Tarrant County has a new online tool that lets people reexamine past elections.
Last year, the Texas Legislature passed a bill that requires counties to make certain election documents public. That includes images of people’s ballots and electronic records of votes, or cast vote records.
A software called Ballot Verifier lets people compare those records side-by-side, to make sure the electronic and physical copies of the ballot match. Tarrant County is the latest to adopt the technology, which will help people parse a massive amount of voter data, Tarrant County Election Administrator Clint Ludwig said at a demonstration Friday.
“In case nobody’s noticed, there’s an election coming up in November that I’m sure people are going to be very, very interested in,” Ludwig said. “We look forward to providing this data and letting them sit at home and peruse at their convenience, not the government’s convenience.”
Startup costs for Ballot Verifier were $50,000, and the site is live. The only data available right now is from the March 2024 primaries.
The county will aim to upload ballot image and other data in a matter of weeks after each election, Ludwig said.
Ballot Verifier comes from a company called Civera. The company’s CEO, Adam Friedman, showed reporters how to find a precinct-by-precinct breakdown of votes in each race.
“We now have the technology to allow maximum transparency, where every single American citizen can look through, for themselves, and really peer inside the process,” Friedman said.
Distrust of elections has been one of the biggest themes in American politics over the last few years. Unsubstantiated claims of election rigging have dogged the national political process. Former president Donald Trump has been indicted for alleged election interference. The conspiracy theories have trickled down to the local level, too, with election workers reporting threats and harassment, forcing some of them to quit.
Ada County, Idaho – home of Boise – was the first to adopt Ballot Verifier, in part to increase trust in elections.
“The vast majority of people probably won’t touch the system,” Ada County Clerk Trent Tripple told Government Technology. “The fact that it exists is the most important thing — that we’re not hiding anything, we’re putting all the information out there.”
Other U.S. counties already make their ballot images public. Dane County, Wis. posts the images as part of a “Do It Yourself Audit.” So do multiple counties in Colorado.
Critics fear making ballot images and cast vote records public will threaten voter anonymity. That includes advocates at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit election policy organization.
"Bad actors may, correctly or not, attempt to connect the published information with identifying information on the voter list,” CLC Communications Manager Matthew Tate-Smith wrote in 2023.
Earlier this year, Votebeat and The Texas Tribune confirmed that new state elections transparency laws made it possible, “in limited instances,” to use public records to connect a ballot to the person who cast it.
That report led the Texas Secretary of State’s Office – which is in charge of elections – to issue emergency guidance to better protect ballot secrecy.
Tarrant County is keeping concerns about anonymity in mind, Ludwig said. People who vote in precincts that see very few ballots will have their names redacted in public voter records, preventing people from matching ballot images to names.
Election workers will also go through each ballot image to redact any identifying information before they turn them over to Ballot Verifier.
“There are individuals who believe they need to sign their ballot. If I put that on the Internet, you have their name on their ballot. It’s no longer secret,” Ludwig said.
Other Texas counties are interested in Ballot Verifier too, Friedman said. He told reporters Denton County is already under contract, and the company is having conversations with Dallas County.
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