By Jen Schumann | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Mesa County’s Ballot Verifier tool has been praised for giving residents unprecedented access to redacted ballot images and cast vote records. But for some longtime election integrity advocates, it’s only part of the solution.
“This is a great step forward,” said Ed Arnos, a Mesa County resident and former lottery systems designer. “But it doesn’t verify the most important part—how the ballots were actually read.”
This article is Part 3 of a three-part series on the Ballot Verifier: Mesa’s launch, Ada County’s pilot and the debate over election transparency laws.
A philosophical divide
Mesa County residents Tom Keenan and Ed Arnos have supported election transparency efforts for years. But both say the current system—while improved—is still legally and technically limited.
Keenan said the software gives the public access to images, but no way to link a vote to an individual voter’s intent. “Yeah, I mean that’s beautiful that we can look at a whole bunch of ballots, but I don’t know which ballot is mine.” He added, “All we need is one. One person to see their ballot was changed—and that would stop the cheating.”
Arnos agrees. “All you’re doing is confirming that from the images Dominion created, you’re getting the same tallies they created,” he said. “I would like to see images created by somebody other than Dominion from the paper ballots.”
“My criticism is not in [Mesa County’s] implementation,” Arnos added. “It might do what the vendor says very well. But it’s expensive. And if you want to do it right, give the software real ballot images—ones not created by Dominion.”
The case for system-agnostic verification
Both Arnos and Keenan support an approach that allows voters to confirm their own ballots—without relying on proprietary data or vendor-specific systems. Arnos suggests counties re-scan paper ballots using a commercial scanner, then run the tally through independent, open-source software.
“Buy an exact replica of the scanner and create the images from the paper ballots yourself,” he said. “To my knowledge, there’s no restriction in doing that.”
Keenan agrees that true trust requires more than image access. “If we had a way to track our ballot with a number that only I know, I could prove my vote was counted.”
Arnos proposes a secure 15-digit identifier for every ballot—a code voters could keep privately to track their vote without revealing their identity. “That scheme is better than the $2 scheme. You now have a unique number… like a watermark.”
What Colorado law allows—and what it doesn’t
The Ballot Verifier launched in Mesa County allows the public to view digital images of scanned ballots. But under Colorado law, any personally identifiable markings must be redacted. Even if a voter chooses to embed something like a name or symbol for tracking purposes, the image is scrubbed before being released.
That’s because Colorado’s open records law—specifically C.R.S. 24-72-205.5—requires strict ballot anonymity. The goal is to protect voters from coercion or targeting.
But critics like Arnos and Keenan say it also prevents voters themselves from verifying their vote.
Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross said she understands the tension. “We’re not allowed to do anything that could tie a ballot back to a voter,” she said. “We have to redact even if someone writes something unique on it.”
In contrast, Idaho law gives counties more discretion. Ada County voters can view their ballot image and cast vote record and confirm how it was counted—without state rules requiring that identifying marks be redacted.
The difference is more than philosophical—it’s practical.
Public disclosure and disclaimers
Both Arnos and Tripple said one overlooked but vital feature of the Ballot Verifier is that it treats ballots as public records and warns voters accordingly.
“The information should be available to anybody who wants to look at it,” Arnos said. “The easy way to do that rather than paying to redact all the personal stuff… is put a disclaimer at the top that says ‘this is a public record. Any personal information you put on it will be available to anyone.’”
Tripple said his office in Idaho uses a similar approach. “There’s a warning on the ballot that says ‘do not write any personally identifiable information on this. It is a public record and we will release it if requested,’” he said. “If people write their name on it, they’re outing themselves—it’s not that we’re outing them.”
A national push for deeper reform
Mesa County officials have said repeatedly that they’re doing everything they can within the boundaries of Colorado law.
But outside Mesa, a louder chorus is calling for those boundaries to shift.
During an April 10 cabinet meeting, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said election security remains a top national priority. She described electronic voting systems as dangerously vulnerable.
“We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable to hackers for a very long time,” Gabbard said. “[They are] vulnerable to exploitation, to manipulate the results of the votes being cast.” She added, “This further drives forward your mandate to bring about paper ballots across the country so that voters can have faith in the integrity of our elections.”
That mandate was formalized weeks earlier. On March 4, President Trump signed an executive order calling on states and counties to adopt systems that produce “timely, accurate and independently auditable election results.” The order also directs federal agencies to support what it describes as “radical transparency” in the election process.
For Arnos, that order echoes what he’s been arguing for all along. “The correct way to verify is to use adjudicated images and tally them using a separate system,” he said. “Verification of the tally results by another system—particularly when you can get it done at little cost—is indispensable.”
He said election offices should adopt the same fail-safes that high-stakes industries already use. “Downtime was $300 a minute,” he said of his experience in lottery system design. “So you never just had one machine—you had two.”
And when it comes to delivering on free and fair elections, Arnos says, the stakes are even higher.
Gabbard made a similar point. “We’re rooting out politicization and bringing transparency to where it’s been weaponized.”
This article is Part 3 of a three-part series.
• See how Mesa County rolled out the Ballot Verifier in Part 1: Local access, national implications
• Learn how Idaho’s pilot program turned skeptics into supporters in Part 2: Inside Ada County’s transformation