Old Dominion News

An analysis of 2020 election results and individual Virginia Department of Elections data shows a 64,000-vote difference between those marked as having participated in the election and the number of ballots certified as being cast.

That's according to the non-partisan Voter Reference Foundation (VRF), which released an audit of the 2020 race on Wednesday. It compares the state of Virginia's official certified vote totals to its official individual voter history files, which report who voted-- and who didn't vote-- last November.

The report said Virginia's Department of Elections is 63,984 voters short, that it certified a ballot total higher than the number of voters it says voted.

VRF Executive Director Gina Swoboda, a former State of Arizona election official, said the discrepancy is unacceptable.

“We are publishing official county and state voting records," Swoboda said. "Basic accounting principles suggest the numbers we are comparing should match and they don't. We need to get to the bottom of why that is the case."

Swoboda said she asked Virginia election officials for an explanation, and that they told her the numbers don't match because the state has deleted the records of some voters who participated in the 2020 election. 

VRF says it has requested the state provide a list of the records it says it deleted.

It is illegal for a state election officer to delete records from an election for President, who are required to keep them "for a period of twenty-two months from the date," according to the federal election code.

Virginia's marks the fourth VRF 2020 vote audit released since its founding this year.

VRF found similar vote discrepancies in Nevada (8,964 voters short) and Pennsylvania (41,503), with certified results citing totals higher than individual voter records did. North Carolina's difference was just 42 votes.

Nevada Secretary of State Barbara K. Cegavske, a Republican, similarly said the discrepancy was due to her office's deleting the records of voters she said had moved or died. But a subsequent Silver State Times report examined 38 Nevadans who died in December 2020 but had not been deleted. 

The Silver State Times also found 17,000 Nevada voters who told the U.S. Postal Service they had moved before the Nov. 2020, but voted in Nevada at their old addresses and were still Cegavske's active voter registration files in 2021.

Downers Grove, Ill.-based Restoration Action launched VRF and a web site, VoteRef.com, in August.

VoteRef.com allows users to browse the public voter registration and history data it uses for its audits. This includes individual voter registrations state-by-state, indicating whether an individual voted or did not vote in a given election.