Retention, Records Law, and Personal Liability

• 60 minutes
• Lecture + statute review
• Prerequisite: M2

Learning objectives

1. State federal retention requirements for election materials
2. Identify state and local requirements layered on top
3. Reconcile retention obligations with append-only architecture and privacy law

Content

• 52 U.S.C. §20701: federal retention of election records for 22 months following a federal election. Understand the scope, and that the obligation runs to the officer personally.
• State retention schedules — typically longer, frequently inconsistent with the federal floor.
• The genuine tension: append-only systems retain by default; privacy law and public records law may require deletion or redaction. Resolution is architectural — separate the custody record (retained, non-personal) from personal data (redactable, separately governed). Participants should ask every vendor how this is handled.
• Public records requests against cryptographic custody data: what is disclosable, what format, what the office is obligated to produce.
• Exercise: given a records request for custody data on a contested batch, determine what must be produced, what may be withheld, and in what form.

Run the exercise

Assessment

Completed retention matrix for the participant's own jurisdiction. ---