Texas activist frustrates election officials with lawsuit about threat to ballot secrecy | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune
Laura Pressley claims to hold the key to what should be a closely guarded secret: how every voter in Williamson County 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.” Read ArticleTexas: Fixing ballot secrecy problems won’t be easy, experts say | Natalia Contreras/The Texas Tribune
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. 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. Read ArticleTexas: Voter advocacy groups ask DOJ to step in after Texas allowed some voters’ ballots to be identified | Natalia Contreras/Votebeat
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. Read Article