Ada County, Idaho, partnered with civic software company Civera on the tool, which it used for the first time during its May elections, publishing ballot images alongside corresponding cast vote records to show how the tabulator machine electronically recorded the selections. The county has so far used the tool to publish information from prior elections going back to 2022, the earliest for which it still has the data.
Now, with the tool up and running, other counties around the country are reportedly in talks to adopt it, too. The tool, Ballot Verifier, allows anyone to access ballot images and cast vote record for free. It also offers infographics of election results, search functionality for specific races and the ability to download results.
“We wanted to build trust in the process by making everything that's available just fully transparent,” said Saul Seyler, elections director for Ada County.
It also may instill trust because a third party is confirming the counts, not just the elections department, said County Clerk Trent Tripple. While some election skeptics may be impossible to appease — they might, for example, insist that ballot images were doctored — having a tool like this available can still make others less receptive to doubters’ claims.
“The vast majority of people probably won’t touch the system,” Tripple said. “The fact that it exists is the most important thing — that we’re not hiding anything, we’re putting all the information out there.”
But putting information out requires considering privacy. If someone wrote their name on their ballot, for example, publishing the image online sacrifices anonymity. But Tripple said residents should know cast ballots are public information.
Another concern is whether comparing who voted in an election against the cast ballots would allow someone to decipher how specific residents voted in a small precinct with low voter turnout. That’s a problem Ada County will address when it arises, Tripple said. But he suggested that one approach could be to combine ballots from several small precincts to better obscure individual voters.
Using the tool in a live election brought challenges around making information publicly available as quick as possible.
Election staff had to extract ballot information from the various voting machines, carefully check it for accuracy and compile it to send to Civera, Seyler said. In this case it took about a week. An election with more ballots would take longer.
Then, Civera needed six business days to get the information published — a timeline that would vary based on the number of contests, said Civera CEO Adam Friedman. The current system can handle over a million ballots at a time. The process also sees the two parties go back and forth confirming and double-checking accuracy.
Should someone viewing the published information claim they found a mistake, “we would welcome that conversation,” Seyler said. It could be an educational opportunity to clarify how elections work, such as how a tabulator reads the ballot.
Tripple hopes voters and campaigns won’t need to call for costly, time-consuming recounts if they can just view the documents online to confirm results. Friedman said the offering also spares government from answering individual public records requests for the now-published information.
It's also provided voter behavior insights. For example, the May primary saw many ballots where voters had selected candidates from different political parties, rather than staying party-exclusive, Tripple said.
Achieving this kind of transparency takes work and money. Ada County had to reassign some employees for the post-election crunch work, Seyler said. Friedman said the tool would cost as low as $10,000 a year for very small municipalities and as high as more than $1 million for statewide elections.
Several counties in Texas and Colorado are under contract to adopt it. Getting Ballot Verifier ready for expansion requires adapting it to different voting machines. So far, it’s only been used with Hart InterCivic, but the company is looking to work with others, Friedman said.
Other counties have tried their own ways of publishing similar information. For example, Dane County, Wis., allows anyone to download zip files of PDF ballot images, Excel sheets of cast vote records and PDFs of unofficial election night results. In 2021, Pueblo County, Colo., announced a pilot program to post ballot images from the 2020 presidential election, while Weld County, Colo., offers cast vote records and ballot images online for users who create a login.
But some precincts may be unable to follow suit. Some states use tabulators that don't create cast vote records, while for others, ballot images are not considered public record.
