Why Election Records Are Kept for 22 Months, and Why Your Original Documents Matter

Why the country keeps its election records, and what your own are kept for

On Tuesday, November 3, tens of millions of Americans will vote, and by the end of the week most of them will have moved on. The records won't. Federal law requires election officials to keep the records of every federal election, including the registrations, the applications and the ballots themselves, for twenty-two months. What is cast this November will be kept until September 2028, when the next presidential campaign is already under way. An official who willfully fails to keep them can be fined, or jailed for up to a year.

A result is announced once. The record is what allows it to be checked afterwards, by people who were not in the room, without anyone having to take anyone else's word for it.

The same rule, at home

Most households run on a smaller version of that rule without ever naming it. Somewhere there is a passport, a birth certificate, a Social Security card, a marriage certificate, the deed to the house, perhaps a will. Day to day you rarely need the originals. Copies, scans and account logins do most of the work.

The originals matter on the day a copy isn't accepted, and that day comes more often than people expect. A passport application wants the certified birth certificate, not a photograph of it. In most states, a court asked to admit a will wants the original, and a photocopy alone can leave a family arguing over whether the will was ever meant to stand.

Why the original counts for more now

For most of the last century, a convincing forgery took skill and time. Now a persuasive image of almost any document can be produced in minutes by someone who has never seen the real one. When any image can be faked, the image proves less, and the thing itself proves more.

A scan of your deed is a convenience. The deed is evidence.

Keeping a record well

This 1960 law doesn't stop at saying the records must be kept. It also says who keeps them and where: an election official, or a custodian the state names, at a place the state specifies. That part is worth borrowing at home, because a record nobody can find does little more than one that was never kept.

So keep the originals together, in one place, protected from what actually destroys paper in a house: fire, water, and the slow drift of things into separate drawers. Write down what is there. And make sure the person who would need them, an executor, a spouse, a grown child, knows where they are and how to get in. A will locked away where no one can open it leaves a family in much the same place as no will at all.

Twenty-two months is how long the country decided a question about an election might reasonably be asked. Your own records keep a longer watch: the passport renewal in ten years, the sale of the house in twenty, the estate someone else will one day settle. They are kept for a day you can't schedule, and for a person who may not be you.