Macomb County clerk introduces verifier that shows images of every ballot cast – Macomb Daily

macombdaily.com · Mar 1, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

Full Article

The Macomb County Clerk’s Office is offering an online service where users can view images of the more than 80,000 ballots cast in the last election and those going forward. County Clerk Anthony Forlini introduced the “ballot verifier” service on its website provided on software by Civera company earlier this week at a news conference attended by Civera founder and CEO Adam Friedman and a half-dozen local-community clerks in the county in the Elections Division office in Mount Clemens. “This is really a great way of being able to provide for our citizens a method of accountability, transparency,” Forlini said at the conference Monday. Online access is available by clicking on the “Past elections results” in the “Elections” section of the Clerk’s Office website that went live the same day. It provides side-by-side images of the ballot and the records that interpret the ballot and other information, such as the serial number of the voting machine and tabulator used for that ballot. Visitors can pare down the search to the precinct level. “By showing these side-by-side, anyone can instantly see whether there are any discrepancies,” officials said in a news release. The system allows for write-in votes to be counted, officials added. The images cannot be traced to a voter so privacy remains, Forlini explained. “All ballots are anonymous,” he said. “No ballot can be traced back to any individual voter. The system ensures transparency and integrity of election results, while protecting voter privacy and security.” A ballot from last year's election in New Baltimore is one of over 80,000 ballots shown on the "ballot verifier" on the Macomb County Clerk's Office for the November 2025 election. MACOMB DAILY PHOTO FROM MACOMB COUNTY CLERK'S OFFICE IMAGE Forlini is seeking the Republican nomination for Michigan Secretary of State in this year’s election. The site also provides historical voting data in the county down to the precincts back to 1998 with plans to go farther back, he said. He has not yet determined how far back to go. County election records date to 1838. The ballot images will only include last year’s elections and the November 2024 election, in a couple of months, officials said. Harrison Township Clerk Adam Wit said in a report on WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) he welcomes the new platform. “All this is, is a digital flashlight that shows the information that already existed,” he told a TV reporter. “It doesn’t create any new information, but it makes it easily accessible for people. And when you make an effort to show that you’re not hiding anything — people figure out that there’s nothing to hide.” The county is paying about $30,000 a year for the service, the clerk said. The expenditure did not have to go in front of the county Board of Commissioners because it’s below the threshold that requires it. “We used funds from our budget,” Forlini said. Macomb is the first county in Michigan to offer the service from a software platform created by Civera, a Cambridge, Mass., company created in 2012 that provides its ballot verifier service in seven states, and other election-related technology services. Friedman said the technology to provide the service has been available for some time, but with election integrity arising from the 2020 election, the need for heightened transparency became apparent. “I think as we all know we have a crisis of trust and confidence in our politics in general in our county, and unfortunately since 2020, elections,” Friedman said. “It’s still there. It’s not gone. We just saw what happened in Fulton County (Georgia). So our hope – by providing more ground-truth transparency, so that voters don’t feel like voting is a black box but a glass box, where they actually see that ground-truth, we’ll take one huge step toward bringing citizens and the government together so that it is a more collaborative and continual-improvement type of attitude and culture of how we do government in the United States, which I think is sorely needed.” Officials believe the added information provided by the service may reduce the number of Freedom of Information Act requests that local and county clerks receive for election data. Friedman said the information eliminated the need for a recount in an Idaho race. He said so far in providing the ballot verifier in 20 counties through seven states, the total of the ballot images matched the official election results. He said there have been some initial mismatches, but the mistakes were located and corrected. The verifier is also used in California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, New Mexico and Texas. In addition, in Georgia, the service is analyzing and mapping over 4 million ballots statewide from the November 2020 presidential election in a project with Yale University, Friedman added.