Even as Alameda County settled its scuffle over the release of voting records last week, larger questions remain for Bay Area counties’ efforts to increase election transparency as ranked-choice voting expands around the region.
After drawing the ire of the Board of Supervisors and community members since the Nov. 5 election with his resistance to releasing the county’s voting records, Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis announced on Tuesday he will make them available.
Most importantly to election integrity advocates, Dupuis said he will release the records in a JSON file, which is a text-based format used to easily analyze large data sets. A Secretary of State’s memo had previously directed the state’s registrars to only release the records in a file type that would have made election audits difficult, if not impossible, according to election integrity advocates like Steve Hill, an author at the national nonprofit FairVote.
“We’re cautiously optimistic that we will now get the cast vote record in the best format, which is what we asked for back in May,” said Hill. “It’s a shame that it’s taken this many months to come to an agreement on what should have been an easy decision.”
Audits performed by organizations like Hill’s helped correct the outcome of an Oakland School Board race in 2022 where the wrong candidate was announced as the winner due to the elections office selecting an incorrect setting for the ranked-choice voting format, which is being increasingly adopted across California.
Ranked-choice voting is used in four cities in Alameda County — Albany, Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro. The format allows voters to rank numerous candidates in order of preference. If no candidate wins a majority in the first round of voting, the candidate with the lowest vote total is eliminated, with the votes applied to the voters’ next option. This process continues until a majority of votes has been secured.
Ranked-choice voting is now used in cities as far north as Eureka and as far south as Redondo Beach in California, while Santa Clara County and San Mateo County are considering adopting ranked-choice voting, too. The movement toward ranked-choice voting comes as voters have grown increasingly frustrated with their limited options at the ballot box, according to Marcela Miranda-Caballero, the executive director of California Ranked-Choice Voting. Instead of voting for the lesser of two evils, voters can rank a multitude of candidates.
“RCV is delivering more choice for voters in California, often while replacing low-turnout primaries and runoffs decided by unrepresentative electorates,” Miranda-Caballero said. “What RCV does is ensure that candidates must be supported by a majority of voters to win.”
But it’s not without its challenges.
In response to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors’ request to release voting records, Dupuis said in October that a recently passed elections law, SB 1328, could lead to “felony charges or civil penalties” for him or the county if he carried out the order. The law states, “it is a felony punishable by imprisonment for 2 to 4 years to interfere or attempt to interfere with the secrecy of voting or ballot tally software program source code,” which could be an issue for Alameda County precincts with less than 10 people.
An Oct. 18 memo from California Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber directed the states’ elections officials to release cast vote records only as PDFs, a nonreadable format that would prevent third-party organizations from reviewing the records.
The author of SB 1328, Steven Bradford, wrote to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to say the bill would not prevent the release of the cast vote record as a JSON file, but Dupuis deferred to a “prescriptive” interpretation of the law by the Secretary of State’s office that allowed the records to be released only as a PDF file, a format that is difficult to use for large data sets. A JSON file, however, can both be read by a human and parsed through by a computer, allowing large data sets to be reviewed quickly and accurately.
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Supervisor Keith Carson expressed frustration about the memo for bucking the supervisors’ goals to increase transparency, especially after the botched Oakland School Board race.
“Releasing CVRs (Cast Vote Records) solely as PDFs would effectively counter the Board’s intended goal of facilitating accurate election oversight,” Carson wrote in an email to Dupuis on Oct. 29. “Voting rights advocates and the Alameda County Elections Commission have raised serious concerns that this format limits the CVR’s utility for election accountability, particularly in ranked-choice voting.”
Dupuis said the contradicting orders from the Board of Supervisors and the secretary of state made his job difficult as he tried to follow the law and carry out the election.
“I understand why people are advocating for seeing the cast vote record in a JSON format. I completely understand that, but I do have to adhere to the law, and I have to follow what the secretary of state says,” Dupuis told the Bay Area News Group.
While this particular issue has been solved for Alameda County — for now — Dupuis sees more potential problems in future elections if the Secretary of State’s Office does not revise its guidelines. But what the office will do on the issue remains unclear.
“We acknowledge the value of the transparency provided by this data. However, while some requestors of the data may utilize the data for independent analysis, we must consider its broader implications,” the Secretary of State’s Office wrote in a statement to the Bay Area News Group. “The Secretary of State prioritizes a voter’s right to a secret ballot and safeguarding the integrity of the election process.”
But that’s a fight for another day for Hill and other election integrity advocates.
“There’s a chess game still going on here, and you still have a couple of acts to play out,” Hill said. “The secretary of state and registrar are concerned about a theoretical invasion of some voters’ privacy, and they’re not very concerned at all about a real mistake that happened and how to prevent that.”