The surge of emails began two weeks ago. The messages—some anonymous, others containing identical text but from four different people, still more from a person in New Jersey—were addressed to the town clerk of Shutesbury, Massachusetts, population 1,700.
Each of the dozen-odd missives had a hostile tone and requested non-existent records from the 2020 election. They, and similar requests sent to other locales, have left election workers scratching their heads and wringing their hands.
“Shutesbury is a very small town, and as is the case in many rural communities, my elections office has only one employee—me,” Shutesbury clerk Grace Bannasch told The Daily Beast. “I am the resource. The more time I spend responding to requests for documents that don’t exist, sent by strangers on the internet, the less time I have to spend addressing the needs of my neighbors. The impact these kinds of requests can have on small election offices can be overwhelming.”
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Local clerks and election officials across the country are facing similar deluges of paperwork.
In recent weeks, prominent election deniers have encouraged their followers to send unwieldy records requests to local officials, demanding documentation on the 2020 election. Conspiracy theorists like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell claim those documents will reveal widespread election fraud. Instead, the latest effort to overturn the 2020 election has seen local clerks scrambling to find obscure or nonexistent documents, sometimes for out-of-state emailers who threaten them with legal action.
Nicole Mickley, an elections worker in Carroll County, Ohio, said her office began receiving the copy-pasted emails this summer—so many that she can break them down into 10 recognizable form letters.
“The first ones we started receiving in July had 12 different things they were looking for, all pertaining to the 2020 election,” Mickley told The Daily Beast. “They wanted our poll book records, ballots, absentee envelopes, correspondence between us and the state, things like that.”
Some of the requests, received in Ohio and elsewhere, included threats of lawsuits. Many of these requests appear to have originated from conspiracy podcaster Terpischore “Tore” Maras, who posted a form letter for records requests on her Telegram channel.
“I am an aggrieved citizen of the United States and of the state of [NAME OF STATE], and I am contemplating filing a lawsuit against the relevant parties pertaining to the continuing concerns I have regarding the integrity of all elections that took place after December 31, 2019,” reads the document, which instructs officials to preserve all election-related documents from 2020 and beyond.
The threat of a lawsuit is important. In Ohio, where Mickley and Maras live, elections officials are instructed to retain certain documents for 22 months, after which they may be destroyed unless they are part of a “pending court action or order.” Other states have similar 22-month deadlines, with some jurisdictions like California requiring the records be destroyed after the deadline passes. Sept. 3 was the 22-month deadline for records on the 2020 presidential election—hence the mountain of late-summer paperwork as Stop The Steal influencers rallied their fans to meet the deadline.
Michael Henrici, a commissioner of elections in New York’s Otsego County, said the legal threats could further complicate the process and slow down local offices.
“People who are just getting this in their inbox blind, I know that has upset people,” Henrici told The Daily Beast. “Depending on how your office works, it can gum things up because then it becomes a back-and-forth where you go to your county attorney about ‘Do we have to answer this? Can we answer this?’”
But even after the 22-month deadline, conspiracy theorists like Maras have encouraged followers to request documents in bulk.
“It seems that ‘ELECTION OFFICIALS’ are upset people are demanding they hold on to records, respond to records and answer questions,” Maras wrote on Sept. 7. “It's hard to WORK for the people—and now that they have to WORK - they complain. IF THEY WERE TRANSPARENT then people wouldnt be demanding records or retainment .. . So instead they seek to silence the people either by BULLUYING them or demanding the LAW stop them?
LOL It's becoming super fun. ‘GUM’ up the system? Maybe they should do their jobs.”
Maras, who is fighting a personal battle with Ohio election officials, did not return a request for comment. This year, she attempted to run for Ohio secretary of state, but did not receive enough signatures to earn a spot on the ballot. In August, she took her case to court, where a judge upheld the decision to keep her name off the ballot. Maras said she would appeal the ruling. On the morning of the court date, she encouraged her followers to send record requests in her stead.
“While I am in my hearing please do this and tell your friends to do it. Mail it off and email—call and assert your rights,” she wrote on Telegram.
Records requests are part of the job, and Mickley said she takes each one seriously. But responding takes time, which is particularly short during the election season.
“Working these requests into our already tight and busy schedule is extremely burdensome,” she said.
The broad nature of some of the requests exacerbates the problem.
“If it’s just a data cache, then it’s just a matter of putting it on a disc and sending it out,” Henrici, the Otsego commissioner said. “Others are asking for copies of just everything; they’re blanket requests. They want every scrap of paper, a copy of your ballot, the tapes from the machines, which can be 10 feet long, so then it’s interesting as to how you put that onto a copier.”
Bannasch, the Shutesbury clerk, said many emails referred to documents that don’t even exist in her jurisdiction. In the past two weeks, she’s received nearly a dozen requests that she describes as “predatory,” which she defined via email as requests that are “1: it is implicitly or overtly hostile, 2: it is submitted simultaneously or successively to multiple election offices, 3: it is asking for records that either wholly or partially do not exist.”
A recent, popular form letter requests “cast vote records,” an obscure tabulation document that varies with jurisdictions’ voting laws and technology. Lindell, who has repeatedly pushed false conspiracy theories since the 2020 election, has called on followers to request the cast vote records from local election offices.
Reached by phone, Lindell told The Daily Beast that those records would finally prove voter fraud.
“All of them are coming through criminal. Ninety-seven percent of the cast vote records show election crime,” Lindell said. This is objectively untrue.
Lindell said he wasn’t asking followers to request other documents. “It’s called the Freedom of Information Act,” the pillow magnate said. “I can’t help what other people ask for.”
Election workers, meanwhile, said they’ve spent years trying to make the vote more transparent.
“I think the thing that’s bothered me the most about some of these emails is that they’re implying that, by us not jumping on their requests right away, or simply because we’re election workers that we’re somehow not being transparent or we’re hiding things from our voters. That couldn’t be further from the truth,” Mickley said.
Before every election, her office holds public tests of voting procedures, which people are free to observe. “We advertise it, I personally invite people,” she said. “In the three years I’ve been here, I believe I’ve done seven public tests. I’ve only ever had one person show up to one.”
