S3E24: Using the Ballot Verifier to Battle Election Mistrust with Trent Tripple in Ada County, Idaho

High Turnout, Wide Margins Credits
Managing Editor: Rebecca Smith
Managing Producer: Aaron Hay
Associate Producer: Katie Quinn
Digital Producer: Mark Johnson

Transcription of the episode is as follows:

Trent Tripple: You know, not everyone’s in this system, right? In fact, the vast majority of people will never look at this. I would say 99% of the populace in Ada County will never click on the ballot verifier, but the fact that it exists, and everybody knows that it exists, is what has elevated the trust level.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Introduction]

Brianna Lennon: Welcome to another exciting episode of High Turnout Wide Margins. This is Brianna Lennon. I’m the County Clerk in Boone County, Missouri, and with me is my co-host –

Eric Fey: Eric Fey, Director of Elections in St Louis County, Missouri, and today, we’re really excited to have –

Trent Tripple: Trent Tripple, Ada County Clerk in Idaho.

Brianna Lennon: Our first question always – regardless of who we have on the show – we ask how they got their start in elections.

Trent Tripple: Boy, how I got my start in elections. I was a 20-year military veteran – Air Force fighter pilot – got out and brought my family back to Idaho, which is where I was born, and I felt like I was missing something in the private sector. And so, this opportunity came up to work in the clerk’s office, at the time, I was asked to be the Chief Deputy Clerk. Elections is part of what we do here in the office. It’s one of the many hats we wear. But it was super fascinating to me to be able to come in, and very rewarding to me – it filled a void that I was missing, once I got out of the military, to feel like I was giving back to the community. And so, that’s how I got started in it. I was in the private sector, making a lot of money, but was very unhappy, and said I needed to do something where I felt like I was giving back to my community, and this was the perfect opportunity to do that.

Brianna Lennon: Can you talk a little bit about Ada County and the structure that you have for elections and some of the demographics, population and things like that?

Trent Tripple: Yeah. So, we have seven large cities within Ada County. We make up about a third of the state population here in Idaho. We have Boise, which some people described as more of a “blue city,” maybe slightly middle of the road, left leaning, and then you have the rural parts of our county – Meridian, Star, Eagle, which are more conservative.

Over the pandemic, we grew about 30% in population – mostly from political refugees from West Coast cities who wanted to move someplace where there wasn’t as many restrictions, and so, we had a massive population boom. All of our farmland turned into suburbs and developments, and our cities grew like 200% in some of our cities. It was quite mind boggling, but it’s a kind of a metropolitan – slash – we’re at the foothills of the mountains. Recreation is a big thing for our county, getting to the mountains and the Sawtooths and stuff. We’re right next to that in Boise and Ada County, so that’s kind of our demographic – a lot of retirees that move from other states here to retire because the cost of living was so low at the time. Now, houses have quadrupled in price because they all moved here, but that’s kind of the demographic that we have.

Brianna Lennon: I’m wondering – so, I went out to Boise for an Election Center class, and a lot of the other clerks there were talking about the political refugees from California.

Laughter

I’m wondering, you know you were talking before about – aside from 2020 and the trust thing and things like that – has that had, do you think that the people that have come in have brought some of the distrust? Or do you think that it’s just kind of an artifact of it being everywhere?

Trent Tripple: It’s hard to group them all into one category. Generally speaking, the people that have moved here are ultra conservative from those other states. A lot of people think, “Oh, you know, there’s these, these liberal ideas that are being brought into the state from other places.” That’s not the case. It’s the folks that were really conservative in liberal places decided they wanted to move someplace that was more conservative, and, I’ll be honest, most of those people were a lot more conservative than the people that were living here in Idaho to begin with.

Idaho is a very libertarian – got a lot of libertarian streaks in it, you know? “I’ll do my thing, you do your thing, and you don’t bother me, and I don’t bother you” type of thing, but then there was a lot of activists that kind of moved in from out-of-state that wanted to really express themselves in a legislature here locally, as well as city councils and the county itself to move it farther to the right. So yeah, there was definitely that demographic feel when they moved in.

Eric Fey: So Trent, can you explain what impact the pretty rapid population increases had – in addition to the political makeup of these folks that you just explained – what impact did that have on the county clerk’s office?

Trent Tripple: We got a lot of pressure from folks in a couple of different camps.

