Votebeat

One of Michigan’s most populous counties will post all ballots online

2026-03-06T15:51:31+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Michigan’s free newsletter here.

Macomb County has begun to post online an image of every ballot cast in the pivotal swing county.

The county, Michigan’s third most populous, is using a program called “Ballot Verifier” to upload scans of every ballot cast for anyone to see. More than 80,000 ballots from the November 2025 election are already online, as is the “cast vote record,” which shows how tabulators read each ballot.

Images of cast ballots — which do not include a voter’s name, address, party affiliation, or other identifying information — are already public record and can be requested through local officials. Putting them online simply improves transparency, Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini said.

“We all wonder, when we put our ballot in, ‘did it score it the right way?’” Forlini told Votebeat. “This takes a little bit of the mystery out of it and adds a little bit of accountability for all of us.”

The premise is simple: Let voters see the ballots, and they can judge the results for themselves. Since Michigan votes on paper ballots, that means anyone can see the sometimes wacky ways people fill in bubbles by hand — an X where a bubble should be, a rant scrawled next to a candidate’s name — right alongside write-in candidates, undervotes, and all the other markings that show the full range of voter intent.

Macomb County plans to post images going back through the November 2024 election and will include future elections in the program as well, Forlini said. He is running for secretary of state as a Republican.

Ballot Verifier caught his attention about a year ago, he said, after he saw how it worked. It’s been used in a few counties around the country in the past few years. In Ada County, Idaho, which adopted it about two years ago, elections director Saul Seyler said the program “has helped build public confidence.”

The program helped address election distrust at the roots, Seyler said. Ada County — Idaho’s most populous county and home to Boise — has worked to improve trust for years, including offering constant livestreams of the facilities where ballots are handled and adding more windows when remodeling their offices.

Ballot Verifier, he said, offered the chance for voters to ensure that the machines had counted their ballots correctly. Officials brought out some of the department’s “harshest critics” to provide feedback on the tool, Seyler said, and even they found it useful.

“Realistically, probably 95% of the public won’t ever use the tool, but there is something to the fact that it’s available,” he said. “There’s a confidence that gets built just by knowing it’s there.”

It has required some minor tweaks to protocol to ensure voters don’t accidentally violate their own right to a secret ballot. The county changed their ballot language, for instance, to make clear that ballots are public records and that voters shouldn’t leave identifying marks.

Voter privacy is one of the greatest concerns about such programs. Michigan voters have a right to a secret ballot. Maintaining that is key, said Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director at Verified Voting, because ballot secrecy laws exist to protect voters from coercion or vote buying. Stray marks or seemingly random write-in choices can still tie a ballot directly to a voter, he said.

He pointed to the 2008 Minnesota Senate election recount, where a ballot that included several write-in spaces marked with “Lizard People” was not counted because canvassers agreed with a challenge characterizing it as an identifying mark, which goes against Minnesota’s laws.

Election officials need to find a “transparent way” to reject the ballots images that are “most blatantly potentially identifiable,” Lindeman said, which can look different depending on the ballot and an election’s circumstances.

In Ada County, officials tried to address the potential issue by working with Civera, the company that produces Ballot Verifier, to ensure that voters are “masked” if something about their ballot would identify them, meaning it won’t be made publicly available. It’s not unheard of for only a single voter in a precinct to get a specific combination of taxing districts on their ballot, for example, and officials wanted to make sure that ballot would still remain private.

That and other workflow changes can add yet another step to “an already kind of chaotic time,” Seyler said, but he believes the change has already saved Ada County money: he said the published ballot images and cast vote records have prevented at least two recounts by allowing potential challengers to review records without having to file for one.

“This can not only be a resource to help build trust, but it can also just help you operationally,” he said.

Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.

Indiana bill would make early ballots traceable to voters

2026-02-23T10:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S.

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For more than a century, American elections have operated around a simple promise: who you voted for is a secret. But a bill moving through the Indiana legislature would undermine that promise — at least for people who vote early.

House Bill 1359 would let counties have early voters feed their completed ballots directly into a scanning machine instead of placing them in a sealed secrecy envelope. It would then allow those ballots to be scanned starting on the first day of early voting, rather than waiting until closer to Election Day.

On its own, that process isn’t unusual — it’s similar to how ballots are handled at in-person polling places on Election Day. But the bill also authorizes counties to generate a unique identifier connected to each voter during early voting, print that number on the voter’s ballot, and allow officials to retract a scanned ballot if its voter is later found ineligible. That combination weakens the traditional separation between a voter’s identity and the ballot they cast.

Election officials and voting rights advocates argue those changes touch one of the most fundamental protections in modern democracy.

“Voters expect that when they cast a ballot, it is done privately, without the ability of clerks or staff to determine an individual’s actual vote,” Marion County Clerk Kate Sweeney Bell, a Democrat, said in a statement. The public is already “fatigued from political partisanship,” she said, and the additional requirements “will ramp up pressure on our staff and poll workers at the point of highest activity.”

The bill advanced out of committee the same day lawmakers added — without public testimony — an amendment that would reduce Indiana’s early voting period from 28 days to 16. If the measure passes, the changes would take effect before the May primary.

To understand why this matters, it helps to zoom out.

For the first half of American history, votes were cast publicly — often orally or by depositing colored party tickets into transparent containers — so that everyone present, including party operatives, knew exactly how each person voted. As a result, elections were rife with vote-buying, employer coercion, and party surveillance.

That started to change when states began adopting the secret ballot — also called the Australian ballot, after the country that exported the concept to the U.S. — in the 1880s and 1890s. States started printing their own ballots and setting up private voting booths so voters could mark their choices confidentially, fundamentally transforming elections from open spectacles into private acts.

Allowing ballots to be scanned within a system that uses voter-specific identifiers — and making those ballots retractable — is a step back in the opposite direction. Election scholars have long warned that even perceived weakening of ballot secrecy can erode public confidence, regardless of whether misuse occurs.

Support for the proposal has come primarily from Republican lawmakers, including Rep. Tim Wesco, who authored the bill, and Senate Elections Committee Chair Mike Gaskill, who offered the amendment to shorten early voting. Supporters have framed the changes as administrative improvements, arguing they would reduce costs, ease strain on county election offices, and allow for more efficient processing of early ballots.

During committee debate, however, lawmakers did not directly address how the early voting identifier system would affect the longstanding practice of keeping a voter’s identity separate from their ballot choices.

At least one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Greg Walker, voted against the piece because he opposes shortening early voting, citing concerns about its impact on voters in his district. So far, there have been no public reports of Republican lawmakers opposing the early voting identifier provision or raising concerns about its implications for ballot secrecy.

If you have questions about how ballots are handled in your county — or how this proposal would change that — shoot us an email. We want to hear from you.

Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.

Judge dismisses Texas lawsuit over ballot numbering, threat to secrecy

2026-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by conservative activists who challenged the use of electronic voting equipment to randomly number ballots in Texas on the grounds that the practice compromised ballot secrecy.

Judge David Alan Ezra of U.S. District Court in Austin ruled that the case, filed in 2024 by longtime Texas election activist Laura Pressley and voters from three counties, was moot, because the Texas Secretary of State’s Office has since prohibited counties from using electronic pollbooks to generate and print numbers on ballot paper.

He also wrote that two of the counties named in the suit, Williamson and Bell, had taken steps to eliminate the use of pollbooks to number ballot paper, and that the third, Llano County, doesn’t use them for that purpose.

In court filings, Pressley had said she used public records to find what she described as an “algorithmic pattern” that could link more than 60,000 voters in Williamson County, north of Austin, to their ballots and expose how they voted, though she did not reveal her exact method.

Ballot secrecy has become a growing concern in recent years, as Texas passed laws that made it easier for the public to access various election records and datasets — anything from voter lists to the labels on election office computers and printers. Votebeat and the Texas Tribune in 2024 reported that the increased availability of records made it possible, in limited instances, to determine the ballot choices of individual voters, compromising their right to a secret ballot.

Following that reporting, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office directed counties to redact any information on election records and materials released to the public that could tie a voter to their ballot. Election officials have offered other solutions to address the state’s ballot secrecy concerns, but Texas lawmakers have yet to take action to tighten access to any publicly available election records.

In court filings, Pressley argued that ballots in the three counties she named in the lawsuit included unique identifier numbers generated and randomized by electronic pollbooks, the devices that are used to check in voters at polling places. Pressley alleged that these numbers were key in allowing ballots to be traced back to voters, though she didn’t specify how.

