Questions about the legitimacy and integrity of elections have reached a fever pitch in recent years, and one county in Idaho has launched an effort to restore confidence from the public.
In Ada County, the clerk’s office will publish all the ballots from the 2024 election to an interactive website within the next couple of weeks as part of an effort toward transparency about the election process. The ballots will not have identifying information so as not to reveal which ballot belonged to which voter.
County Clerk Trent Tripple told the New York Times the effort to publish the 271,186 ballots cast in this month’s election in the county was undertaken because of a break in trust between voters and election officials.
“I was tired of everybody questioning elections in Idaho,” Tripple told the outlet. “The idea is to get the vast majority of people back into this bucket of trusting elections.”
The online portal has results for all elections dating back to 2022, which can be sorted by precinct and how the vote was cast, among other filters.
Some voters reportedly made distinct markings on their ballots to be able to find them on the online ballot verifier website. The ballot verifier system software was created by Civera and was also used by Tarrant County, Texas, for this year’s elections.
The company touts its partnership with Ada County and says the software “proactively makes granular election data readily accessible online, eliminating barriers to transparency, and freeing up time otherwise spent fielding public record requests.”
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Election integrity and questions of voting procedures were major points of contention after the 2020 election, largely from allies of now-President-elect Donald Trump, but claims of election fraud have been minimal after the 2024 cycle.
Ada County voted for Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris, 53.8%-43.4%, and voted in favor of the ballot measure affirming citizenship as a requirement to vote, as well as against implementing ranked choice voting. The county voted in line with the rest of the state for each of those races.