At the heart of many election conspiracy theories is a simple truth: America’s voter rolls are imperfect. The U.S. doesn’t have a central voting list. It has a bunch of different lists. And they will always be slightly off. Charles Stewart, an election data expert at MIT, remembers being at a conference 20 years ago, and an election official from Belgium was talking about voter rolls. “He said, ‘The problem with you Americans is that you were never conquered by Napoleon,’” Stewart recalled. “Napoleon wanted to know where everybody was.”