Pressley argued the ballots should instead be numbered sequentially, starting with 1, and then shuffled before they are issued to voters to protect ballot secrecy. She cited a 19th-century state law that calls for numbering ballots sequentially, but for years, the Secretary of State’s and and Attorney General’s office have said that randomized numbering complies with the law.

Pressley has sued at least twice before over ballot numbering, but those cases haven’t gone anywhere. Ezra said that Pressley and the other plaintiffs may file similar claims in the future, but they can’t “be based on facts alleged in this case.”

Pressley told Votebeat in an email that she’s planning to appeal Ezra’s ruling. The Texas Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment.

A federal lawsuit against Harris County election officials filed last year by the national conservative nonprofit group Public Interest Legal Foundation also alleges that the county’s voting system violated at least three voters’ right to a secret ballot. The plaintiffs allege that Harris County officials failed to follow the state’s directive and released unredacted election records. The case, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Houston, is pending.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Election officials worry that Pennsylvania court rulings could compromise ballot secrecy

2025-03-19T09:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Pennsylvania’s free newsletter here.

Recent decisions from a Pennsylvania state court could create a new route to pierce the secrecy of some mail ballots and reveal the private choices made by thousands of voters.

While a very small percentage of cast ballots would be at risk, according to a pair of analyses, some state and county officials are concerned about the potential for any voter’s choices to be exposed.

In two cases last year, the Commonwealth Court ruled that voted mail ballots were public records under the state’s open-records laws, meaning Erie and Allegheny counties, where the records requests were filed, would have to release them.

These ballots are already separated from their envelopes, so they would not include the voters’ names or other directly identifying information.

However, both the Pennsylvania Department of State and Allegheny County argue that the ballots could be cross-referenced with other publicly available information, which in limited instances could expose voters’ choices.

Allegheny County, with the support of the state, is appealing the Commonwealth Court’s decision to the state Supreme Court, and is withholding access to the ballots until the appeal is resolved. Erie County has also separately appealed the decision in its case to the state Supreme Court and has not yet released the records.

A Department of State spokesperson told Votebeat and Spotlight PA that the agency believes access to voted ballots violates the Pennsylvania Election Code, which has language restricting the release of “contents of the ballot box.”

“Disclosure of this information, then, not only violates these voters' constitutionally guaranteed right of secrecy but also could certainly chill citizens from exercising their right to vote in this manner in the future,” the department wrote in a brief filed with the Commonwealth Court in the Allegheny County case.

How many ballots would be at risk?

In a brief submitted to the court in one of the cases, the Pennsylvania Department of State estimated that if the court required mail ballots to be released statewide, for the 2024 primary alone, mail ballots in 1,400 precincts throughout Pennsylvania would be at risk.

Votebeat and Spotlight PA reviewed tracking data on ballots that were cast across the four statewide primary and general elections since the spring of 2023. The analysis found roughly 10,000 ballots statewide in that dataset that — if voted ballots were released statewide and cross-referenced with other publicly available data — could be at risk of being linked to a specific voter.

More than 14.2 million votes were cast in total across those four elections, so by the news organizations’ calculations, the risk applied to roughly 0.07% of ballots cast.

A Department of State spokesperson declined to comment on the methodology used for its analysis or for the analysis by the news organizations.

In certain circumstances involving small precincts and elections with few mail-ballot voters, according to the brief the Department of State filed in the case, comparing voted ballots with other publicly available data could “easily be used to find out who a specific voter voted for.”

Three county election officials noted that a great deal of election data and documents were already public, and there was already some existing risk.

Still, election officials said they worry about the possibility of bad-faith actors taking advantage of the ability to see actual voted ballots.

“You could run a foolproof bribery or intimidation scheme if you know on the back end you have access to the ballots,” Lycoming County election director Forrest Lehman said.

Landlords, abusive spouses, or others would then have a way to pressure voters to cast their vote a certain way, and confirm they had done so, he said.

Cases are a test of election transparency vs. privacy

A push for transparency in elections, which some experts say helps to build trust, has fueled efforts around the country to make more election data and records publicly available. The requests in both the Allegheny and Erie cases came in 2022, a time when conservative activists raising questions about the trustworthiness of elections were pushing followers to request election records. Some nonpartisan and civil rights groups, including the ACLU of Pennsylvania, have also advocated for releasing ballots to show transparency.

“When you won’t release the information, you’re just creating more conspiracy theories because it looks like you have something to hide,” said Marian Schneider, senior voting rights policy counsel at the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

Schneider said there are ways to protect secrecy without withholding ballots, such as releasing results by municipality rather than precinct.

In other states, similar efforts to release election data and records have created worries about ballot secrecy.

After Texas passed a law in 2023 that allowed people to inspect voted ballots, ballot images, and electronic voter records, Votebeat and the Texas Tribune found that this information, in conjunction with other public records, made it possible to connect some voters with their ballots. That discovery prompted Texas election officials to issue emergency guidance to counties advising that they withhold certain information to protect ballot secrecy.

Other reviews of this kind of information have shown the risks are relatively small.

A recently released study from researchers at Yale University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed cast vote records — which are essentially digital representations of voted ballots — from Arizona and found that releasing ballots does not substantially increase the number of votes at risk of being revealed.

“Vote revelation is very rare,” said Michael Morse, an assistant professor of law at Penn and one of the study’s co-authors.

Morse said there has always been some risk of votes being revealed because of how counties release election results.

How other states handle the release of records

Voting choices were not private for much of the country’s history, according to a history of secret ballots published by the Congressional Research Service. States began adopting secret ballot laws in the late 1800s to prevent vote buying, coercion, and intimidation by employers, but it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that all states implemented the practice.

Some counties in Pennsylvania already release precinct-level voting results, broken down by vote method. This means some number of ballots, just as in Arizona, were likely already at risk. Without knowing exactly how each county has released results in the past, it is impossible to determine precisely how much the Commonwealth Court decision increases the risk.

Since the risk of revealing votes isn’t necessarily tied to releasing ballots, and exists even when simple results are published, Morse said solutions that preserve secrecy don’t have to include withholding ballots.

Still, some states have recognized that releasing ballots can increase the risk, however small, of vote revelation, and taken steps to minimize it.

New Mexico, Nevada, and Florida redact or aggregate certain information from smaller precincts, for example, which Pennsylvania doesn’t currently do. Precincts could also be redrawn or combined to create larger groups of voters and make it harder to link any individual to a ballot.

Susannah Goodman, director of election security at Common Cause, a nonpartisan democracy-focused advocacy group, said steps like that balance secrecy with transparency.

“You can create a situation in which the way that the data is aggregated, you can get transparency without compromising ballot secrecy,” she said. “That is the direction we have to head.”

Thomas Wilburn, Senior Data Editor for Chalkbeat, contributed to this report.

Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.

Texas lawmakers are mostly silent on addressing threats to ballot secrecy

2024-11-25T11:00:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free newsletters here.

This story was produced in collaboration with the Texas Newsroom, a public radio journalism collaboration that includes NPR, KERA in North Texas, Houston Public Media, KUT in Austin, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio and other stations across the state.

Listen to a radio version of this story here:

Bgainey · GAINEY Ballot Secrecy Lege FINAL

Texas officials had to issue emergency guidance this year to patch holes in new election transparency laws that threatened to expose the choices people made on their ballots.

Now that the 2024 election is over, the issue of protecting ballot secrecy is receiving renewed attention in both the courts and the Legislature.

A national conservative nonprofit last week filed a federal lawsuit against Harris County, alleging the county isn’t taking steps to protect voters’ right to a secret ballot. Another case involving an activist who claims to have uncovered the ballot choices of more than 60,000 voters is ongoing.

And Republican state Rep. Ryan Guillen proposed a bill this month that would make it a felony for individuals to obtain information that could tie voters back to their ballot choices.

It’s the first concrete sign that lawmakers plan to tackle the ballot secrecy issue since an investigation by Votebeat and the Texas Tribune in May showed how laws touted as increasing election transparency have made it possible — in limited instances — to determine how individuals voted, using publicly available records and data.

How push for records unlocked voters’ choices

The push for increased transparency gained momentum after the 2020 presidential election when then-former President Donald Trump successfully convinced activists statewide that the election had been stolen from him. In an effort to uncover evidence of voter fraud, they began filing open-records requests for original voted ballots and cast-vote records — anonymized electronic representations of how each voter voted — in almost every Texas county.

