KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Election officials across the country are getting more requests to review the 2020 election results.
Records obtained by 10News show the Knox County Election Commission has received at least seven of those requests, including at least one from out of state and one from a newly elected county commissioner.
"If you have a question about what we do, give us a call," Knox County Administrator of Elections Chris Davis said. " You know, social media is poison and evil sometimes and certainly, you can get caught down a rabbit hole."
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — who denies the 2020 election results — has asked his supporters across the country to request something called the "cast vote records."
In one Facebook post, he said they'll "prove the [voting] machines can be rigged" and must be preserved before they could be legally deleted on Sept. 3, 2022.
Of the seven requests received by Knox County, at least one was from New Jersey.
Another was from attorney Rhonda Lee, who just took her oath of office as the Knox County commissioner for District 7.
"My purpose [in] requesting the votes for the 2020 General Election was to assure the votes were stored and the voice of the people will remain safe and stored," she said. "There is litigation going on across the country and I feel it is crucial to preserve any and all evidence."
On the phone, she told 10News she is not aware of any issues with the 2020 election results in Knox County specifically.
"Everything we do is done by a team of people representing both Republican and Democratic parties and in some cases, even some independents," Chris Davis said. "We all constantly have eyes on each other, if you will, to make sure that we're doing all of our processes and procedures properly. We follow state law. We have paper ballots."
Davis said Knox County already does everything they can to ensure the integrity of everyone's vote.
"We have no voting machines that are hooked up to the internet, or even capable of being hooked up to the internet," he said. "We don't have drop boxes in Tennessee. We don't mass-mail ballots. Ballot harvesting is illegal. We require photo IDs. There's a number of steps that we take to make sure that voters can be comfortable with the fact that when they go and vote, their vote is secure."
Under federal law, Davis said they're required to retain the November 2020 election results for 22 months. That date was Sept. 3, although he said it's a process to discard them.
"The destruction of that data probably won't take place for a while because there's a committee in Knox County that actually sees the oversight of document destruction," Davis said. "It has a judge and it has a couple other people on there who actually have to vote on that."
He said he welcomes anyone with questions to reach out to his office directly. In some cases, Davis said he's hired some people who were skeptical at first — until they understood how everything works.
"Please come work for us, see what we do, and follow the processes," Davis said. "We want people to be comfortable when they go to vote that they know that their vote counts."