Many election jurisdictions, particularly smaller counties and towns without the budget or staff to run elections entirely in-house, contract with third-party vendors to handle some or all of their election administration — everything from equipment maintenance to ballot printing to the technical operation of vote tabulation systems. This kind of outsourcing is common practice and, in many cases, allows smaller jurisdictions to access expertise and equipment they couldn’t otherwise afford on their own.
The tradeoff that comes with this arrangement is a question of accountability and transparency. When core election functions are handled by a private vendor rather than directly by public election officials, it can become harder for the public — and sometimes even for the contracting jurisdiction itself — to fully audit and verify every step of the process, particularly around proprietary software and equipment configurations that vendors may treat as trade secrets.
This isn’t a claim that vendor-run election administration is inherently less trustworthy than in-house administration. It’s an observation that outsourcing adds a layer of complexity to the accountability chain, and that jurisdictions relying on third-party vendors have a particular responsibility to build strong contractual transparency requirements, independent testing provisions, and robust chain-of-custody procedures into those arrangements from the start, rather than treating vendor operations as outside the scope of normal public oversight.
For voters in a jurisdiction that outsources election functions, it’s reasonable to ask specific questions: what access does the jurisdiction itself have to audit vendor performance, what happens to equipment and data custody between the vendor and the jurisdiction at each stage, and are post-election audits conducted independently of the vendor whose work is being checked. These aren’t adversarial questions — they’re the same kind of due diligence any government function involving outsourced services should be subject to.
Contractual Safeguards Worth Requiring
Jurisdictions considering or currently using a third-party election vendor can strengthen accountability through specific contractual provisions: requiring the vendor to grant the jurisdiction’s own election officials full audit access to relevant systems and records, mandating that any software or firmware used be available for independent security review, and specifying clear data ownership terms so that voter and election data always remains the legal property of the public jurisdiction rather than the private contractor. These provisions don’t require specialized technical expertise to negotiate — they require treating vendor contracts with the same rigor applied to any other public procurement involving a critical government function.
Public Disclosure of Vendor Relationships
A related, low-cost transparency measure is simply requiring public disclosure of which vendors a jurisdiction uses for which specific functions, along with the terms of those contracts where not legally protected as trade secrets. Voters generally have very limited visibility into which private companies touch their election data and in what capacity. Basic public disclosure of these relationships is a modest but meaningful step toward the kind of accountability that outsourced election functions otherwise make more difficult to achieve.