At the time, the law said voted ballots had to be kept private for 22 months after an election. But in 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a non-binding legal opinion advising county officials to release voted ballots as soon as they are counted, while redacting any information that could identify the voter.

After at least three counties challenged Paxton’s advice in court, the Texas Legislature rewrote the law to allow public access to ballot images, cast-vote records, and the original voted ballot just 61 days after an election.

In the past three years, the requests for election records have become more expansive, election officials said. Activists are now requesting copies of voting equipment manuals, data from election servers, and other information produced by voting equipment, including electronic poll books used to check in voters at polling locations.

Officials came face to face with the risks of releasing these records in May, when the conservative news site Current Revolt published what it said was the image of the ballot that former Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi cast in the March 5 Republican primary.

The site did not explain how it obtained the ballot, or how it linked it to Rinaldi, but Votebeat and the Tribune were able to verify that such a match was possible. Using public records, reporters were able to identify the choices of voters who’d cast ballots in precincts with a small number of voters.

That same month, longtime conservative activist Laura Pressley claimed in a federal lawsuit that she had discovered an “algorithmic pattern” in public records that allowed her to link 60,000 Williamson County voters to their ballot choices. Her lawsuit, which is still pending, alleges that a failure by state and local election officials to comply with a ballot-numbering law has allowed her to match voters to their ballots.

Pressley has been reluctant to share details of the purported “algorithmic pattern” with state officials. Still, the Secretary of State’s office this year directed election officials who use electronic poll books to print serial numbers on the ballots to stop doing so, and to switch to paper with preprinted ballot numbers, which must be redacted before being released to requestors.

How will the Legislature respond?

State and local election officials said they had been concerned about the risks to ballot secrecy for some time as lawmakers made it easier to access voter data. But it wasn’t until after the May disclosures that Paxton and Secretary of State Jane Nelson issued additional guidance to election officials, ordering more redactions and instructing them to stop releasing information that can help expose how people voted.

Conservative election activists have been vocal about their opposition to redactions and lengthening the timeline to make ballot images public. Such moves, they say, would prevent them from performing their own election audits.

In a legislative hearing this summer, state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Houston, said he believed there could be bipartisan support for other measures, such as a bill that would require information from small precincts to be aggregated into larger ones. That was one of the solutions outlined by Christina Adkins, the elections division director in the Secretary of State’s office, to better anonymize voters who cast ballots in precincts where few others are cast.

Bettencourt could not be reached for comment. A spokesperson for his office told Votebeat in an email that he plans to file legislation to try to solve ballot secrecy concerns.

As of late last week, Guillen’s bill was the only one filed related to the issue. Guillen, of Rio Grande City, did not respond to a request for an interview.

State Rep. Terry Wilson, R-Marble Falls, and Rep. John Bucy, D-Austin, co-authored the bill in 2023 that expanded access to election records. Wilson did not respond to Votebeat’s request for comment. In an emailed statement, Bucy said “ballot secrecy is a foundational feature of our electoral system” and that “robust conversations” between the secretary of state’s office and local elections officials are ongoing. “We intend to continue that work and provide them the support and tools they need to protect voter privacy,” he said.

Some voting rights advocates say that without some action from lawmakers, voters will be vulnerable to breaches of privacy, harassment, and intimidation.

“You’re guaranteed a secret ballot. That is something that you take into the polling place with you. And if you can’t count on that, then our concern would be that folks who might otherwise vote, may not due to fear,” said Elisabeth MacNamara, vice president of advocacy for the League of Women Voters of Texas.

Latest lawsuit targets countywide polling place program

The federal lawsuit against Harris County filed last week by the national conservative nonprofit group Public Interest Legal Foundation alleges that the county’s voting system violated at least three voters’ right to a secret ballot. The plaintiffs allege that Harris County officials failed to follow the state’s directive and released unredacted election records.

The suit says the county’s use of the countywide polling place program — which nearly 100 Texas counties use — along with publicly available records puts voters’ secret ballots at risk. County election officials and officials with the Texas Secretary of State have previously denied that the countywide polling place program poses a threat to ballot secrecy. State Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, has filed legislation to eliminate the program.

Caroline Kane, a voter in Harris County who was the GOP candidate for a U.S. House seat, states in the lawsuit that the ballot she cast in the March 5 Republican primary was disclosed and made public. The lawsuit states that she is “concerned about the negative effects of the lack of secrecy regarding her ballot and potentially facing retribution from those who have discovered her ballot.” Kane lost to Democrat Lizzie Fletcher.

Kane and the two other plaintiffs are asking the court to prevent Harris County from releasing voters’ identifiable information in ballot images and electronic poll book data. They’re also asking the court to order county election officials to “abstain from viewing information that may lead to the discovery of a voter’s ballot and from identifying to anyone a voter’s vote or ballot.”

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Houston.

A spokesperson for the Public Interest Legal Foundation said in an email that the organization is “seeking a ruling that the US Constitution supports the right to a secret ballot and that right is being violated. We have no exact proposed solution. That is up to the county or state.”

Harris County officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Local officials are left with an arduous task

While lawmakers have said little about the issue — outside of two public hearings in the spring — local election officials are scrambling to ensure that voters’ ballot secrecy is protected.

Linking a voter to their specific ballot choices isn’t easy. It requires a process of elimination and the use of multiple public records. It is more likely to succeed in circumstances involving less populous counties, small precincts, and low-turnout elections.

Regardless, pending legislative action, all counties have to follow directives from the secretary of state, spending significant time and resources on redacting any type of information that could tie a voter to their ballot choices. In some counties, these steps have required additional manpower and costly computer software.

In Guadalupe County, east of San Antonio, election administrator Lisa Hayes is bracing herself for an onslaught of public records requests. While working to meet state-mandated post-election deadlines and preparing for local runoff elections, she’s also trying to figure out how she’ll handle the redaction of more than 80,000 ballots cast this November. She may purchase special software or resort to printing out the documents, redacting information by hand with a black marker, and scanning the ballots back in.

“It’s going to be a huge undertaking,” she said, adding that she wished lawmakers would clarify where these steps “fall in the priority list” of deadlines, requirements, and advisories county elections offices are required to adhere to.

Tammy Patrick, CEO of programs at the National Association of Election Officials, said further guidance from the legislature and the secretary of state is necessary to help counties prevent errors when redacting thousands of ballots

“Because if you have one county doing it one way, and across the state, it’s being done 10 other ways, that’s going to cause additional confusion and problems like lawsuits on equal protection and other issues,” Patrick said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Texas activist frustrates election officials with lawsuit about threat to ballot secrecy

2024-08-02T09:55:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Laura Pressley claims to hold the key to what should be a closely guarded secret: how every voter in Williamson County, Texas, has voted.

Her story about how she got hold of this information goes something like this: She had gathered clues through scores of public-records requests she had made over the years to the Williamson County elections department, looking for a breakthrough in her quest to find flaws with the electronic voting machines that Texans use to cast their ballots.

One day, she fell to her knees, weeping, and asked God to reveal to her the vulnerabilities she was certain existed, she told attendees at an April social media event on ballot secrecy issues organized by the right-wing organization Cause of America, according to an audio recording reviewed by Votebeat. “I said, ‘Dear Lord, show me the pattern, because I know it’s here.’”

Around 20 minutes later, by her account, “the Lord showed me the pattern, and I found it. I was literally in shock — emotional shock — to actually have the knowledge of how every voter in Williamson County votes.”

State and county election officials are anxious to know whether, in fact, Pressley has figured out how everyone in the county, north of Austin, voted — and, more broadly, whether she has uncovered a major vulnerability that could threaten ballot secrecy for voters statewide.

But she’s refusing to share details with them. Instead, she’s suing the state, and proposing a purported solution involving ballot numbering that election technology experts and election administrators say would return Texas to an obsolete system that further undermines ballot secrecy.

Protecting ballot secrecy has become a more urgent concern after Texas made it easier in recent years for the public to access vast collections of election records and datasets in the name of transparency. Votebeat and the Texas Tribune have reported that the wider availability of the data and records has made it possible, in limited instances, to determine the ballot choices of individual voters and violate their fundamental right to a secret ballot.

In response, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office in June told local election officials to redact enough information from public records to make such connections impossible.

The question now is whether Pressley has found a separate vulnerability, or is engaged in a similar cross-referencing of public information, as election experts suspect is more likely. Either way, election officials must find a way to understand what she’s doing well enough to protect the secret ballot.