One, they wanted to burn everything down, right? Because they didn’t trust anything. Others wanted us to be more vocal and out there in the community, to kind of shore up what we have been doing in Ada, which we were pretty proud of. You had an outside of ADA moving in versus locals kind of friction that bubbled up in a lot of the local party committees, the county parties both Democrat and Republican, and they were all turning to us for facts to kind of push back against some of the rhetoric that they saw at the national level with respects to how people voted, when they voted, you know, was it counted correctly, all those types of things.

Eric Fey: So, just a quick follow up. So, that was kind of the, maybe, the political ramification of the population increase – was there any need for increased manpower in your office, or more equipment, more materials, things like that, with the big population increase,

Trent Tripple: There was. We redistricted in 2020 and based off the census that came out, we went from 140 precincts to 197 precincts, and that came with a bill, right? We had to stand up 50 more precincts – both physical locations, as well as all the equipment that went with them. We had to look at, you know, did that hurt us scaling that? To how we managed our central count versus precinct count versus our managing of absentee ballots? Fortunately, at the time, there was a lot of grant money that was available, some of which was tainted in a political way, but we were able to use some of those funds to be able to plus up some of our processes. But, for sure, the growth has had an impact administratively and cost wise, as well for our county.

Eric Fey: So, let’s talk about that ballot verifier a little bit. I know that was the impetus for us to reach out to you here. Since 2020, you already mentioned it, that there’s been an increased focus on transparency and public engagement within the election administration. In a number of places across the country there now seems to be a movement toward displaying all the ballot images or at least making them a public record that people can obtain, and you have, I think you’re probably one of the first in the country to display all of the ballot images on your website. And so, you talk a little bit about what led you to that place, but can you expound on that a little bit and maybe talk in a little bit more detail – because most of the listeners are people like us that do this job – Talk a little bit about what it actually is and what it does?

Trent Tripple: Yeah. So, post-2020, you know, we’re getting inundated with public records requests like I’m sure everyone is for ballot images and cast vote records, which is how our precinct scanners and our central count scanners tabulate and calculate the what’s on the ballot, right? They capture that, right? And there was a big question: One was, I want to see the actual ballots, right? The paper ballots or images of them, but I also don’t trust that the machines are working properly, right? And we could bring in people, we could let them look at the machines, and I could, you know, if I had the authority at the time, open up the software and let them look at it and do all that stuff – that still wouldn’t change their minds, right?

And so, we were trying to brainstorm how we could get past that question and start talking about other things, and so, at the time, we were capturing images, but we weren’t posting them anywhere, right? And obviously, we were capturing cast vote records because that’s what we use in our tabulation system to produce the results, and I said, “Why can’t we put those two side by side and just post them online?” And, you know, 99% of the people I talked to said I was crazy.

One, technically, technology – didn’t think they’d allow that, right? Our HART InterCivic system, they kept telling us, you know, those things are, they’re anonymous, they purposely, you know, shift things around so you can’t, like, identify certain things. And I just said, “No, there’s got to be a way to be able to track this and put those two back side-by-side and then present it.

And so, we approached – well, one of the reasons we did this is, again, we were getting inundated, but yet it wasn’t just the pressure to alleviate the workload on our folks, it was also just the high level of distrust in the community, right? And we really didn’t have anything to battle back against it because everyone’s like, “Well, you won’t show us – you’re hiding stuff,” you know, “so we don’t trust what you’re doing,” and it just created this feeling of, “Gosh, we’re trying to do everything right, but you guys won’t believe us.” And so, I said, “Look, we gotta just put everything out there so people can see, so there’s nothing that we’re hiding.”

And so, we worked with a company called Civera out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Adam Friedman’s the CEO of it. He runs a backbone elections reporting software called Election Stats, and that was born out of his frustration of not having easy access to election results that are searchable, that you can analyze. He was going to the libraries and with thick paper volumes of results, going, “How do I use this to do any kind of research?” So, he put all the election stats online and the software that he developed. I met him at a conference, and I said, “Hey, do you think we could do your same kind of platform, but for ballot images and cast vote records?? And he, his mouth started watering, and he was like, “Man, this is going to be the bee’s knees, and let’s do this,” and he was very positive.

But yet, there was still a lot of folks in our office, as well as his, that were like, “We don’t think this is possible.” So, it was an 18-month development that we went through. We met once a week for a couple of hours, spent 1000s of hours working on this thing, trying to get it to work and eventually we just knocked every barrier down and cleared every hurdle and to our surprise, it worked, and it works really well. So, that was the process, that was the impetus for trying to go down this path.

Brianna Lennon: Have you seen, I mean, I think, like the million-dollar question is: Have you seen an increase in the trust from the people that were pushing you about this stuff before? Are they utilizing it? Has it helped at all?

