This article marks the official launch of the Check My Vote Substack newsletter. Our goal is to build a consistent, research-driven publication that helps citizens understand how voter roll systems work, how laws and administrative rules affect list maintenance, and how everyday Americans can engage lawfully and constructively with the process.
Subscribers can expect ongoing analysis of voter roll data practices, administrative rule changes such as Michigan’s Rule Set 2025-13 on voter registration cancellation, challenges, and corrections, and practical education on tools like FOIA, public data review, and documentation standards that improve transparency. We will also publish technical discussions on data integrity, including best practices for handling large public records files, auditability, and verification methods that protect both election systems and public trust. Additionally, you will enjoy op-ed’s from election experts across the nation and breaking election updates.
Check My Vote is funded through volunteer support and individual contributions. If you believe accurate voter rolls are foundational to public confidence in elections, subscribing to this newsletter is one of the most direct ways to stay informed and support this work. As a subscriber, you will receive research updates, educational resources, and opportunities to participate in lawful, citizen-led efforts to improve transparency and accuracy in voter registration systems.
Restoring accuracy. Restoring trust.
Accurate voter registration lists are an essential foundation of free and fair elections. Voter rolls must reflect current and eligible voters to support confidence in election outcomes and ensure that every lawful vote counts. Maintaining these lists requires a combination of robust data sources, systematic review procedures, and active participation by both citizens and election officials. CheckMyVote.org was established in 2021 to advance these principles and to put voter-roll management in the hands of everyday American citizens.
At its core, Check My Vote is a citizen’s voter roll integrity management toolkit designed to help Americans identify, verify, and rectify potential irregularities in voter registration lists. Using only lawfully permitted procedures, the platform empowers volunteers and stakeholders to engage with state and local election clerks, examine public records, and support each other in maintaining accurate lists on an ongoing basis. As of early 2026, Check My Vote is operational in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Rhode Island and we are actively expanding into more states where volunteers and analysts work together to evaluate and improve the quality of voter roll data.
The Importance of Accurate Voter Rolls
Voter registration lists are dynamic databases that must be regularly updated to reflect life events such as relocation, death, or changes in eligibility status. Because millions of Americans move within or between states, update their registration status, or become newly eligible to vote each year, maintaining accurate rolls is a complex and ongoing process. Election officials employ systematic list maintenance practices to address these changes, but the public’s ability to participate in lawful oversight is also critical for transparency and trust.
Federal and state laws require jurisdictions to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from registration lists while ensuring that eligible citizens are not improperly removed. For example, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 outlines criteria for list maintenance that election officials must follow, including the careful handling of voting records and procedures to notify voters of status changes before removal.
Decentralized Analysis: Why Precinct-Level Scoring Matters
A defining feature of the Check My Vote methodology is its decentralized analytical framework. Rather than beginning at the state or even county level, Check My Vote calculates voter roll quality metrics first at the precinct level. Precinct scores then aggregate upward to township, county, and ultimately state-level summaries.
This structure reflects a core operational premise: all meaningful action occurs at the precinct level, while cumulative impact is realized at the state level. Election administration is inherently local. Registration records are maintained by local clerks, reviewed within local jurisdictions, and influenced by community-level demographic changes. By anchoring analysis at the lowest administrative level, Check My Vote aligns its data model with the structure of election governance itself.
Decentralization of analysis is critical for citizen engagement. When anomalies or irregularities are presented only as large state-wide aggregates, the scale can appear abstract and unmanageable to the average citizen. A statewide report reflecting tens of thousands of potential discrepancies may raise concern, but it does not provide actionable clarity. By contrast, precinct-level scoring allows individuals to examine manageable, localized datasets where irregularities can be reviewed, verified, and addressed constructively with election officials.
This approach also increases transparency. When metrics are calculated at the smallest unit and rolled upward, every higher-level score is traceable to underlying precinct data. The system therefore supports both granular accountability and macro-level insight.
Bringing Voter Roll Transparency to the Citizen
Most publicly available tools provide analysis at the state or, in some cases, county level. While useful for broad comparisons, those reports often lack the granularity required for meaningful local engagement.
