HARRISBURG (TNS) — Conservative activists in Pennsylvania have inundated county elections offices with records requests in recent weeks seeking vote records from the 2020 election, potentially slowing down each county’s ability to prepare for the upcoming November election.

The activists are seeking “cast vote records,” often abbreviated as CVRs. These records show how a person voted. The cast vote records could be images of an individual’s ballot or the reports produced by ballot scanning machines to tabulate the results.

These activists, generally, are supporters of former President Donald Trump and believe his claims — never proven — that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has pivoted his career as a pillow and sheet manufacturer to be one of the top Trump allies pushing the unproven election claim, told attendees at a conference he hosted in August that requesting these records in every county in the United States was Trump’s supporters’ “biggest call to action.” These requests have appeared in county elections offices across the country ever since.

In Pennsylvania, these records are considered to be the contents of a ballot box. It’s illegal in Pennsylvania for any of these components, like a person’s ballot or the inside of a voting machine, to be publicly inspected, as a person is guaranteed in the state constitution that “secrecy in voting be preserved.”

Trump’s supporters have turned to records requests as the latest strategy to scrutinize — and oftentimes, overwhelm — county election bureaus. The conservative activists have other components to their efforts to disturb the election process, including trying to stop the usage of all electronic voting machines and return to hand-counting ballots, as well as advocating for an end to Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes.

County officials told the Post-Gazette that the requests are not hindering their ability to prepare for the upcoming election. But several county officials said these template-produced records quests can take away from the busy election-preparation season.

”They take time we could’ve spent preparing for [the election], instead of answering the same requests,” said Marybeth Kuznik, the elections director in Fayette County. “I’m delighted when people want to know about elections. We want people to know; we want people to understand. But we also have to be mindful that we have a finite amount of time and a lot of things that have to be done.”

In Greene County, a county of about 36,000 people, Director of Elections Judy Snyder said in an email that the five requests that county employees received are impacting their ability to prepare for the November election. She did not offer any explanation or respond to follow-up questions.

Across Pennsylvania, at least 36 counties have received these requests as of last month. Approximately two dozen states received similar requests, the Washington Postreported.

Allegheny County in 2021 released these records to a requester — about a year before these requests started showing up in counties en masse and more importantly, before the Pennsylvania Department of State told counties that these are not considered public records.

The records that were made public were allegedly shared with and reviewed by Michigan-based private company Speckin Forensics, which helped Arizona with its 2020 election audit that has been discredited for failing to follow professional audit processes.

In a letter dated Sept. 16, a document analyst for Speckin Forensics claimed that some of the scanned images of ballots from the 2020 election in Allegheny County had “image quality” issues. County officials rejected this at a meeting earlier this month, Harrisburg Public Radio station WITF reported. The analyst did not claim there was any fraud, and acknowledges that he would need to review all of the county’s ballots to decide if the image quality “anomalies” mean anything.

Lisa Schaefer, the executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, emphasized the time each request may take. Managing an influx of records requests could make it harder for counties to complete the necessary pre-election tests of ballots and more.

”If there’s something that requires a large amount of information, it’s going to take more effort and more resources to pull together,” Schaefer said. “Those are things that while counties are really busy with election preparation, it puts a strain on workload and resources for us as we strive to [administer] a fair, secure and accurate election.”