, 2020|accessdate=May 25, 2025}} This resulted in the publication of NIST Special Publication 1500-103 in November 2019, establishing the first formal standard for CVR data formats.

File:Ballot-foia.png

The availability of CVRs to the public varies significantly by jurisdiction, with some jurisdictions posting CVRs online, while others provide CVRs only through public records requests. Other jurisdictions do not disclose CVRs. For example, in March 2024, Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania decided that CVRs are not subject to public disclosure, given that Pennsylvania’s Elections Code provides that election records are public "except the contents of ballot boxes and voting machines and records of assisted voters,” with the Court determining that CVRs are the "electronic, modern-day equivalent" of ballot box contents.{{cite news |author=Mark Scolforo |date=March 4, 2024 |title=Pa. court rules electronic voting data is not subject to release under public records law |url=https://whyy.org/articles/pa-court-rules-electronic-voting-data-is-not-subject-to-release-under-public-records-law/ |accessdate=May 25, 2025 |publisher=WHYY}}

Notable jurisdictions making CVRs publicly available include many Colorado counties, San Francisco (which publishes a CVR with each release of results, including preliminary results),{{Cite web |last=FairVote and the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center |date=October 10, 2024 |title=Best Practices for Releasing RCV Election Results: 2024 Update |url=https://fairvote.org/report/best-practices-for-rcv-results-2024/ |access-date=2025-05-26 |website=Fair Vote}} Dane County, Wisconsin (as part of "Do It Yourself Audit" program), and many jurisdictions using ranked-choice voting, including Alaska,{{Cite journal |last=Reilly |first=Benjamin |last2=Lublin |first2=David |last3=Wright |first3=Glenn |date=2023 |title=Alaska’s New Electoral System: Countering Polarization or “Crooked as Hell”? |url=https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5k75w7xw |journal=California Journal of Politics and Policy |language=en |volume=15 |issue=1 |doi=10.5070/P2cjpp15160081}} Maine, and New York City.

Following the 2020 United States presidential election, election offices experienced a surge in public records requests for CVRs, often from activists searching for evidence of fraud. This included coordinated campaigns encouraging supporters to file identical requests, which some election officials compared to denial-of-service attacks due to the volume overwhelming their offices.

Databases of CVR data have been compiled by academic researchers and electoral reform advocates.{{Citation |last=Otis |first=Deb |title=Single winner ranked choice voting CVRs |date=2022 |url=https://dataverse.harvard.edu/citation?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/AMK8PJ |access-date=2025-05-26 |others=Deb Otis |publisher=Harvard Dataverse |format= |doi=10.7910/DVN/AMK8PJ}}

{{Main|Risk-limiting audit}}

CVRs form an important part of risk-limiting audits,{{Cite web |last=National Conference of State Legislatures |date=September 6, 2024 |title=Risk-Limiting Audits |url=https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/risk-limiting-audits |access-date=2025-05-26 |website=www.ncsl.org}} where they are used to compare a random sample of stored physical paper ballots against their interpretation in the cast vote. In addition, using the CVR data, an independent computer can tabulate the votes independently of earlier tabulations to get new totals, with humans reporting any differences in interpretations and total tallies.{{Cite journal |last=Lindeman |first=Mark |last2=Stark |first2=Philip B. |date=3 April 2012 |title=A Gentle Introduction to Risk-Limiting Audits |url=https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6175884 |journal=IEEE Security & Privacy |volume=10 |issue=5 |pages=42–49 |doi=10.1109/MSP.2012.56 |issn=1558-4046}}

Academic researchers use CVR data to study many aspects of elections and voting, since this data allows them to correlate voter choices across different races. In particular, CVR data allows researchers to study the prevalence and extent of split-ticket voting (where voters choose candidates from different political parties for different offices decided during the same election),{{Cite journal |last=Kuriwaki |first=Shiro |date=2024-12-12 |title=Ticket Splitting in a Nationalized Era |url=https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/734263 |journal=The Journal of Politics |doi=10.1086/734263 |issn=0022-3816}}{{Cite journal |last1=Agadjanian |first1=Alexander |last2=Robinson |first2=Jonathan |date=2019 |title=Ground Truth Validation of Survey Estimates of Split-Ticket Voting with Cast Vote Records Data |url=https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=3443722 |journal=SSRN Electronic Journal |language=en |doi=10.2139/ssrn.3443722 |issn=1556-5068}} and thereby quantify partisanship in voting patterns.{{Cite journal |last1=Dowling |first1=Conor M. |last2=Miller |first2=Michael G. |last3=Morris |first3=Kevin T. |date=2025-06-01 |title=Crossover Voting Rates in Partisan and Nonpartisan Elections: Evidence From Cast Vote Records |url=https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129251318645 |journal=Political Research Quarterly |language=EN |volume=78 |issue=2 |pages=720–737 |doi=10.1177/10659129251318645 |issn=1065-9129}} The data also allows researchers to analyze ballot design effects in more detail, including quantifying the effect of ranked-choice voting ballots on the rate of invalid votes and understanding different kinds of invalid choices such as undervotes and overvotes.{{Cite journal |last1=Pettigrew |first1=Stephen |last2=Radley |first2=Dylan |date=2025-03-15 |title=Overvotes, Overranks, and Skips: Mismarked and Rejected Votes in Ranked Choice Voting |url=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-025-10028-4 |journal=Political Behavior |language=en |doi=10.1007/s11109-025-10028-4 |issn=1573-6687}}{{Cite journal |last=Cormack |first=Lindsey |date=2024-05-01 |title=More Choices, More Problems? Ranked Choice Voting Errors in New York City |url=https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X231220640 |journal=American Politics Research |language=EN |volume=52 |issue=3 |pages=306–319 |doi=10.1177/1532673X231220640 |issn=1532-673X}}{{cite arXiv | eprint=2404.11407 | last1=Delemazure | first1=Théo | last2=Peters | first2=Dominik | title=Generalizing Instant Runoff Voting to Allow Indifferences | date=2024 | class=cs.GT }}

