Washoe County launches 'Project Plain Sight' to publish verifiable voter‑roll snapshots

The Washoe County Registrar of Voters on May 12 unveiled Project Plain Sight, a pilot website that will publish dated snapshots of the county voter roll alongside SHA‑256 cryptographic hashes so members of the public can verify downloaded files match the county’s official record.

Registrar Andrew McDonald said the tool is aimed at strengthening public confidence in the voter roll itself, not voting machines. He said the pilot publishes a limited set of fields (voter ID, name, party code, county ID, precinct, status, and ZIP code) and deliberately omits street addresses and other sensitive identifiers to protect voter privacy.

“Accountability says, ‘Here’s what we published.’ Data integrity says, ‘Here’s how you can prove it hasn’t changed,’” Justin Warren of the registrar’s office said during the presentation, summarizing the portal’s technical approach. The portal will display the date of a snapshot, a downloadable file of the snapshot and the file’s SHA‑256 hash; residents can run a hash on their copy and compare it to the published value.

The county’s work was developed with Discovery Forensics and the Center for Internet Security (CIS). Joshua Franklin of CIS told the commission that SHA‑256 is a widely used cryptographic standard with no known practical attacks and that CIS has worked with the county to harden servers and follow cybersecurity best practices.

Project proponents emphasized that the verification step requires only basic tools available on modern computers and that the county will offer guidance pages and a Microsoft form for reporting discrepancies. Ira Victor of Discovery Forensics offered to stay after the meeting to answer technical questions in the hallway: “If anyone in the room wants to know more, please follow us out into the hallway after this presentation, and we'll stay as long as we can to answer questions.”

Commissioners and staff discussed contingencies for outages and integrity checks. County staff said backups and an immutable ledger approach will be used; if the system cannot capture a snapshot for a specific day during an outage, the next successful snapshot will be published and the county will note any missing dates.

Some residents voiced strong skepticism. Penny Brock told the board she prefers paper ballots and hand counts and said many voters lack internet access to perform cryptographic checks. The registrar responded that Project Plain Sight is a voluntary verification tool intended to provide an additional, public method of confirming the voter roll, not to replace existing access or other transparency measures.

The county plans to operate the pilot during the election year and refine the approach based on feedback from cybersecurity partners and the public.