Pressley, who is intimately familiar with election procedures, has said in court filings she wants to reveal how her method works only to a federal judge, preferably in the courtroom, though she said she would also be willing to share it — if required to — with a single lawyer for the state Attorney General’s Office. In court filings, she said she wants to exclude state and county election officials from seeing it “so that no more harm is done.” Her method relies on public records, she said in the filings, and if she explains it publicly, anyone could use it.

Amid the push for greater transparency, some election administration experts say, voters need to understand that there are some elements of the process, especially related to security, that election officials simply cannot disclose.

“In this moment where we’re pushing for so much transparency, this is a reminder that we have to sometimes take a step back and make sure that there aren’t unintended consequences in the transparency that we are creating,” said Tammy Patrick, CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials and a former Arizona election administrator. “Whether it’s ballot secrecy or a vulnerability of the system, that’s where I think election officials are still struggling to find that balance.”

Texas is among just a few states that still number ballots

Texas is one of a small number of states whose laws require numbering ballots at all, but the way counties handle the numbering can differ somewhat from the letter of the law — a difference that Pressley has seized on in her lawsuit.

Years ago, Pressley told listeners on the April meeting, “the Lord said, ‘focus on the ballot numbering.’” And for the better part of a decade, that’s what Pressley has done.

In her latest lawsuit, she’s accusing the state of undermining ballot secrecy and failing to comply with a state law dictating how numbers on the ballots should work.

She’s alleged the same thing in previous lawsuits, and those never got a hearing. But in the latest case, Pressley is specifically targeting the way some Texas ballots are printed out with a randomly generated number that’s used for auditing purposes and to prevent double voting. She asserts that her method of tying voters to their ballot choices is connected to that randomly generated number.

In a phone call, Pressley declined to answer specific questions, citing the litigation, but referred Votebeat to her court filings and her lawyers. In an email, lawyer Frank Dobrovolny, who represents the plaintiffs, asserted that election officials bypassed and violated election laws and as a result, “the ballot secrecy of over 60,000 in-person voters in Williamson County has been breached,” prompting the lawsuit asking the court to intervene.

In court filings, Pressley refers to her method as an “algorithmic pattern,” and alleges that a failure by state and local election officials to comply with a ballot-numbering law has allowed her to match over 60,000 in-person voters to their ballots across multiple Williamson County elections, including those of local elected officials.

She said in court filings that a computer science expert, Walter Daugherity, verified her work. Daugherity, a senior lecturer emeritus in computer science at Texas A&M University, was an expert witness for the lawsuit filed by former Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Trial and appellate courts in Arizona have dismissed Lake’s claims of election malfeasance.

Election officials deny violating election laws.

Experts question Pressley’s ballot-numbering solution

The solution Pressley calls for in her lawsuit is a strict interpretation of a 19th-century Texas law requiring sequential numbering of ballots. She is asking the court to make counties use preprinted, sequentially numbered ballots, starting with 1.

Such a method would require additional time and resources from county election officials to redact those numbers if requested by the public for inspection. It’s also more expensive for taxpayers, since that type of preprinted ballot stock cannot be reused in future elections.

Experts have repeatedly said sequential numbering this way could make it easier to breach ballot secrecy, not harder. It’s reasonable to assume that any numbering of ballots raises the risk of them being tied later to a specific voter. That’s why many states don’t require, or even allow, ballots to be numbered.

Texas stands out as one of a few states that have continued doing so, based on a law passed in the 1800s that was meant to prevent double voting. Others include North Carolina, which numbers its early-voting, absentee and provisional ballots, and Michigan, which prints the ballot number on a detachable stub.

Experts say advances in election technology and best practices for security, auditing, and ballot secrecy have led most states to move away from the practice. Most states have more modern chain-of-custody requirements for post-election reconciliation, said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official and an expert on election audits. “You don’t have to have those numbers on the ballot to do that level of ballot accounting,” she said.

The Texas law says ballots should be sequentially numbered, starting with 1, and distributed to polling places in batches so that “a specific range can be linked to a specific polling place.” They’re supposed to be “distributed to voters non-sequentially in order to preserve ballot secrecy,” the law says.

But counties’ voting systems and practices differ, and the type of voting equipment they use also affects how they comply with this particular law. For example, some counties purchase blank ballot paper that voters themselves insert into a touch-screen voting machine, known as a ballot marking device, at the polling place. Once the voter finalizes their candidate selections, the device prints the voter’s ballot and adds a randomized number to preserve ballot secrecy. In other counties, including Williamson County, a randomized serial number is printed on the ballot paper before the voter makes their candidate choices.

Laura Pressley (right) speaks during a Williamson County Commissioners Court meeting in Georgetown, Texas, on Aug. 15, 2023.

The Texas Secretary of State’s Office and the Texas attorney general have both issued guidance saying that randomized numbering complies with the law. But Pressley doesn’t agree, and has repeatedly argued that the practice is illegal and less protective of voters.

In June, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office released an advisory that prohibits counties from using electronic poll books — the equipment used to check in voters at polling sites — to generate and print numbers on ballot paper. That stems from concern that such numbers, which link the ballots to the device used to check in the voter, could later be cross-referenced with other information to pierce ballot secrecy. As a result, some counties will have to buy new ballot stock with preprinted sequential numbers, starting with 1, that will have to be redacted when they’re opened up for public inspection. Citing the ongoing litigation, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment.

With her lawsuit, Pressley is now also claiming state and local officials who have allowed the use of randomized numbers generated by the electronic voting systems and printed on paper ballot stock have caused the “direct breach of voter ballot secrecy.”

She’s so sure of that, she said in court documents, that during the May 2024 local election in Williamson County, Pressley spoiled her own ballot. She said that after seeing that her blank ballot had a “computerized unique identifier,” she decided against casting it “because my right to freely cast a secret ballot has been repeatedly violated for many elections and now in this one,” she said in the court filings, adding: “This was a very grievous decision which caused severe emotional stress.”

How Laura Pressley became a force in Texas elections

Pressley, 62, has a doctorate in physical chemistry, but is best known across the state for her activism on elections.

For years, she has gone to great lengths in counties across the state to obtain access to records and a close-up view of election procedures. And her crusade to influence how elections in Texas are conducted, especially when it comes to ballot numbering, has made her a well-known figure among state and local election officials.

A petite woman with blond hair, Pressley has testified in front of Texas lawmakers that she believes election administrators are committing “criminal acts,” based on her own interpretation of election law. Her comments have been influential with some GOP state lawmakers — including Sens. Bob Hall and Bryan Hughes and Rep. Valoree Swanson — in discussions about new legislation.

During the social media meeting in April, she said her involvement in elections began in 2010, soon after she became an empty nester. “I said, ‘Lord, give me something hard.’ And basically, he put it on my heart,” Pressley recalled.

She ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Austin City Council in 2014 and lost more bids for local office after that. She alleges that there are issues with how at least some of those elections were run, though most of her challenges have not changed the results.

Pressley’s résumé describes her as an elections and poll-watching expert. She has trained hundreds of people across the state, creating a network of allies and supporters. Some of those allies, including the other plaintiffs in the case, have filed election-related records requests on her behalf. Many of her supporters now advocate on elections in their counties, including Tarrant and Hood counties in North Texas and Gillespie in the Hill Country.

Candidates and poll watchers have access to certain parts of elections that other people don’t. Candidates can request recounts, as Pressley has, and have long been entitled to copies of voted ballots and other records that, before Texas changed the law last year, weren’t publicly available until nearly two years after the election.

Poll watchers, especially following the passage of Senate Bill 1 in 2021, have extensive access to every part of the election process, from the time the polls open to the counting of the final ballot.

During a constitutional amendment election in 2023, Pressley, serving as a poll watcher, stood side by side with election workers inside the ballot tabulation room. In a state-mandated video livestream, Pressley was visible for hours, talking to election workers, pointing at the computer screens, and taking notes.

Laura Pressley (left) observes and takes notes as a poll watcher inside the Williamson County elections department's central counting station as election workers count votes for the November 2023 constitutional amendment election.

In some cases, candidates for local offices have selected Pressley as a poll watcher for their recounts. According to her résumé, she’s participated in at least 13 of those, including one she requested herself as a candidate. Earlier this year, she made attendees at one of her poll watching trainings in Tarrant County sign nondisclosure agreements.

She and election officials have had conflicts. Pressley and poll watchers she had trained in Gillespie County clashed with election officials during a recount of a city proposition in 2019. Last fall, Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell accused Pressley of causing a poll worker’s heart attack, though he later retracted the allegation after Pressley objected, characterizing it as defamatory. Through her lawyer, Pressley said she wasn’t responsible for the worker’s medical emergency, had actually been talking to someone else at the time of the incident, and helped make sure the worker received help. Pressley did not respond to a request for comment for this story on these instances.

