An Idaho county is shaking up the national debate over how to restore confidence in elections.
Ada County, home to Boise, Idaho, is pushing election transparency to the extreme, posting images of each ballot and its tabulation data online for all to see, while taking precautions to protect voters’ identities.
The county’s Ballot Verifier website, where auditors can compare hundreds of thousands of scanned ballots with their cast ballot data, will go live this week with results from the 2024 general election.
Although counties in California and Colorado have been publishing ballot images or cast ballot data for years, this appears to be the first time the two data sets have appeared together so the public can audit the work of election officials and tabulation machines.
Led by newly elected County Clerk Trent Tripple, Ada County election workers hope this experiment will become a new norm across the country to build trust in what they believe should be a fundamentally public process.
“We see it as the ultimate tool for transparency,” said Saul Seyler, Ada County elections director. “We had public records requests for this kind of thing and we decided that because this is the public’s information, and the public’s data, they have a right to have access to it.”
A Utah lawmaker is pushing for greater access to election results during the 2025 legislative session to better mirror neighboring states to the West. Proponents argue that providing additional information about how votes are counted for public scrutiny will go a long way toward curtailing election conspiracies.
But amid concerns about voter privacy and the cost to taxpayers, Utah’s elected officials may be slow to follow Ada County’s lead, with skeptics insisting that these types of reforms will ultimately fail to sway voters. to soften those looking for a reason to reject election results they don’t like.
Will Utah make election results public?
Since President-elect Donald Trump denied the results of the 2020 election, election officials in Utah and across the country have been subjected to a tsunami of criticism from supporters of the former president.
A renewed wave of election skepticism swept Utah during the 2024 election cycle, as losing Republican candidates in the 2nd Congressional District primary and the governor called for greater transparency around voter signatures, rejected ballots and election results.
Lawmakers are discussing several electoral reforms for the 2025 legislative session to address these concerns. State Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, plans to introduce a bill that would require county clerks to permanently store electronic ballot data, as well as information about how it is tabulated.
Current state code requires county clerks to shred paper ballots and remove ballot images and cast ballot data — a digital representation of how ballots are tabulated — after 22 months. Under Utah law, these files are considered private election results and cannot be made public.
“From a public administration and transparency perspective, that doesn’t seem to inspire public confidence,” Thurston said.
If Thurston had his way, the state code would be changed to allow Utah counties to follow Ada County’s lead. The ability for observers to verify election results would increase government legitimacy and accountability, Thurston said.
But Thurston’s bill is just a small step in that direction. The proposal would amend state code to allow state and county officials to access ballot images and cast ballot data after the election for research purposes only. Thurston believes that election results should be made public, but he calculated that there is no will among his colleagues and district secretaries for widespread reform on this front.
“There is resistance among Utah’s elected officials to publishing full transparency,” Thurston said. “I think it’s a misplaced fear that we’re going to violate our long-standing secret ballot policy.”
Releasing ballot images and cast ballot data can reveal the voter’s identity in some situations, Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson acknowledged. This can happen in extremely small voting districts because the ballot images contain the constituency number and the voting records cast can be used to limit votes to specific individuals if everyone in a constituency votes the same, or if one individual votes differently and is registered at a polling station. different political party than the others.
However, the provinces have found a number of solutions to this problem. Ada County’s Ballot Verifier system redacts all information from very small precincts. Counties in Colorado use software that excludes marks or scribbles that could be used to trace a ballot back to a particular voter, Thurston said. And according to Davidson, county clerks can merge ballots from precincts with similar voting formats to avoid the small precinct problem entirely.
If the issue of voter privacy can be resolved, there is no reason why ballot images and cast ballot data should not be made public, Davidson said.
Davidson said he believes voters have a right to this information and that making it public “would remove a lot of suspicion.”
“I think it would clear up a lot of the misconception that our elections are secure,” Davidson said. “There is a lot of doubt, there are conspiracy theories, it would wipe them all away.”
Is there a downside to transparency?
But there is no guarantee that changing the process will satisfy voters whose main dissatisfaction is the outcome, said Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City, who opposed the bill at an interim committee hearing last month Thurston resisted.
Before this coming session, Thatcher spent almost a decade as chairman of the Government Operations Committee, which oversees electoral reform. During that time, Thatcher said he spent more time investigating claims of election fraud and the details of election processes than anyone in the legislature.
What struck him was that while the Legislature was doing things like mandating multiple audits every election cycle and increasing transparency in an effort to respond to dissatisfied voters, lawmakers were essentially engaging in a “Whack-a-Mole ” affair that failed to rebuild voter confidence in the elections. elections and may have given power to those who try to discredit them.
“Personally, I feel like the more you take into account some of these more bizarre ideas, because they’re all being refuted, they’re just going to come up with another idea that’s even crazier,” Thatcher said.
It is always worth discussing improvements to the electoral system, Thatcher said. But in his conversations with election workers, he has concluded that every time lawmakers increase transparency, election critics shift their criticism elsewhere. A better policy priority, from Thatcher’s point of view, would be to implement reforms to ensure that access to the ballot box is “free, fair and easy”.
Weber County Clerk Ricky Hatch applauded Ada County’s steps to increase government transparency, but he also shared concerns that making ballot images and cast ballot data publicly available won’t be a “magic elixir” that immediately builds confidence in elections .
There are additional costs lawmakers must consider when changing state policy, Hatch said. Scanning both sides of a ballot envelope to track postmark information could cost large counties hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace ballot scanning machines, and permanent storage of election data would cost counties hundreds of dollars a year, Hatch said. And there is always the risk that greater transparency could reveal how individuals voted in violation of the right to a secret ballot.
“If taxpayers are willing to spend that extra money for that extra transparency, then let’s change the law and get it done,” Hatch said. “As long as the clerks can be convinced that voters will not be harmed — that the manner in which they cast their ballot, the privacy of that will be maintained — I don’t think you’ll see clerks upset or seemingly trying to stop this .”
County clerks across the country have expressed interest in Ada County’s experiment with total transparency, said Seyler, the county employee who oversees Ada County elections.
Tarrant County, Texas, quickly lined up to use the Ballot Verifier system, developed by Massachusetts-based software company Civera, for this year’s general election. State lawmakers, including in Idaho and Arizona, have reached out to the county for more information, and in some cases for committee testimony, Seyler said.
In Ada County, the response to the new policy has been “overwhelmingly positive” from Democrats and Republicans, Seyler said. The province even brought in some of their fiercest local critics to test out the system before publishing it. The result? Former skeptics were impressed with their ability to conduct their own evaluations of the election results, and county officials believed they had accomplished their goal: creating a system so reliable that attention shifted from the process to the outcome .
“By getting it out to the public, we hope to quell those kinds of discussions and really get back to the question of, ‘How are our elected officials doing?’ not whether or not they were duly elected,” Seyler said.
