Tarrant County Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig said Tarrant County is the first in Texas to use this tool, allowing residents to sort out previous election results in a variety of ways.
Residents can filter by political race, such as president, or filter multiple races or get the ballot breakdown by precinct, according to the Aug. 9 presentation at a county warehouse in Fort Worth. Residents can view the cast vote record, which is used to tabulate results provided by the county during an election.
“We’ve built massive searchable archives of past election result history along with voting statistics and ballot measures, and contextual information that’s the lifeblood of any democracy,” Civera CEO Adam Friedman said. “You can verify that every ballot cast is accounted for, and every ballot cast adds up to the expected results.”
The background
During the 88th legislative session, House Bill 5180 was passed and went into effect Sept. 1, 2023, according to the Texas Secretary of State's website. The bill calls for the general custodian of records—Ludwig—to make available election records that are images of ballots or cast vote records for public inspection the 61st day after an election.
A byproduct of this move will be less time filling open record requests for data, Ludwig said. Now, citizens can find the information they want within minutes online.
“We had one large data file of images and another large data file of cast vote records, but they weren’t connected in any way,” Ludwig said. “There wasn’t a whole lot you could do with it except just have a very large data file and scroll through. We wanted to find a better way for the public to view this information and find things that were important to them, [and] let them be at home and verify with their own eyes.”
A closer look
Civera, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has worked with disseminating public voting records in 10 states, Friedman said. He added that Tarrant County is the first client in Texas but said his company has pending contracts with Denton County and Jim Wells County, near Corpus Christi.
Friedman said the voter information is kept private, and his company will not receive any identifying marks on the ballots given to them by the county. Ludwig said the county will maintain the hard copy of the ballots.
According to the presentation, the ballots are scanned and delivered to Civera through a file transfer protocol, or FTP site.
The only record for Tarrant County is the March 2024 presidential primary, Ludwig said. Future elections will be added to the ballot verifier, but Ludwig said any election before the March 2024 election will only be election numbers without viewable documents.
The initial contract to collect the March elections cost the county $50,000, and a second request for proposal will go to the Tarrant County commissioners soon for approval for the upcoming election, Ludwig said.
“This information is public information, but just how it was being released [in the past] was very, very hard to ingest and digest,” Ludwig said. “With Civera, you are able to pick and choose exactly what you want to see. We’re glad that we are able to do this. It’s great to be a leader in the state.”
What’s next
Friedman said the company's first client was in Ada County, Idaho. He said it took his company six days to turn around the public viewing portion of the results after getting the canvassed results.
He said Tarrant County is about four times that size, so the November election cycle could take a few weeks to get posted.