Check My Vote addresses this gap through its flagship feature, “Audit My Address.” This tool allows citizens to examine voter registration data at the address level, effectively bringing voter roll transparency to the doorstep of the individual. No comparable tool nationwide currently offers this level of localized access integrated within a structured scoring and metrics framework.
By making voter roll quality measurable at the precinct level and accessible at the address level, Check My Vote lowers the barrier to lawful civic participation. Anomalies are no longer abstract statistics. They become localized records that can be reviewed carefully, documented responsibly, and addressed through proper legal channels.
This is the power of decentralization: actionable insight at the lowest level, measurable impact at the highest level.
Restoring accuracy. Restoring trust.
Check My Vote Data Sources
Check My Vote’s analyses are built on publicly available data and volunteer contributions. The organization’s principal data sources include:
State Voter Files: These are obtained through periodic Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to state election agencies or downloaded directly from state secretary of state websites where available.
Public Postal Address Databases: Databases of known USPS and UPS addresses provide contextual information for analyzing registration addresses.
National Change of Address (NCOA) Data: Your monetary contributions help purchase NCOA data, these datasets track people who have moved into or out of states over the past four years.
Volunteer Categorization: Daily contributions from volunteers who flag registrations as deceased, moved, or otherwise potentially inaccurate.
Together these sources create a framework for identifying potential inaccuracies and supporting lawful review processes.
Context and Challenges in Voter Roll Management
Across the United States, debates over voter roll maintenance have intensified in recent years. In 2025 and 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice pursued legal action against multiple states to compel the release of detailed voter registration lists, including sensitive personal identifiers. Election officials and civil rights advocates raised privacy and constitutional concerns about these efforts, and federal courts have begun to reject some of these requests on legal grounds.
These developments highlight the importance of accurate public data and state authority in election administration. The Constitution grants states primary responsibility to administer elections and maintain voter rolls, with federal law providing standards and frameworks for cooperation.
Check My Vote’s Role and Vision
Rather than pursuing legal conflict, Check My Vote’s approach emphasizes lawful analysis, public transparency, and citizen engagement. By providing tools and resources to everyday Americans, Check My Vote encourages collaborative identification of irregularities and supports constructive dialogue with election administrators. This work contributes to a broader understanding of how voter list maintenance functions in practice and how citizens can participate meaningfully in the process.
Check My Vote is currently funded by volunteer donations and personal support. Contributions help sustain research, data analysis, and platform operations. If you value transparency, accuracy, and public confidence in our electoral systems, your support contributes directly to continuing this mission.
Empower. Inform. Participate.
Accurate voter rolls are essential to preserving faith in elections. Check My Vote exists to bring meticulous analysis and citizen-driven engagement to the task of ensuring voter lists reflect current and eligible voters. By promoting lawful oversight, shared learning, and practical tools for public use, this newsletter seeks not only to inform but to empower informed participation in election administration.
Next on the Check My Vote Substack: How Are Scores Calculated?
In our next edition, we will take you inside the scoring framework that powers Check My Vote. How are voter roll quality scores calculated at the precinct level? What factors contribute to a score? How do duplicate registrations, empty lot addresses, out-of-state movers, and other measurable indicators translate into a normalized integrity rating between 0 and 10? We will break down the methodology, explain how decentralized scoring rolls upward from precinct to state, and show how citizen verification through tools like “Audit My Address” can positively adjust scores over time. If transparency matters to you, you will not want to miss this deep dive. Stay tuned!
You certainly have a well-stated mission !!!
It certainly sounds good to be cleaning the voter rolls, but the only real way to clean them is to get them off computers and the internet and ethernet and the dark web.
It is more useful to produce a clean voter roll and physically put it into the custody of the voting precinct where there is "in person voting on one day, with picture ID and proof of citizenship and residency, in your precinct in one room only and then hand counted there by an incremental auditing system, using only paper poll books and records, and certified by the counting teams before the count and, if required by SOS rules and directives, ballots are delivered to the county for recording or tabulation."
I am interested in your methods of identifying egregious or fraudulent data and have a few tricks of my own to do that after 5 years of study. I will contribute by commenting occasionally.
Washington State has free voter rolls