Rumors and misleading allegations regarding Arapahoe County’s 2020 General Election Cast Vote Record (CVR) and election interference are all unequivocally false.
The cast vote record is a report generated after every election, as a Microsoft Comma Separated Value (.csv) spreadsheet file. A CVR is not created until all votes have been counted, all ballots have been received, and all results have been tabulated, audited and certified. It is impossible to alter ballots, change vote counts, or manipulate election results with a CVR.
In December 2020, well after the 2020 Election was audited and certified in Arapahoe County, a redacted copy of the 2020 General Election Cast Vote Record (CVR) was prepared following Secretary of State’s Office protocols. During the required redaction process a member of our Elections staff made a formatting error. The formatting errors present in that file had no bearing on the 2020 General Election, which had already been audited, then certified on November 23, 2020.
Nearly four years later, in October 2024, a political researcher and professor from Yale University wrote the Clerk and Recorder’s office that he was using our publicly available CVR for research and the file showed anomalies, most likely caused by a formatting mistake during the redaction process.
In February, after the 2024 General Election and all post-election processes were complete, we conducted our own review and arrived at the same conclusion. We immediately removed and discarded the erroneous file and replaced it with a correctly redacted CVR, which was generated from the original, unredacted file.
No county is required to post copies of their CVR. Arapahoe County and others do so solely in the interest of transparency.
For reference, our original statement can be found here.