Pressley is currently locked in a legal dispute with one client, David Puryear, a Republican who lost his 2022 bid for Hays County criminal district attorney. Puryear sued her last year, alleging Pressley refused to turn over notes submitted by his volunteer poll watchers. According to the lawsuit, Pressley argues the poll watcher notes belong to her because they are on her company’s “copyrighted” forms.

Puryear’s lawsuit also says that Pressley directed recount volunteers to disregard the rules set by Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra, who then threatened to kick them out. Pressley’s conduct “created great difficulties in dealing with county officials throughout the recount,” the lawsuit says.

In court filings responding to Puryear’s lawsuit, Pressley denies all allegations against her and says Puryear has “mischaracterized the facts.” She also says that she made it clear to Puryear that the poll watcher forms Pressley designed are her intellectual property, and releasing those to him was not part of their agreement.

A judge denied Puryear’s request to obtain the documents and ordered both parties to come to an “amicable solution,” according to Dobrovolny, who is representing Pressley and her consulting firm in the case. Dobrovolny told Votebeat in an email that a proposal to settle the dispute was sent to Puryear more than a year ago, but he has not received a response. Pressley and Puryear have yet to come to an agreement.

Some election officials say they’re not sure what Pressley’s intentions are. Jennifer Doinoff, the Hays County elections administrator and president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said Pressley asserts that she’s an elections expert but doesn’t try to collaborate with county election officials or the state officials in charge of interpreting and implementing election laws.

“If she wants to help elections, she needs to work within the system and not against it,” Doinoff said.

Public information about elections created new vulnerabilities

In addition to her efforts to observe elections as closely as possible, Pressley and her associates in various counties for years have flooded election departments with public information requests seeking election records and data. In Williamson County, where she lives, Pressley has obtained records from elections since at least 2019, public records obtained by Votebeat show. Her requests have yielded reports with very detailed data about when and where individual voters cast ballots.

“We didn’t know there were certain records that could make it easier to tie a ballot to a voter, but obviously now we know that there are, and yeah, all of that was being requested and released,” said former Williamson County election administrator Chris Davis, who is now the voter registration director in Travis County.

Under the guidance issued by state election officials last month, at least some of the information released to Pressley in the past would almost certainly now be redacted.

Twice before, Pressley has filed ballot-numbering related lawsuits against state election officials, but those cases went nowhere. The fate of her current one isn’t yet clear.

But her lawsuit got more attention after a right-wing news site published what it said was the ballot of a former Texas GOP chair cast in this year’s Republican primary, though apparently without knowledge of Pressley’s method. Having acknowledged real vulnerabilities in ballot secrecy, Texas officials say that they’re taking Pressley’s allegations seriously — but that she isn’t responding to their attempts to determine what she may have found.

“I have not seen this algorithm. Nobody has presented it to our office, so we don’t know what they’re talking about there,” Christina Adkins, the elections division director at the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said during an Elections Committee hearing in the Texas state House last month. State Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican, pressed Adkins on whether the office had tried every possible measure to obtain it.

“Our attorneys are trying to get us access to that so we can, we can review it, because, sir, if this algorithm does what it purports to do, what these individuals say that it does … we actually have authority when it comes to certification of any e-poll books. We could do something to address that,” Adkins said.

Pressley and her fellow plaintiffs — residents of Williamson and Llano counties, whose officials are also named in the suit — “are deliberately obstructing the SOS Defendants from determining whether their allegations regarding an ‘algorithm’” have any merit by refusing to provide such information,” the Texas Secretary of State’s Office said in a July legal filing responding to Pressley’s lawsuit.

How Pressley’s claims are affecting some Texas counties

In her lawsuit, Pressley alleges that her method is enabled by the electronic pollbooks used in conjunction with equipment from a state-certified election machine vendor, Election Systems & Software. In her lawsuit, Pressley says she believes it’s possible to also match a voter to their ballot with the other state-certified vendor, Hart Intercivic.

Katina Granger, an ES&S spokesperson, told Votebeat that when the state certified its machines, officials did not raise any concerns about ballot secrecy.

Both companies said their ballot-numbering methods — which mainly differ in terms of how and when their systems number ballots — are secure, and cannot be used to link a voter to their ballot.

Election officials familiar with the system say the number, by itself, can’t link the voter to the ballot. “There isn’t one single file or report that anyone can obtain that shows you the name of the voter and their selections. It’s multiple pieces of information put together and in limited circumstances,” said Davis, the former Williamson County elections administrator.

Last month’s advisory from the Texas Secretary of State’s Office ordering election officials to make changes applies only to an ES&S system — specifically, the one used in Williamson County. Now, counties that use ES&S voting systems — at least half the counties in the state, including Collin and Travis — must overhaul their procedures and buy preprinted and prenumbered ballot stock.

Election officials in those counties told Votebeat they are still figuring out the costs associated with the changes. Bruce Sherbet, the Collin County elections administrator said he estimates the preprinted ballot stock will cost about $160,000 for each general election. More training will be required, since poll workers will need to shuffle the ballots before handing them to voters, as required by law. “The additional handling of ballots could slow down the check-in process for voters, but we won’t know until we implement it,” Sherbet said.

Sherbet and other election officials are not sure how long the new rules on how to number their ballots will remain. Sherbet expects to hear more at a statewide training hosted by the Secretary of State’s Office later this summer.

It’s a lot of effort to comply with a requirement that most states have determined they don’t need, said Patrick. Arizona, for example, does not number its ballots.

That’s because “policies, practices, and protocols are in place to ensure that you don’t have to have something that jeopardizes voter privacy,” she said.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Correction: An earlier version of a story incorrectly reported Laura Pressley’s age. She’s 62.

Fixing Texas’ ballot secrecy problems won’t be easy, experts say

2024-06-26T15:59:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

When Pam Anderson was a county elections clerk in Colorado about a decade ago, she worried about whether the state’s increasingly transparent election process had made it possible to link a ballot to the voter who cast it.

As a test, she asked her staff in Jefferson County to see whether they could find a ballot that she had cast in a previous election.

It took them less than 20 minutes.

“It was a big revelatory moment to know this could be possible,” said Anderson, now an election administration expert and consultant.

Since then, Colorado has taken steps to protect a voter’s right to a secret ballot: Election officials there remove the voting method and polling location from public reports detailing voter participation. The state has invested in training election officials to redact information from the records it releases publicly, and purchased technology to help make those redactions more efficiently, Anderson said.

Such measures could help point the way forward for Texas, where recent laws enacted in the name of increasing election transparency have made it possible — in limited instances — to use public records and data to determine how individual voters voted.

The vulnerabilities came into public view last month, after a right-wing news site published what it said was the ballot a former Texas GOP chair cast in this year’s Republican primary. Votebeat and The Texas Tribune were able to verify that the private choices some voters make in the voting booth could be identified using public, legally available records.

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson and her staff were aware of the risk that voters’ choices could be exposed to public discovery, and election administrators across the state had been warning about it.

But it wasn’t until after the Votebeat and Texas Tribune report that Nelson’s office and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued emergency guidance to election officials, instructing them to stop releasing information that can help expose how people voted.

This week, Nelson’s office quietly issued an additional directive that will require even more redactions and aim to limit opportunities for members of the public to cross-reference records and pinpoint a particular voter’s ballot.

The guidance from Nelson and Paxton adds to the burdens on local election officials to figure out what information they have to redact in a given case to prevent records from being used to link individual voters with a specific ballot or ballot image.

Limiting threats to ballot secrecy is a complex task

Other states have already contended with the tension between ballot secrecy and transparency. Striking the right balance between those two goals, experts say, is neither quick nor easy.

To fully protect all voters’ private choices, Texas will need to provide additional support and resources to local election administrators whose voting systems, equipment, and recordkeeping procedures vary by county, experts said.

Anderson, who was the Republican nominee for Colorado secretary of state in 2022, said election officials will need time to work through the problem, taking into account all the specifics that apply — everything from the types of voting systems used in the state and the turnout in individual elections to the types of documents election officials must release.

Some local election officials said the state’s initial guidance to redact was too broad. Redacting “is not an easy fix and it can’t be a cookie-cutter thing for everyone,” said Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County elections administrator.

During a House Elections Committee hearing earlier this month, Christina Adkins, head of the elections division in the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, acknowledged during questioning that county clerks and election officials performing redactions would still have access to records that could tie a voter to their ballot.

