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Collin County OKs purchase of ballot-image redaction tool after staff cites time, cost of manual redaction
Summary
Commissioners voted 5-0 to authorize procurement of a redaction tool to prepare ballot images for public release after the county's elections administrator said manual redaction of 2024 ballots would take months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Collin County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to approve procurement of a ballot-image redaction tool to prepare election images for public release, County Elections Administrator Caleb Breaux told the court.
Breaux said the county sought legal guidance after statewide attorney-general opinions indicated ballot images may need redaction before public release. He recommended using a commercial redaction tool used by neighboring counties and said the vendor would provide a secured, cloud-hosted redaction system that would be handed off to the county about two months after sample files are provided.
Breaux told the court the vendor allows the county to send mock-up or sample files rather than live ballot images for testing and said “we could accomplish it with about a thousand ballots or less.” He described the product as “a secured cloud hosted system” and said vendor personnel would not examine ballot files unless the county asked for troubleshooting assistance.
Breaux also gave the court a cost and time comparison for manual redaction: he said the 2024 general election produced 520,196 ballot-image records that would need redaction; at about 2.5 minutes per record, staff estimated 21,675 hours of work. With roughly 20 part-time workers, that would take about 27 weeks and cost about $324,000 to complete in-house, he said. For the 2024 primary he estimated 37,685 records would require about 5,737 hours, seven weeks of work and an estimated $84,000 labor cost.
Several commissioners asked whether the vendor’s standard hosting service — the public web hosting that would let anyone download images to audit elections — was included in the contract. Breaux said hosting is an additional service and not included in the redaction contract; he said he had budgeted for that separate service.
Commissioner Fletcher moved to approve the item; the court recorded a motion and a second and voted 5 to 0 to carry the measure.
The court did not specify the vendor’s final contract price in the public discussion and commissioners asked Breaux to confirm which fees are included in the quoted estimate. The vote authorizes procurement of the redaction tool as presented and does not, according to Breaux’s remarks, authorize public hosting fees.
