There has been less controversy about the administration and results of last year’s election than we’ve seen in the past couple of cycles. But, in some circles, there’s more controversy about the ability to get access to a key document from elections. It’s called the cast vote record and analysts say it’s an important aspect of election transparency.
Jen Fifield, a senior reporter at Votebeat, has written about this and joined The Show to discuss.

Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Jen.
JEN FIFIELD: Good morning. Thanks so much for having me on.
BRODIE: Of course, thanks for being here. So what exactly is the cast vote record?
FIFIELD: Basically it's a giant spreadsheet that tells you by ballot what people voted for. It's an anonymous spreadsheet. The person's name or voter ID isn't on there, but if you look at each row, it'll say, you know, a vote for Lake, a vote for Trump, etc.
BRODIE: And why this is something that used to be, if not readily available, available for folks who wanted to, you know, try to do analysis of elections, but why has that changed?
FIFIELD: So you're right, it used to be available 2020, 2022. Analysts were able to use it to say, for example, why Trump lost when other Republicans down ballot did great in their elections in 2020. And now counties are saying, well, we figured out that there's these concerns state law may prevent us from giving it out, we think it does. And also there's voter privacy concerns that come up when releasing this record.
BRODIE: Does state law specifically preclude this document from being released?
FIFIELD: Like everything in election law, it's a little vague, so it says you can't release the digital record of the ballot, but you know there's a debate about whether this data is a digital record.
BRODIE: Well, so let's talk about some of the different sides of that debate for folks who say this should be released. What is their argument and for the benefit of it being released and why do they say that it should be allowed to be released?
FIFIELD: Well, basically they say the more transparency the better. Public records laws, you know, always should weigh voter and resident rights over any other concerns unless there's a major concern of the state, unless you're going to somehow harm the state by giving it out. So there's a major just voter transparency argument here. But then when you look at the fact that you may be able to figure out a small percentage of who people voted for, then that's when it gets kind of concerning.
BRODIE: Well, and is that the argument for folks who say this should not be released, that it could in theory be possible to figure out who's like who somebody voted for?
FIFIELD: Yes, that's definitely the main argument. So this is an anonymous record, but if you take it and you look at a very small precinct, say four people voted from a precinct, and you combine that with the record of votes cast, which does have people's names, you see four people, they all voted for the same candidate. Now you know exactly who they voted for. So in very select circumstances there's a major voter privacy concern. Our ballots by nature under federal law have to be secret ballots.
BRODIE: So what are the possible outcomes here? I mean, is this something the Legislature could try to clarify? Does it seem like there might be momentum to try to do that?
FIFIELD: There is not a lot of momentum on these boring type election issues, right? And so I, you know, that's my job is to raise these boring issues, you know, they're not boring though, but there's not a lot of compromise happening in the state Legislature for election law other than that major bill that passed last year regarding the timeline, and they snuck some compromise in on smaller issues in that bill. Do I see that happening this session? Not really.
BRODIE: Well, and as you write about, like this is one of the things that people would in theory be able to use this kind of data to figure out is how President-elect Trump won Arizona, but U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake did not. Is that sort of the kind of thing that analysts are saying, look, we're, we're going to have a harder time, we're not going to be able to figure out without this specific data?
FIFIELD: For the last election, definitely that's the main thing they want to say because there are still claims of how could Lake lose this election in such a large way when Trump, you know, was a landslide across the state. And so they want to look by ballot. Now we can look like by precinct or by party. We know that independents split their ticket, but if we want to look at the exact split ticket votes saying look at all of these, the number of Republicans or the number of voters who voted Republican down ballot then did not select the Lake. That's the kind of thing we could see here.
BRODIE: Yeah, I was going to ask you if there are other ways to sort of get at this information. It sounds like broadly there are, but maybe not at the same granular level, not the same level of specificity as what you would get in the cast vote record.
FIFIELD: You're right, yeah, you can look by party, for example. You can look by precinct, which is just like the neighborhood you live in, and you can look at both. You can look at your precinct by party as well. So you can get pretty granular, but I think the main thing here is for those people who don't trust elections, for giving them a way to see by ballot, this is, these are the results that the machines tabulated. And now, obviously there's a record that we shouldn't be making policy for that small percent of voters that don't trust elections though.