# Civil Rights Act of 1960 The **Civil Rights Act of 1960** was enacted to close enforcement gaps left by the Civil Rights Act of 1957, principally by attacking the destruction of evidence. Southern registrars had been disposing of the registration records that would have proved discriminatory administration, so the Act imposed a federal duty to keep them. Its **Section 301** is now codified at **52 U.S.C. § 20701**: every officer of election must retain and preserve, for **twenty-two months**, all records and papers coming into their possession relating to any application, registration, payment of poll tax, "or other act requisite to voting" in a federal election. Willful failure is punishable by a fine of up to $1,000, up to a year's imprisonment, or both. Section 302 (§ 20702) applies the same penalty to **any person** who willfully steals, destroys, conceals, mutilates or alters those records. Sections 303–305 (§§ 20703–20705) give the demand to inspect to the **Attorney General** alone, restrict onward disclosure, and give a federal district court jurisdiction to compel production. This matters well beyond its original subject, because § 20701 has become the only national rule governing the custody of American ballots — a civil-rights evidence-preservation provision that voted ballots happen to fall inside, read by the Department of Justice to cover them. It was not written as a ballot-security statute and should not be described as one. See [[Election Ballot Chain of Custody Flow]], stage 10 and closing block A. Expand with: the Act's other titles, its legislative history and the 1957 Act it amended, its relationship to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the enforcement record under §§ 20701–20702. This is a stub — created in the 2026-10-03 ASCII map build. Expand as noted above. ## See Also - [[Election Ballot Chain of Custody Flow]] · [[Chain of Custody]] - [[Voter Suppression]] · [[National Voter Registration Act]] · [[Help America Vote Act]]