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Part of Election claim checking: a practical guide
Election claim checklist: security, finance and polls
An election claim checklist for claims that are not about counted votes: campaign finance, security incidents, polls and court filings, with records to open.
What to take away
- Some election claims are about money, machines, polls or lawsuits rather than counted votes. Each has its own record trail.
- A campaign committee's disclosure is not an FEC finding, and a filing is not an agency finding.
- An outage, an attempted intrusion, access, a compromise, a data change and an outcome effect are different events.
- A poll average is an aggregation, not a substitute for a poll's methods.
- A complaint's allegation is not a court holding. Attribute every statement to its speaker.
Claims about a candidate's money, a system failure, a poll lead or a pending case often travel beside vote totals and borrow their authority. Pull them apart first, then run the checks below. The method for the vote count itself sits in the election claim checking guide.
Add a reviewer, result, retrieval time and evidence path for every material check.
Which record to open first
Each claim type has one record that comes before any commentary. Open it before reading the story that cites it, and note what that record cannot show.
| Claim about | Open first | What it cannot show |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign money | The original FEC filing, or the state disclosure portal | An agency finding |
| A security incident | Logs, an assessment or a responsible expert | Proof about a different incident |
| A poll | The pollster's original release and disclosure | A lead in the average |
| A lawsuit | The docket entry and its later status | A holding, from a complaint alone |
Campaign finance claims
A finance claim is checked against filings, not against press releases. Confirm the candidate and committee identifiers, the committee type and its relationship to the candidate, and the coverage period and amendment status of each filing.
- Candidate and committee identifiers confirmed
- Committee type and relationship to candidate stated
- Filing coverage period and amendment status checked
- Receipt, expenditure, transfer, refund, loan, debt and memo entry distinguished
- Aggregation rule and date range documented
- Newsroom total reproduced from raw transactions where material
For federal committees, use the FEC's candidate and committee search to locate original filings: Form 3 for authorized committees and Form 3X for unauthorized committees. For state and local committees, use the relevant state's campaign-finance disclosure portal. Claims about Canadian committees go to another regulator, set out in where to verify Canadian campaign finance.
Security claims
Name the system before judging the claim: registration, pollbook, voting, tabulation, reporting or office IT. The evidence types compared show why each system leaves different records, and an outage in one says little about another.
- Outage, attempted intrusion, access, compromise, data change and outcome effect distinguished
- Technical claim supported by logs, assessment or a responsible expert
- Absence-of-evidence statement bounded to source scope and time
- Election process safeguards checked without treating them as proof about a specific incident
CISA's statement on the security of the 2024 elections said the agency had no evidence of malicious activity with a material impact on election-infrastructure security or integrity, then pointed to state and local certification work. Cite the scope and date of such statements rather than turning them into timeless claims about every allegation.
Security claim verification
- Identify systemregistration, pollbook, voting, tabulation
- Distinguish outage, intrusion, access, compromise, data change
- Support technical claim with logs or expert
- Bound absence-of-evidence statement to scope and time
- Check safeguards without treating as proof
When an allegation points at the count itself, measure it against the canvass. The Election Assistance Commission's Guide to the Canvass emphasizes reconciliation, chain of custody, documented issues, valid ballot inclusion, and public communication on the route from unofficial returns to certification. State and local law still controls the particular canvass.
Canvass reconciliation steps
- Reconcile ballots issued, cast, returned, accepted
- Consider early, mail, provisional, military categories
- Review chain-of-custody for specific allegation
- Describe discrepancies with cause and resolution
- Compare observer claims with procedure and records
For a security or fraud allegation, three of those steps matter most.
- Review the chain-of-custody and incident documentation for the specific allegation.
- Describe any discrepancy with its cause, its resolution and its possible effect on the outcome.
- Compare observer claims with procedure and records, using the common reporting problems as a reference for how such claims drift.
Poll claims
Start with the pollster's original release and disclosure, not the headline that cites it. Record the population, question wording, field dates, method and stated uncertainty before comparing the poll with any other number.
- Poll population and wording recorded
- Field dates and method recorded
- Uncertainty stated beside the finding
- Average or aggregation labelled as such
The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative can help check participating pollsters' disclosure practices. FiveThirtyEight's polling averages, when available, are an aggregation rather than a substitute for a poll's methods. The poll and survey audit walks through the questions in order.
Political and legal records
Read the speech or ad in full context, and keep a policy proposal apart from an enacted measure. A complaint's allegation is not a court holding, so check the docket entry and its later status before quoting either.
For federal court filings, check PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). Use the official state-court docket for state cases and check later entries. A candidate's biography claim gets checked through primary records, and a committee disclosure is never called an FEC finding.
Docket status changes after a filing is quoted. A ruling can be appealed, a complaint can be amended, and a later entry can undo what an early story reported, so the retrieval time belongs beside every legal claim. The same habit applies to an ad: note when it ran and which version was reviewed.
Updating and attributing
Attribute political, campaign, witness and legal statements to their speakers. Money, security, poll and court claims all change after publication, so plan for it from the first draft.
- Headline, chart, caption, alert and social copy use the same status
- Uncertainty and missing evidence placed near the finding
- Responsible office and affected party given a fair chance to respond
- Next official step and date included
- Monitoring owner assigned
- Correction reaches every distributed format
Keep the filing dates and retrieval times in a records request log so a later reader can see which version of a filing a figure came from.