Trent Tripple: 100%. Almost every single person in the state of Idaho here has used this as an example of why you should trust Idaho elections. They haven’t quite reached the point of which they can say you can trust all elections across the whole country, but it’s definitely had a local impact. Most of the people that were questioning the integrity of elections and the outcome of elections are now pointing to Idaho and Ada County as, “Look, we’re doing it right,” and so the trust level here locally has gone through the roof, for sure.

[High Turnout Wide Margins Mid-break]

Eric Fey: So, as an election administrator, I find this really interesting because, here in Missouri, we have a law that prevents us, that prohibits us from sharing the ballot images publicly, and that law is a result of, you know, in decades past, of vote buying. And so, do you have any concern that, you know, once people catch on to this, that they might start paying people to mark their ballot in a certain way, where they can look at your website and verify it and, you know, pay for people to vote? That kind of thing?

Trent Tripple: Twenty years ago, I would have said – if this was the first time this was happening, or something like this was happening, I’d say, “Yeah, there might be a concern for that,” but vote buying with today’s technology – with cameras and to be able to take a picture and transmit it somewhere – you know, all I am doing is making what we’ve already made available to the public accessible online, right? Will there be people that try to utilize it for bad things? Probably. Maybe. I can’t prevent any of that stuff from happening, right? I. The system is designed where there’s no personally identifiable information on there to match a voter with a ballot. It’s completely anonymous. Unless someone writes their name on it, right? I don’t know whose ballot it is. We have had some people who have questioned whether or not their particular ballot did get counted correctly, and I have told them, “Look, you can go on there and mark something on your ballot that only you would know about, and then go in and look at it later to verify that the cast vote record matched what you wrote on your ballot,” and overwhelmingly the pros have far outweighed the cons for us in going down this path.

Brianna Lennon: And maybe you haven’t had this happen – but I feel like I’ve had enough people come in that say things like, they forgot if they voted. We’ve had a number of people that come in that have voted absentee four weeks prior and say I didn’t vote at all, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and then we find their absentee ballot envelope and show it to them, and they have indeed [been] counted. Have you had instances – because one of the fears that I have is that I would put ballot images up and someone would go, “Yep, that’s not how I voted,” and whether it’s in good faith or bad faith, they take it and they say, “See, it didn’t count it because this is not how I mark my ballot. My ballot’s been marked in a different way.” Have you had that happen?

Trent Tripple: We have not had that happen yet. It’s kind of one of the things that’s in the back of my mind, right? Some person out there going, you know, I’m gonna do a fast one here and write my name on their ballot, and then, you know, put it out there on social media and have it light like a wildfire, right? And go, “Aha, see how he voted,” and, you know, at that point, me coming out saying, “Well, that’s not my ballot” is going to kind of be a hard thing to deal with, but no, I haven’t had it happen yet.

I’ll tell you, you know, not everyone’s in this system, right? In fact, the vast majority of people will never look at this. I would say 99% of the populace in Ada County will never click on the ballot verifier, but the fact that it exists, and everybody knows that it exists, is what has elevated the trust level to be that transparent, man, you really look inside your processes and go, “Are we doing everything correctly?” Right? The last thing I want to do is to throw all of these ballot images and cast vote records over the fence to Civera and have them come back and go, “Yeah, you screwed up, man. You got this one wrong, right?” So, because we’re willing to put that out there now, we really do a thorough internal check of everything, all of our processes, you know, we’re not leaving any stone unturned through the election process.

There’s a couple of things that I get a lot of questions on – maybe I’ll just address some of those, yeah? Like how much does this cost? We – because we were the first initial ones, and for the record, we weren’t the first to post ballot images online. We were the first to post ballot images side-by-side with a cast vote record, and we were the first to do it in a format that wasn’t just a million ballot images, right? If you go on there now, you can sort this down to a contest, to a candidate, to a vote type like absentee, in-person early voting or Election Day, and you can look at just those ballots associated with whatever your search is. The cost for us, ongoing cost is about $25,000 for licensing a year based off a, you know, I got 300,000 registered voters, you know, and the costing for that is probably a per voter type of scale – is what I’m being told by Civera.

The development costs for this were pretty low for us, but I think that was because Civera was taking a risk, and they wanted to know if this would actually work, and now they’re probably, now that they’ve got the system up and running, I don’t know what their pricing structure will be, but I’ve been told on a statewide ballot verifier for like Idaho – with just north of a million voters – it would be about a million dollars for ongoing costs. So, if that kind of gives people an idea.

