To combat election doubters, a county clerk in Idaho posts every ballot online

BOISE — Distrust of voting systems in the United States spread quickly after the 2020 presidential election, when then-President Donald Trump refused to concede the presidential election, claiming the results were rigged.

Fueled in large part by Trump’s baseless claims, election offices have been inundated with questions and complaints about the process. Election officials have resisted such claims for years and tried to inform voters about the fraud checks as part of the process, but a county clerk in Idaho recently suggested a relatively simple solution to the distrust: Post a copy of every ballot online after the election.

Trent Tripple, the Republican county clerk of Ada County in Boise, received approval from the county board before launching the Ballot Verifier program ahead of the state’s primary election earlier this year. In the coming days, the tool will be updated with all 271,186 ballots cast in the county during the Nov. 5 general election, Nicole Camarda, a spokeswoman for the Ada County Clerk’s Office, told KSL.com.

“After the 2020 election, our office was inundated with public records requests from people wanting more information about the election in general,” she said. These requests were so large that a significant portion of the county’s resources had to be devoted to responding to them.

“So we partnered with a software company called Civera,” she said. “It took about two years, but we launched Ballot Verifier in April of this year, and now people can go online to our website and look at all of those ballot images, voting records and all of the data associated with it.”

Camarda said scanning ballots for posting online works “hand in hand” with counting ballots. When voters place their ballots into a scanner after filling them out, an image is captured that is later uploaded to the county clerk’s website. There was a “really high voter turnout” in Ada County this year, so it took longer to fully upload ballots from the last election, she said.

The ballots lack personal information, meaning users of the Ballot Verifier tool cannot see how individual Idahoans cast their ballots. However, some voters added scribbles or other markings to their ballots so they could identify them later.

“We take the right to a secret ballot very seriously here in Ada County, and I know that is the case throughout the state of Idaho. There is no way to attribute it to a specific voter,” Camarda said.

In addition to allowing anyone with concerns about the election to review the results, the program has given the county and outside researchers more insight into detailed voting habits. The county plans to conduct follow-up research on the program’s impact on voter confidence in elections.

“We don’t want people to have questions, and we want people to be able to see everything we do and increase that trust,” Camarda said.

Tarrant County, Texas, has already launched a similar program using Civera’s technology, and election officials in some other states have been receptive to the idea.

However, Utah is unlikely to be one of them, at least according to the current legal status. Ryan Cowley, the state’s election director, told KSL.com that Utah law prohibits the release of some election materials. He said state lawmakers will have to change that if Utah wants to adopt a program similar to Ada County’s.

“It’s something that the Legislature could certainly think about,” Cowley said. “I think we always want to be careful because people have a constitutional right to a secret ballot in their state. … We want to be as transparent as possible, but we also have to respect people to have an absolute right to a secret vote.”