The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ballot decision is a step in the right direction

In its coverage of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s recent cast vote record decision, Democracy Docket framed the ruling as a dangerous victory for “election deniers” and claimed it gave a “DHS conspiracy theorist access to 2020 election data.”

That framing misses the central point of the case: The court did not authorize the exposure of anyone’s private vote. It allowed access to election records that help the public verify whether reported vote totals match recorded vote data.

In a republic, ballot secrecy protects the voter. Transparency protects the result. Both principles can coexist, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court understood that.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons.

The court’s actual holding was straightforward: Cast vote records, or CVRs, are not the “contents of ballot boxes or voting machines” under Pennsylvania’s Election Code and therefore are not categorically exempt from public disclosure.

A CVR is not a physical ballot. It does not contain information about voters. It contains information about ballots — and ballots do not contain personally identifying information.

A properly configured CVR cannot link a ballot to a voter in a way that compromises ballot secrecy. In the Lycoming County system at issue, the data was randomized and did not contain personally identifying voter information.

The court explained that the CVR numbers do not correspond to the order in which voters checked in or cast ballots and that those randomization features “significantly decrease the likelihood” of identifying an individual vote. The court concluded that disclosure would allow the public to check the math without violating ballot secrecy.

There is a line of thinking that says a CVR can be kept from the public if there is some edge case where the voter behind a ballot could be reasonably guessed. What that argument misses is that ballot secrecy exists to protect voters from the state — not to protect the state from public scrutiny.

If a government builds or certifies a voting system that allows officials, vendors, or anyone else to identify which voter cast which ballot, the problem is not the citizen asking for public records and the remedy is not secrecy for the government. The remedy is fixing, randomizing, or decertifying the system.

If a county claims that it cannot disclose a CVR because the public could determine how individual voters voted by matching multiple records together, that should trigger an immediate and serious response from state election authorities.

A voting system that allows ballots to be connected back to voters is not merely inconvenient for public-records compliance. It is a direct threat to ballot secrecy.

Public access to CVRs is not about exposing voters. It is about allowing citizens to confirm that election totals add up. Bloomberg Law captured the ruling more accurately: Pennsylvanians may review raw voting records to ensure elections are accurate; the court said disclosure promotes trust, confidence, and legitimacy without violating voter secrecy law.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons. In September 2024, Gallup found that only 57% of Americans were confident that presidential votes would be accurately cast and counted nationwide, with a massive partisan gap: 84% of Democrats expressed confidence, compared with only 28% of Republicans.

After the 2024 election, AP-NORC found that about six in 10 Americans believed the presidential vote was counted accurately nationwide, while independents remained notably less confident.

In April 2026, Reuters/Ipsos found sharp partisan divides on election fraud beliefs, while also finding that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans remained confident their own ballots would be counted.

This is not a one-party problem. Republicans have raised concerns about mail ballots, voter rolls, citizenship verification, ballot harvesting, and machine tabulation. Democrats, too, have raised serious concerns about election technology when the perceived threat came from foreign interference or insecure electronic systems.

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After the 2016 election, the Clinton campaign joined recount efforts in key states, with Marc Elias writing that the campaign had examined allegations involving hacking, outside interference, and voting technology.

In the years that followed, prominent Democrats pushed aggressively for paper ballots, audits, and replacement of insecure voting machines. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s PAVE Act, backed by Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Tammy Baldwin (Wisc.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), and others, would have mandated hand-marked paper ballots and risk-limiting audits in federal elections.

Let’s be honest: Concern about election technology was not invented in 2020. Democrats were warning about electronic voting systems, paperless machines, hacking, and public confidence long before the current fight over CVRs.

In the case of Pennsylvania, election researcher Heather Honey asked a basic question: Can the public inspect the data necessary to verify the count? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court answered yes, subject to the election code and subject to the protection of ballot secrecy. That should be an easy win for anyone who claims to care about democracy.

Instead, Democracy Docket labeled Honey a “conspiracy theorist” and portrayed the ruling as a victory for sinister forces. But the court did not adopt a conspiracy theory. It adopted a transparency principle. In fact, the court said disclosure promotes “fair, honest, and transparent elections.”

I know Heather Honey as a hard-working, dedicated patriot, a wonderful person, and a loving parent. Her biggest personal failing, as far as I can tell, is that she is a Philadelphia Eagles fan — a burden no court can remedy.

The attack on Heather Honey is totally misplaced. If Democracy Docket disagrees with the legal reasoning, it should argue the law. If it believes certain CVR formats in certain counties could threaten secrecy, then the correct response is not to smear citizens who request public records.

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The correct response is to demand voting systems that protect ballot secrecy by design: randomized ballot records, standardized public CVR formats, and certification standards that make it impossible to connect a ballot back to a voter.

Marc Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket, has built a platform devoted to voting rights and election litigation. He knows better than most that election legitimacy depends not only on access to the ballot, but on public confidence that lawful votes are accurately counted.

CVR transparency is one way to earn it. It does not reveal who someone voted for or publish private voter choices. Properly handled, it lets citizens, researchers, journalists, campaigns, and watchdogs compare reported totals against underlying tabulation records. It is a public audit trail.

And if any county says its CVRs cannot be disclosed because the records would allow ballots to be matched back to voters, then the public-records request is not the scandal. The voting system is.

Democracy does not become weaker when citizens can verify government math. It becomes stronger.

So Democracy Docket should correct its framing, and Marc Elias should leave Heather Honey alone. She is simply defending one of democracy’s oldest and most important rules:

Trust the voters. Protect the secret ballot. And let the people check the math.