“That’s why I think that this is a short-term solution, and why there needs to be some bigger discussions about how to prevent this issue from occurring on the front end of the election,” Adkins said.

The latest guidance from Nelson’s office, obtained by Votebeat earlier this week, will require more redactions. It prohibits counties from using electronic poll books — the equipment used to check in voters at polling sites — to generate and print numbers on ballot paper. That stems from concern that such numbers, which link the ballots to the device used to check in the voter, could later be cross-referenced with other information to pierce ballot secrecy.

This directive will force multiple counties including Dallas, Travis, and Williamson to quickly change their procedures and revamp their worker training in a presidential election year. Some counties will also have to order new paper ballot stock in order to comply, an unexpected expense. That new ballot stock will be sequentially numbered, and those numbers will then have to be redacted in order to avoid creating yet another ballot secrecy risk.

How some states balance transparency and privacy

The U.S. adopted the secret ballot in the late 19th century in an attempt to address issues of vote-buying and voter intimidation For decades, election officials across the country have striven to find the best ways to protect voters’ ballot secrecy.

Following the passage of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, election technology evolved, chain-of-custody procedures improved, more jurisdictions switched to using paper ballots, and election records became much more detailed. These are the changes that prompted Anderson’s request to her staff more than a decade ago.

In areas with very small voter precincts and low turnout, the risk of identifying how someone voted also increased. And the way in which election-related data is disclosed can add to the risk.

In Colorado, an effort to allow 16-year-olds to vote in school district elections four years ago failed over ballot privacy questions. The issue was that only a small number of teens in each precinct would have obtained the specific ballot style for school district elections, making it easier to tie such voters to individual ballots.

In Texas, when someone voted and by what means are considered public information. Each county reports what kind of ballot — in-person, mail, provisional, overseas — a voter cast and whether they voted early or on election day. Many other types of information are also available through open-records requests, or published online, including data from electronic poll books used at individual voting precincts; “cast vote records,” the electronic representation of how voters voted; and ballot images, which are copies of actual ballots as marked by voters.

The push to make more records public grew in Texas after the 2020 presidential election as conspiracy theories about the outcome took hold in the state.

In contrast, other states have sought to limit the availability of election information to help safeguard ballot secrecy.

Colorado no longer publicly reports election participation by vote method or by location, in part because so few people vote in person there. In addition, the election officials in the state combine and shuffle small batches of ballots to protect anonymity, a technique often used with military and overseas voters.

North Carolina in 2002 banned the public release of cast vote records and voted ballots. This year, a May primary had such low turnout that the State Board of Elections also removed precinct-level results from its website “so that people couldn’t use that and our voter history data to see how individuals voted,” said Patrick Gannon, the public information director for the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

With some election data, North Carolina officials are permitted to insert “statistical noise” in certain areas before publishing results, Gannon said. For instance, if all voters in a particular North Carolina precinct voted for the same candidate, the state would add a small, random number of votes to the other candidates in the published vote totals for that precinct — but not in the official, certified results.

That way, “no one could use our precinct data and voter history data to determine how any individual voted,” Gannon said.

The U.S. Census Bureau uses a similar method in its data to protect privacy.

When elections officials employ this tactic, vote counts in specific precincts will differ slightly from those in the final results, which some experts have said could be misleading.

But “if state officials did not add statistical noise to the precinct sorted data, any person could use that dataset, combined with our voter history dataset, to determine how certain people voted in certain situations,” Gannon said, underscoring that the practice does not alter the official results. “We only insert statistical noise where absolutely necessary.”

Research looks into sources of potential breaches

Experts say election officials seeking to protect ballot secrecy should first understand how exactly a voters’ ballot could be exposed, so they can decide what information really needs to be withheld.

“A lot of the times when we talk about the secret ballot, we don’t really specify how the secret ballot could be violated,” said Michael Morse, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania whose research focuses on voter registration and election administration.

The key is understanding the mechanism that threatens the secret ballot so that the fix is properly tailored to the threat, he said.

Morse’s most recent research, with political science professors Jeff Lewis at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Shiro Kuriwaki of Yale University, examines the extent to which releasing certain election records — such as cast vote records — can identify voters and their ballot choices.

They found that for 99.8% of Maricopa County voters in Arizona’s 2020 general election, the release of ballot records did not lead to the revelation of any vote choice. Morse and his colleagues showed that a vote would be revealed there only if all voters in a “reporting group” — for example, a single precinct, or those who voted by a certain method within a precinct — are unanimous in their choice of a particular candidate.

Florida tries to limit this risk by aggregating results in some cases. Election officials there typically report election results by precinct and vote method. But if there are fewer than 10 voters who cast ballots in a particular precinct using a particular method, then by law, election officials report only the aggregated precinct-wide results.

This type of aggregation rule doesn’t work perfectly, Morse and his colleagues explained.

“It suppresses some results that would not lead to vote revelation, but might not suppress a few that could,” he said

Morse and his colleagues point to longer-term measures, such as redistricting, as potentially more effective solutions.

“Lining up the district lines for multiple offices to avoid split precincts would increase the number of voters per precinct and thus reduce the extent of revelation,” he said.

Texas election officials have proposed a similar long-term solution that would require the Texas Legislature to increase the minimum number of registered voters allowed in voting precincts. Currently, county election precincts must have at least 100, but not more than 5,000 voters. However, in some large counties, a precinct can have as few as 50 voters.

The Texas Legislature will resume in January.

Local election officials take on a new burden

By law, Texas election officials are already required to redact identifiable information in election records such as Social Security numbers, state-issued identification numbers, and phone numbers. But the recent guidance from the Texas Secretary of State’s office said they’re obligated to do more, if necessary, to protect voter privacy, though they might need to seek guidance from the state attorney general to know whether they’re doing too much.

That means an added burden on local election officials.

“It’s time consuming, and it requires additional effort on the part of the election administrator, who is working on behalf of the voter to help maintain their privacy and anonymity,” said Tammy Patrick, CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.

Hancock, the election administrator in Brazos County, home to College Station and Texas A&M University, said lawmakers should consider the time and resources that redactions have required in recent years. Hancock’s office is one of many election departments across the state that have been flooded with public information requests seeking granular election data. And although her office gets help from the county’s public records department, most of the state’s smaller counties do not have that support — or funding for software to help with redactions.

“A department with only two people on staff would have to handle that themselves. They’d also be under a time crunch to respond, and they’d also be in the middle of running an election,” Hancock said. “So you would either have to hire somebody to come in and redact that stuff, or they would have to take the other person to stop their duties to redact.”

The concern is not only about time, workers, or resources, she said, but also about figuring out exactly what to redact.

“You never know what information people are going to use to connect the dots,” she said. “What’s to stop one person from requesting one thing, another person requesting another thing, another person requesting another thing, and then they all work together to connect those dots?”

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Natalia is based in Corpus Christi. Contact her at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Voter advocacy groups ask DOJ to step in after Texas allowed some voters’ ballots to be identified

2024-06-13T20:39:13+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

A coalition of watchdog and voter advocacy groups asked the U.S. Department of Justice on Thursday to use “all available legal authorities” to protect the secrecy of ballots after Votebeat and The Texas Tribune confirmed that the private choices some voters make in the voting booth can in some instances be identified using public, legally available records.

The two news organizations reported on the limited ability to identify how some people vote after an independent news site published what it said was the image of the ballot a former state GOP chair cast in the March 5 Republican primary.

The League of Women Voters of Texas, American Oversight, the Campaign Legal Center, and

Southern Coalition for Social Justice cited the investigation by Votebeat and The Tribune that replicated a series of steps that could identify a specific person’s ballot choices using public records. The outlets did not detail the precise information or process needed to do so.

The advocacy groups said the ability to identify how people vote could lead to voter intimidation.

“Texans should not have to fear that their right to a secret ballot can be compromised, nor should they have to fear any other adverse consequences flowing from the compromise of that right—such as exposure of the ballot being wielded to threaten or intimidate them and their loved ones,” the groups wrote in the letter, addressed to Tamar Hagler, the chief of the voting section of the the Justice Department’s civil rights division.

The groups’ request to the Justice Department comes a week after the Texas Secretary of State’s Office issued emergency guidance to local election officials, telling them, among other things, to “redact any information on the precinct election records or on the ballot image that identifies the location at which a voter voted.”

Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s office had been aware that publicly available information could be used to link a particular ballot to the voter who cast it, but didn’t issue the guidance on how to protect ballot privacy until after the two outlets reported on the situation.

Texas lawmakers and county election officials have made election records easier to access in recent years, citing the need for election transparency as conspiracy theories about the outcome of the November 2020 election took hold in the state.

During the 2023 Texas legislative session, lawmakers responding to pressure from conservatives seeking more access to election records overwhelmingly passed House Bill 5180, allowing public access to records such as ballot images and cast vote records — electronic representations of how voters voted — just 61 days after election day.

When publishing what it said was former Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi’s ballot, the independent news site didn’t fully explain how it linked the ballot image to him. Rinaldi has neither confirmed nor denied that it was his ballot.

“This was always a possibility that we were concerned about. And of course, as your reporting has shown, it’s a reality in certain jurisdictions under certain circumstances,” Elisabeth MacNamara, vice president of advocacy for the League of Women Voters of Texas, told Votebeat. “The mere fact that someone could, in the right set of circumstances, connect all of the dots because these voted ballots are available and know how their neighbors are voting is intimidating and we’re concerned that it’s going to discourage people from voting in this state where turnout is already pretty low.”

During a Texas House Elections Committee hearing Wednesday, state representatives discussed potential legislation that could help prevent a voter’s ballot choices from becoming public. Such changes could include aggregating information from smaller precincts into larger ones and expanding the number of voters in precincts, steps that could make it more difficult to link a ballot to a voter.

Currently, county election precincts must have at least 100 voters but not more than 5,000. However, in some large counties, a precinct can have as few as 50 voters.

Christina Adkins, the elections division director for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, told lawmakers she and her staff are looking at best practices from other states to protect a voter’s right to a secret ballot. The office did not immediately respond to questions about which state it is looking to for guidence. Both South Carolina and North Carolina have taken steps to protect ballot secrecy by restricting which election records are released and by aggregating results from smaller precincts into larger ones when necessary.

Lawmakers on Wednesday discussed additional possible legislation that would further prevent the misuse of publicly available election records by exposing how people voted. Currently under state and federal law, anyone who publicizes a voter’s ballot information could face legal action if the release of information is tied to voter intimidation, bribery, or coercion.

On the same day Adkins issued guidance to local election officials last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a legal opinion that said the disclosure of election records must be done in a way that preserves ballot privacy.

In their letter to the U.S. Department of Justice, the groups criticized Paxton’s guidance and noted that it was a 2022 opinion from his office that “produced this issue” and that the office “takes no responsibility for creating an environment of fear in Texas elections.”

“Simply put, the recent legal opinion is too little, too late,” the letter said.

Voted ballots, by law, had to be kept secure and were not available to the public for 22 months after an election. But in August 2022, Paxton released a non-binding legal opinion advising county officials to release voted ballots as soon as they are counted, while redacting any information that could identify the voter. After at least three counties challenged Paxton’s advice in court, the Texas Legislature rewrote the law to align with Paxton’s advice to more quickly release voted ballots.

The groups in their letter raised concerns about whether the state law conflicts with federal law requiring that every voted ballot in a federal election “be retained and preserved for 22 months” following such an election in their original format.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org

Texas tells local election officials to withhold information that could undermine ballot secrecy

2024-06-06T18:54:55+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

Texas’ top election official Thursday issued emergency guidance to counties aimed at protecting ballot privacy, after Votebeat and The Texas Tribune confirmed that the private choices some voters make can later be identified using public, legally available records.

“It is imperative that we make every effort possible to provide protections to voters while balancing the public’s interest in transparent elections,” Christina Adkins, the election division director for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office, wrote in the memo to county election officials.

Separately, state Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday released a legal opinion stressing that any disclosure of election records must be done in a way that preserves the privacy of a voter’s choices.

Both Paxton and Nelson emphasized that Texas voters have an overarching right to a secret ballot. It is “unacceptable for any voter to have their ballot choices publicized,” Nelson said in a statement.

In testimony to state lawmakers last week, Adkins confirmed reporting from Votebeat and the Tribune that found some voters could be tied to their ballots through a combination of publicly available information, which lawmakers and county officials have made easier to access in recent years in the name of election transparency.

She also acknowledged that election officials had been worried that the state’s push for more transparency around elections would compromise ballot secrecy.

The emergency guidance is an attempt to close off the public’s ability to link some voters with their ballot choices. Last month, an independent news site published what it said was the ballot of former Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi, cast in the March 5 GOP primary. The site didn’t fully explain how it linked the ballot image to Rinaldi, who has neither confirmed nor denied that it was his ballot.

Votebeat and the Tribune were able to verify and replicate a series of steps to identify a specific person’s ballot choices using public records. But to protect the secrecy of the ballot, the two news outlets are not detailing the precise information needed or the process used to match ballot images with individual voters.

Lawmakers made election records more accessible

Soon after the November 2020 election, as former President Donald Trump and his allies promoted baseless theories that his reelection loss was caused by voting fraud, the number of election-related public record requests increased.

Many of them came from people asking to inspect original voted ballots, ballot images, and “cast vote records,” the electronic records of a voter’s choices.

That created a way for people to use public records to match different pieces of information about where, when, and how voters cast ballots. In some circumstances, the combination of data points was enough to link a voter to their ballot.

In her guidance to county officials Thursday, Adkins said the steps necessary to protect a voter’s identity could vary, depending on the type of election, the turnout, and details of the request, because a voter’s identity can be deduced using a combination of data points through a process of elimination.

When posting records voluntarily to the county website to make them publicly available, election officials should “redact any information on the precinct election records or on the ballot image that identifies the location at which a voter voted” before posting, Adkins wrote.

When responding to a specific request to release election records, Adkins wrote, county officials will have to weigh the specific facts of the situation. The information election officials were told they should consider withholding includes where voters cast ballots, the dates early voting ballots are received, and some pre-printed ballot numbers.

County officials would have to ask the requester to agree to the redactions, or seek an open records ruling from the state attorney general authorizing them in those specific circumstances, Adkins said.

The president of the state’s association of election administrators told Votebeat that the guidance formalizes short-term solutions election officials had previously discussed with the Secretary of State’s Office, but that lawmakers still should take additional steps.

“I definitely think that the Legislature will need to look at this and try to make more long-term changes to the law for ballot secrecy,” said Jennifer Doinoff, the Hays County elections administrator and association president.

Changes the Legislature could make to further protect ballot secrecy include aggregating information from smaller precincts into larger ones and expanding the number of voters in precincts, which could make it more difficult to link a ballot to a voter. Currently, county election precincts must have at least 100 but not more than 5,000 voters. However, in some large counties, a precinct can have as few as 50 voters.

Paxton intervenes in Tarrant County records request

The legal opinion Paxton released on Thursday is in response to a public records request submitted to the Tarrant County elections department seeking registered voters’ history over a 12-year period, including the voter’s ID, voter name, primary address and the precinct number or polling place where they voted.

The county attorney’s office sought an opinion from Paxton on whether such information was exempted from disclosure because it contains information that could threaten a voter’s ballot secrecy.

After review, Paxton’s office determined that “election records custodians must redact such personally identifiable information to protect the constitutional right to a secret ballot in Texas.”

“Now that we’ve seen how some of the public information is being utilized out there, we have to take extra steps to ensure that ballot secrecy remains,” Doinoff said, adding that the guidance from state officials now affirms that “we have the right to redact information that’s going to allow somebody to see how somebody has voted.”

Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

How Texas’ push for election transparency undermines the secret ballot

2024-05-29T09:50:00+00:00

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Texas’ free newsletter here.

This story was reported in partnership with The Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.

Texas’ efforts to make elections more transparent allows the public — in limited instances — to pierce the anonymity of the ballot and find out how people voted, undermining the secrecy essential to free elections.

The choices voters make in the private voting booth can later be identified in some cases using public, legally available records, a review by Votebeat and The Texas Tribune found.

Since 2020, requests for such records have skyrocketed, fueled by unsubstantiated concerns about widespread voter fraud, and Texas lawmakers have supported changes to make election records easier to access soon after elections.

County elections administrators, trying to fulfill activists’ demands for transparency, have also made information public that can make it easier to determine how specific people voted.

An effort to link a voter to specific ballot choices is more likely to succeed in circumstances involving less populous counties, small precincts, and low-turnout elections.

“What bothers me is that people cannot vote in secret in the United States,” said Williamson County District Attorney Shawn Dick about the potential lapses in ballot secrecy. “If people’s ballots don’t remain anonymous, that’s a huge affront to our system of government and our system of elections.”