Researchers in voting theory and social choice also use CVR data. In ranked-choice elections, the data allows them to compare different preferential voting rules,{{Cite journal |last1=McCune |first1=David |last2=and McCune |first2=Lori |date=2024-01-02 |title=Does the Choice of Preferential Voting Method Matter? An Empirical Study Using Ranked Choice Elections in the United States |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00344893.2022.2133003 |journal=Representation |volume=60 |issue=1 |pages=1–16 |doi=10.1080/00344893.2022.2133003 |issn=0034-4893}} and to understand how often instant-runoff voting exhibits paradoxes.{{Cite journal |last1=McCune |first1=David |last2=Wilson |first2=Jennifer |date=2023-07-01 |title=Ranked-choice voting and the spoiler effect |url=https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-023-01050-3 |journal=Public Choice |language=en |volume=196 |issue=1 |pages=19–50 |doi=10.1007/s11127-023-01050-3 |issn=1573-7101}} Researchers have also used them to explore new types of voting systems such as proportional multi-issue voting methods.{{Cite journal |last1=Chandak |first1=Nikhil |last2=Goel |first2=Shashwat |last3=Peters |first3=Dominik |date=2024-03-24 |title=Proportional Aggregation of Preferences for Sequential Decision Making |url=https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/28813 |journal=Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence |language=en |volume=38 |issue=9 |pages=9573–9581 |doi=10.1609/aaai.v38i9.28813 |issn=2374-3468}}

While CVRs are anonymized, the public release of CVRs can raise potential privacy concerns.{{Cite journal |last=Williams |first=Jack R. |last2=Baltz |first2=Samuel |last3=Iii |first3=Charles Stewart |date=October 2024 |title=Votes Can Be Confidently Bought in Some Ranked Ballot Elections, and What to Do about It |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/abs/votes-can-be-confidently-bought-in-some-ranked-ballot-elections-and-what-to-do-about-it/11DE1EAE0FF635E1274B7BF0C2D615B0 |journal=Political Analysis |language=en |volume=32 |issue=4 |pages=463–475 |doi=10.1017/pan.2024.4 |issn=1047-1987}}{{Cite journal |last=Kuriwaki |first=Shiro |last2=Lewis |first2=Jeffrey B. |last3=Morse |first3=Michael |date=2025-03-12 |title=Privacy violations in election results |url=https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt1512 |journal=Science Advances |volume=11 |issue=11 |pages=eadt1512 |doi=10.1126/sciadv.adt1512 |pmc=11900849 |pmid=40073116}} In particular, in small precincts, unique voting patterns may identify individual voters, and there could be a potential for vote buying through pre-arranged voting patterns, especially in complex ballots such as ranked-choice vote elections. However, researchers found, using Maricopa County's 2020 election as a case study, that "the release of individual ballot records [CVRs] would lead to no revelation of any vote choice for 99.83% of voters as compared to 99.95% under Maricopa’s current practice of reporting aggregate results by precinct and method of voting".

Proponents argue CVRs enhance election transparency by enabling independent verification of vote counts, supporting risk-limiting audits, and allowing researchers to study voting behavior.{{cite web |author=Walter Olson |date=November 29, 2023 |title=Should Election Authorities Publish the Records of Individual Votes? |url=https://www.cato.org/blog/should-election-authorities-publish-data-files-or-images-cast-votes |accessdate=May 25, 2025 |publisher=Cato Institute}}

CVRs come in various formats depending on the voting system vendor and jurisdiction. Common formats include spreadsheet files (CSV, Excel) with ballots in rows and offices or contests in columns, or XML or JSON files with more detailed information but that require programming knowledge to analyze.

The NIST CVR specification supports data interchange in both XML and JSON formats to promote interoperability between different voting systems. It also defines a comprehensive data model using Unified Modeling Language (UML) that supports multiple voting methods (plurality, ranked choice, cumulative voting), CVR snapshots showing different processing stages, adjudication tracking, digital signatures and hash values for verification, and allows association with ballot images.

A CVR typically includes:

• Voter choices for each race
• Indications of how the scanner has interpreted various marks (such as the darkness of a filled-in bubble, undervotes and overvotes, or write-ins)
• Ballot style identifier (mail, early, Election Day, overseas/military)
• Precinct associated with the CVR
• The equipment that produced the CVR

• Risk-limiting audit

{{reflist|30em}}

• [https://www.nist.gov/itl/voting/cast-vote-records-cvr-subgroup NIST Cast Vote Records Working Group]
• [https://github.com/usnistgov/CastVoteRecords NIST CVR Specification Repository]

Category:Elections

Category:Elections in the United States

Category:Electronic voting

Category:Voting

Category:Data formats