The other thing that is super fascinating that we didn’t anticipate is now you have a window into voter behavior where you never had that before. You know, you could get precinct behavior right? Because we would report precinct results, and you could see in a precinct who people are voting for, right? But now you can actually see a ballot image and go, “Holy smokes, this person – I don’t know who they are, but this person voted for a Republican and a Democrat and an Independent person all in the same ballot,” right? And there’s a lot of people in Idaho that think that that person does not exist on the planet, right? They think if you’re a registered voter or registered Republican, you were only going to vote for Republicans. If you’re a registered Democrat, you’re only going to vote for Democrats on your ballot. What we found in the 2022 general election is that about 25% of people who voted, voted straight Republican. 16% voted straight Democrat. You can see by the numbers there that the majority of voters in Ada County did not vote party lines. They cross voted, right? And when I show people that, it blows their mind. They’re like, just “No way,” right?

The other thing you saw was down ballot voting, right? Under votes. Everyone says, “Oh, it always happens,” you know, “they only vote for president”, or “they only vote for the governor, and they don’t vote for anybody else.” Well, in the primary this last election, I can’t tell you how many ballots now you can go in and look at that they didn’t vote for US representative, but they voted for their precinct committee men, right? And that was the only person they voted for, right? And you’re just kind of like, “Oh, there’s people out there that only care about their local precinct committeeman, and don’t care about commissioner or sheriff or, you know, state rep or state senator. All they wanted to do was get in there and vote for their precinct committee men.” So, it pours cold water on a lot of these notions that I think have been universally accepted for years, and so, it’s really fascinating to see that.

The other cool thing is, I’ll bring in a representative and, and they’ll be like, “Okay, so I want to, let’s see, but this ballot verifier, blah, blah,” I’ll start looking through it and, and I go, “Hey, you know, let’s pull up your election,” and now, this isn’t part of ballot verifier, this is something that we’ve done in addition to it, which is analysis of voter behavior. And I’ll pull up, and I’ll say “We’ve done the analysis on this using AI and some other tools. The governor – registered Republican in our state, right? If they voted for the Republican, did they also vote for you?” And they’d be like, “Well, of course they voted for me,” and I pull it up and I go, “Well, you know, only 63% of the people that voted for the governor also voted for you.” And they’d sit there and go, “What? How is that even possible,” right? And I’m like, “Well, here’s all the ballots,” and I’d show them some of the ballots, right? And they’d be like, “Oh, wow,” right?

So, there’s people that ignore precincts and legislative districts in our county because they think they’re either all Democrat or all Republican, right? And they won’t knock doors, they won’t send literature to, they won’t campaign at all in these places, because they’re like, “Yeah,” and I’ll go and show them, I said, “60% of the people in this legislative district or precinct voted for the opposite party,” and they would be like, “There’s no way that that happened,” And you just go, “It’s truth. Data.” There’s nothing to hide anymore. You can look at this stuff and it’s there, right? You can’t deny it. It’s right in front of your face. And so, it’s really helpful. I don’t know how many people have called me as the clerk – you probably get these calls all the time from political people, from other elected offices, going, “What about this?” Or citizens who want public records requests. Now it’s so easy because I just give them a website and I go, “Here’s all the information and some,” right? “You now have it at your fingertips. It doesn’t cost you anything as a citizen,” right? “You can go in and it’s in a format that’s really easy to look at, and slice and dice however you want, “ and so, it’s alleviated our workload, and it’s built trust. So it’s a win- win in my mind.

So, I don’t understand why not everyone else is doing this – other than they have state laws that prohibit them from doing this. Missouri is not the only one. There are several states that people have called me and said, “How do we get this?” And I said, “Well, first you got to change your laws because unless you’re allowed to do this, you can’t do it.” But like Arizona – they were one vote away in their legislature from funding this statewide. Texas – like four or five counties have adopted this. Now we’re getting calls from all over. So, hopefully it continues to go that way, and we can get the conversation back to how are elected officials doing their jobs, not whether or not that elected official was actually duly elected.

Eric Fey: You’ve been listening to High Turnout Wide Margins, a podcast that explores local elections administration. I’m your host, Eric Fey alongside Brianna Lennon. A big thanks to KBIA and the Election Center for making this podcast possible. Our Managing Editor is Rebecca Smith. Managing Producer is Aaron Hay. Our Associate Producer is Katie Quinn, and our Digital Producer is Mark Johnson. This has been High Turnout Wide Margins. Thanks for listening.