Several election officials said there have been concerns and ongoing discussions about the possibility of people exploiting public records and data to detect or narrow down how individuals voted, particularly in smaller counties.

Top Texas election official acknowledges concerns about threats to ballot secrecy

And the Texas Secretary of State’s office has been aware that publicly available information could be used to link a particular ballot to the voter who cast it, according to sources who spoke to Votebeat and the Tribune on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the issue. Nonetheless, state lawmakers have spent the last several years making it easier to mine voter and ballot data.

Election administration experts and voter advocates say Texas lawmakers need to find a better balance between transparency and voters’ ballot privacy — and clarify the roles county elections administrators and the Secretary of State’s office play in getting there.

“If we don’t share this information, we’re not able to determine whether or not the ballot is secure,” said Bob Stein, a political science professor at Rice University and an election administration expert. “On the other hand, if people think that these are things that shouldn’t be shared, then their confidence goes down.”

Earlier this month, the independent news site Current Revolt published what it said was the image of the ballot that former Republican Party of Texas Chair Matt Rinaldi cast in the March 5 GOP primary, provided by a source it did not name.

The site did not explain in detail how its source was able to find the ballot and connect it to Rinaldi.

State and county elections offices maintain an array of election records that are available via open records requests and even published online in some instances. That includes which candidates won individual precincts, where and by which method people voted, the original ballots they cast, and electronic images of those ballots. To be clear, voted ballots do not contain a voter’s name or identifying information such as identification numbers or Social Security numbers. Many kinds of identifying information must also be redacted from other election records before they are released.

But in certain circumstances, finding someone’s ballot is possible by identifying and cross-referencing a series of variables that are public.

There was no personally identifying information printed on the ballot Current Revolt claimed was Rinaldi’s, so it’s impossible to say with 100% certainty that it was his. Rinaldi has neither confirmed nor denied that it was his ballot.

Rinaldi did not respond to requests for comment from Votebeat and the Tribune. The Republican Party of Texas referred Votebeat and the Tribune to a statement it released on social media saying that the party’s legal counsel advised Rinaldi not to comment and that it was “investigating potential civil and criminal acts including defamation” against Current Revolt.

The state’s chief elections officer is Secretary of State Jane Nelson, who is appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. Her agency declined to comment on whether officials there knew about the vulnerability in ballot secrecy. In a public statement last week, Nelson’s office said county elections administrators need to balance ballot secrecy with election transparency — but the statement provided them no guidance on how to do that.

On Tuesday, after Votebeat and the Tribune told her office about vulnerabilities with ballot secrecy, Nelson said in an emailed statement that she was advising county elections administrators that “they have a duty to redact personally identifiable information” but did not detail what that includes or what information may be redacted.

“No one should have their ballot privacy compromised,” Nelson said.

Texas election records are an open book

Texas stands out among other states for its expansive approach to making election records public, an effort to provide transparency in a state where unsupported theories about election fraud are widespread.

The public can obtain data from electronic poll books used at individual voting precincts, showing which voters have cast ballots and detailing exactly when they did so; “cast vote records,” the electronic representation of how voters voted; and ballot images, which are copies of actual ballots as marked by voters.

By law, counties are supposed to redact identifiable information such as Social Security numbers, state identification numbers, birthdates, or phone numbers. In the case of ballots, they are also supposed to react names.

The push for increased transparency gained momentum after the 2020 presidential election when former President Donald Trump launched a campaign, bolstered by two fellow Republicans, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, to convince voters the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Conservative activists searching for proof of voter fraud routinely began requesting original voted ballots and cast-vote records in almost every Texas county.

At the time, voted ballots, by law, had to be kept secure and were not available for 22 months after an election. But in August 2022, Paxton — who had tried unsuccessfully to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in four battleground states outside his jurisdiction — released a non-binding legal opinion advising county officials to release voted ballots as soon as they are counted, while redacting any information that could identify the voter.

After at least three counties challenged Paxton’s advice in court, the Texas Legislature rewrote the law.

During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers overwhelmingly passed House Bill 5180, allowing public access to ballot images, cast-vote records, and the original voted ballot just 61 days after election day.

“This is about giving our citizens confidence in their elections while protecting our election administrators,” the bill’s author, state Rep. Terry M. Wilson, R-Marble Falls, said during a committee hearing on the legislation in April 2023.

Supporters argued this bill was necessary for third-party groups to conduct audits of elections in a timely manner.

Christina Adkins, then acting director of the Secretary of State’s elections division, told lawmakers during the hearing that the bill provided much needed clarity for the state agency.

But opponents of the legislation noted that election departments in Texas and across the country had seen an increase since the 2020 presidential election in records requests seeking more technical information about an election.

Stephanie Swanson, the issue chair of voting rights for the League of Women Voters of Texas, warned that the legislation would result in an even greater flood of public records requests, which could be used as a means of voter intimidation.

“If election records are no longer under the control of election officials, this can lead to a significant risk of the records being lost, stolen, altered, compromised, or destroyed,” Swanson said.

Election administrators look to the Legislature for help

One potential solution pits the state against the counties in terms of where the responsibility lies to fix the problem.

On Friday, the Texas Association of Election Administrators as well as county and district clerks sent a letter to the Texas Senate State Affairs Committee, which deals with voting issues, suggesting that there could be changes to what’s considered “identifiable” information.

“County election officials are working with the Secretary of State’s office to improve the redaction of information that can be used to identify a voter and his/her precinct,” the letter reads.

Dick, the Williamson County prosecutor, said his county is aware of possible ballot secrecy issues and said that the attorney general’s office is looking into the matter. A spokesperson for Paxton’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

A ballot Dick previously cast in a Texas election was apparently included as evidence in an unrelated lawsuit filed earlier this year, also accusing Texas of ballot security vulnerabilities.

That lawsuit alleges that Nelson and election officials from three Central Texas counties violated voters’ equal protection rights by allowing the public to track down a voter’s ballot through a unique identification number. The plaintiffs did not describe the method in the lawsuit and declined to share it with Votebeat and the Tribune. It could not be verified.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit, including Laura Pressley, have made similar allegations in past lawsuits that courts have dismissed. Since at least 2014, when she lost a race for the Austin City Council, Pressley has frequently sued counties, election administrators, and the Texas Secretary of State for not following the Texas Election Code as she interprets it. She rarely succeeds in court.

She and her allies have long pushed for the state to get rid of the popular countywide polling place program — used by more than 90 jurisdictions in the state. The Texas Senate State Affairs Committee is set to hear testimony on election issues, including the use of the program on Wednesday in Austin.

Pressley has also advocated for counties to stop using electronic voting equipment and has demanded the use of sequentially numbered, preprinted ballots, which experts say could further threaten ballot privacy.

If businesses or politicians are able to track down how individuals voted, Dick said, it would change the way those entities target voters for profit and campaign purposes — and could open the door to voter intimidation.

Dick said the issue needs to be resolved immediately but he doesn’t believe the answer is to shut down public access to ballot records and voting information.

Other states, too, have grappled with whether and when to make cast vote records and ballot images public.

In South Carolina, a judge earlier this month shot down a group’s request to examine voters’ cast vote records from the 2020 presidential election. The judge determined that if the documents become public under the Freedom of Information Act, it would violate voters’ right to a secret ballot in the state.

In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections recently removed the precinct-level details of election results for each county from its website. The state argued that because of the particularly low turnout in the state’s recent primary, it could be too easy to determine how some people voted.

In Texas, some county elections administrators say the Legislature needs to craft a law that settles what information must be made public so elections administration is transparent — as well as what can be withheld, so ballot secrecy is protected. Without that, they say, vulnerabilities will persist.

In addition, there are other steps lawmakers could take that would make it harder to breach voters’ privacy, said Jennifer Doinoff, Hays County elections administrator and the president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators.

For example, she said, they could change the law to raise the minimum number of voters allowed in a precinct, which would make it more difficult to link a ballot to a specific voter. Lawmakers could also rethink how to release information about voters in small precincts, or not release specific polling location records, she said.

As things stand now, Doinoff said, “It’s going to be a lot of attorney general opinions, and it’s going to be a lot of working with the state legislators to figure out what is releasable and what’s not.”

Data journalist Thomas Wilburn contributed to this story.

Natalia Contreras covers election administration and voting access for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.

Karen Brooks Harper and William Melhado are reporters for The Texas Tribune. Contact Karen at kharper@texastribune.org and William at william.melhado@texastribune.org.