Ada County Idaho relies on complete transparency to restore voter trust – Deseret News

An Idaho county is shaking up the national debate about how to increase trust in elections.

Ada County, home to Boise, Idaho, is pushing election transparency to its constitutional limits: posting images of every ballot and associated tabulation records online for everyone to see, while taking precautions to protect voter identities.

The county’s Ballot Verifier website, where auditors can compare hundreds of thousands of scanned ballots with their cast ballots, is scheduled to go live this week with the results of the 2024 general election.

While counties in California and Colorado have been releasing either ballot images or records of votes cast for years, this appears to be the first time the two datasets will be released together to the public to verify the work of election officials and tabulation machines.

Led by newly elected County Clerk Trent Tripple, Ada County election officials hope this experiment will become a new norm statewide, instilling confidence in what they say should fundamentally be a public process.

“We view it as the ultimate transparency tool,” said Saul Seyler, Ada County elections director. “We’ve had public records requests about things like this and we just decided that because it’s public information and data, they have the right to access it.”

A Utah lawmaker is pushing for greater access to election results in the 2025 legislative session to better emulate his neighbors to the west. Proponents argue that providing additional information about how votes are counted for public audit will go a long way toward curbing election conspiracies.

But given concerns about voter privacy and costs to taxpayers, Utah elected officials may be reluctant to follow Ada County’s lead. Skeptics insist that these kinds of reforms ultimately will fail to appease voters looking for a reason to reject election results they don’t like.

Will Utah release election results?

Since President-elect Donald Trump denied the results of the 2020 election, county election officials in Utah and across the country have faced a tsunami of criticism from supporters of the former president.

A new wave of election skepticism erupted in Utah in the 2024 election cycle as losing Republican candidates in the 2nd Congressional District and gubernatorial primaries called for greater transparency regarding voter signatures, rejected ballots and election results.

Lawmakers are discussing several election 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 records of ballot returns and information about how they are tabulated.

Current state law requires county officials to destroy ballots and delete ballot images and ballot records — a digital representation of the tabulated representation of ballot markings — after 22 months. Under Utah law, these files are considered private election results and cannot be made public.

“From a government records and transparency perspective, this does not appear to inspire public confidence,” Thurston said.

If Thurston had his way, state law would be changed to allow Utah counties to follow Ada County’s lead. Allowing 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 change state law to allow state and county officials to access ballot images and ballots after the election only for research purposes. Thurston believes the election results should be made available to the public, but he believes there is not a will among his colleagues and county officials for comprehensive reform on that front.

“There is resistance among Utah’s elected officials to releasing full transparency,” Thurston said. “I think it’s an unwarranted fear that we’re violating our longstanding policy of secret voting.”

Publishing ballot images and voting records can reveal the voter’s identity in some situations, Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson acknowledged. This can happen in extremely small precincts because the ballot images contain the precinct number and records of votes cast can be used to narrow down votes to specific people if everyone in a precinct votes the same or if an individual votes differently and is registered with one a different political party than the others.

However, counties 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 markings or scribbles that could be used to trace a ballot back to a specific voter, Thurston said. And according to Davidson, county clerks can combine ballots from counties with similar ballot 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 voting records should not be made public, Davidson said.

Davidson said he believes voters have a right to this information and that releasing it would “dispel a lot of distrust.”

“I think it would just clear up a lot of the misconception that our elections are safe and secure,” Davidson said. “There are a lot of doubts, there are conspiracy theories, this would just wipe them all out.”

Is there a downside to transparency?

But there is no guarantee that changing the process will satisfy voters whose biggest dissatisfaction is the outcome, according to state Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City, who spoke out against Thurston’s bill during a preliminary committee hearing last month.

Before this upcoming meeting, Thatcher had chaired the Government Operations Committee, which oversees electoral reform, for almost a decade. Thatcher said he spent more time dealing with claims of voter fraud and the details of the electoral process than anyone else in the legislature during that time.

What struck him was that legislators were effectively caught up in a whack-a-mole affair, as the Legislature ordered multiple audits each election cycle and increased transparency to respond to disgruntled voters, failing to do so. to restore voter confidence in elections and may have strengthened those who seek to discredit them.

“I personally feel that the more you consider some of these more bizarre ideas, as each one is refuted, the more you come up with another, crazier idea,” Thatcher said.

It is always worth discussing improvements to the electoral system, said Thatcher. But in his conversations with election officials, he concluded that every time lawmakers increase transparency, election critics shift their criticism elsewhere. A better policy priority, in Thatcher’s view, would be to enact reforms to ensure access to the ballot box is “free, fair and easy”.

Weber County Clerk Ricky Hatch praised Ada County’s steps to increase government transparency, but also shared concerns that making ballot images and voting records publicly available will not be a “magic elixir” that immediately instills confidence in elections.

There are additional costs that lawmakers should consider when changing state policy, Hatch said. Scanning both sides of a ballot envelope to keep track of postmark data could cost large counties hundreds of thousands of dollars to replace ballot scanning machines, and permanently storing election records would cost counties hundreds of dollars each year, Hatch said. And there is always the risk that greater transparency could reveal how individuals voted in violation of the right to secret ballot.

“If taxpayers are willing to spend this extra money for this additional transparency, then let’s change the law and enforce it,” Hatch said. “As long as officials can be confident that there will be no harm done to voters — that the way they cast their vote will be privacy-preserving — I don’t think there will be any officials who are upset or upset apparently trying to stop.” This.”

According to Seyler, the county clerk who oversees elections in Ada County, county officials across the country have expressed interest in the full transparency experiment in Ada County.

Tarrant County, Texas quickly stepped 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, committee testimony, Seyler said.

In Ada County, the response from Democrats and Republicans to the new policy has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Seyler said. The county even brought in some of its harshest local critics to test the system before its release. The result? Former skeptics were impressed by their ability to self-verify election results, and county officials felt they had achieved their goal of creating a system so trustworthy that attention shifted from the process to the outcome.

“By making it available to the public, we hope to quell that kind of discussion and get back to the question: ‘How are our elected officials doing?’ not whether they were properly elected or not,” Seyler said.