A new website is posting individual Arlington residents’ voting records online, including who did and didn’t vote in the 2021 gubernatorial election between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin.
VoteRef.com, published by the Voter Reference Foundation (VRF), posted its first Virginia vote data on Thursday. The site allows a user to search and browse 5,985,685 individual voter records in the state, including an election by election list of whether someone voted, or not.
Voter registration and history data is public record but is typically only accessed by political campaigns. Individual vote history data includes whether someone voted in an election, but not for whom they voted.
Affording to its website, VoteRef.com is “dedicated to ensuring transparent, accurate and fair election” by providing public access to official government data pertaining to elections, including voter registration rolls, with a goal of encouraging greater voter participation in all fifty states.”
“Our system of government is based upon citizen participation. We believe the people, in effect, own this data and have a legal right to see it in an understandable and transparent form,” the site says.
VRF’s executive director is Gina Swoboda, formerly an executive with the Arizona Secretary of State.
Downers Grove, Illinois-based Restoration Action first launched VRF and VoteRef.com in August. It currently includes voter data from Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Virginia.
