Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
- Ada County, Idaho, launched the Ballot Verifier program to increase election transparency.
- The program publishes all ballot images online, ensuring voter anonymity and addressing election doubts.
- Similar programs are being considered in other states, but Utah's current laws prevent such public ballot disclosures, a top official said.
BOISE — Distrust in election systems in the United States spread rapidly following the 2020 presidential election, when then-President Donald Trump refused to concede the presidential race and claimed the results had been rigged.
Fueled in large part by Trump's unfounded claims, election offices were flooded with questions and complaints about the process. Election officials have spent years pushing back on such claims and trying to inform voters of the checks on fraud within the process, but a county clerk in Idaho recently proposed a relatively straightforward solution to the mistrust: Publish a copy of each ballot online after the election.
Trent Tripple, the Republican county clerk of Ada County in Boise, got approval from the county's board of commissioners before launching the Ballot Verifier program earlier this year, ahead of primary elections in the state. In the coming days, the tool will be updated with all 271,186 ballots that were cast in the county during the Nov. 5 general election, Nicole Camarda, a spokesperson for the Ada County Clerk's Office, told KSL.com.
"After the 2020 election, our office was inundated with public records requests of people wanting more information about the election, in general," she said. Those requests were enough that a significant amount of county resources had to be dedicated to addressing them.
"So, we partnered with a software company called Civera," she said. "It took about two years, but we got the Ballot Verifier launched in April of this year, and now people can go online to our website and view all of those ballot images, cast vote records and all of the data that goes along with it."
Camarda said scanning the ballots to post online works "hand in hand" with the counting of ballots. When voters drop their ballots into a scanner after filling them out, an image is captured that is later uploaded to the county clerk's website. This year saw "really high turnout" in Ada County, she said, so it has taken longer to fully upload the ballots from the recent election.
The ballots lack any personally identifying information, so users of the Ballot Verifier tool cannot see how individual Idahoans cast their ballots. However, some voters have marked their ballots with doodles or other markings so they can later identify them.
"We take the right to a secret ballot very seriously here in Ada County, and I know the whole state of Idaho does, as well. There's no way to connect it to a specific voter," Camarda said.
In addition to allowing anyone with concerns about the election to go in and verify the results, the program has also given the county and outside researchers more insights into granular voting habits. The county plans to conduct follow-up research on the impacts of the program on voter trust in elections.
"We don't want people to have questions, and we want people to be able to see everything that we're doing and increase that trust," Camarda said.
Tarrant County in Texas has already launched a similar program using Civera's technology, and election officials in a handful of other states have been open to the idea.
Utah, however, is not likely to be among them, at least as the law currently stands. Ryan Cowley, the state's elections director, told KSL.com that Utah law prevents some election records from being disclosed publicly. He said state lawmakers would need to change that if Utah wanted to adopt a similar program to Ada County's.
"That's something that, certainly, the Legislature could look at," Cowley said. "I do think we always want to be careful because people do have a state constitutional right to a secret ballot. ... We want to be as transparent as we possibly can, but we also have to respect the people to have an absolute right to a secret ballot."
