Election officials across the country have denied requests from citizens to view and count the digital ballot images which are automatically generated in the majority of US voting precincts. The digital ballot images are a little-known feature of most US voting systems.

Noted Arizona election activist Jim March Simpson has initiated a campaign to request copies of the digital ballot images for a number of key counties and races in the upcoming vote, including Clark County NV, Kern County CA, Los Angeles CA, Colorado counties Mesa, Gunnison, Pitkin, Eagle, Chaffee, and Denver, WA counties Seattle, King County, PA counties Lancaster and Chester, IA counties Adair, Cedar, Mitchell, Pottawattamie and Hardin, and all of Ohio.

Joe Gloria, Registrar of Voters of the Clark County, NV Election Department, answered Mr. Simpson's request by writing in an email, which was forwarded to this reporter:

I am unable to release this information to the public without a court order.

To date Clark County, King County WA, Monroe County OH, and Jefferson County CO have written back that they would not comply with the requests for public records, as digital ballot images are classified. The election activists say that no state law prevents the counties from releasing the digital images, and that in some states, such as Colorado, state law in fact specifically treats digital ballot images as public records under the Colorado Open Records Act.

The existence of stored digital images of the ballots cast in most US precincts was recently discovered by election integrity activists, who last summer charged that the results of the 2016 Democratic primaries were riddled with evidence of fraud. The activists and experts, one of whom includes the 100th president of the American Statistical Association, suggest that Bernie Sanders actually won the Democratic nomination. In the report "Democracy Lost: A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries," the authors called for:

"decertification of the 2016 Democratic primary results in every state in which we have established a reasonable doubt as to the accuracy of the vote tally."

In the majority of paper ballot vote-counting machines, a marked ballot is fed into an optical device which reads and counts the votes and generates a digital image of the ballot all at once. The digital images are then stored in memory. The creation of digital ballot images was meant to serve as a back-up to the original paper ballot record. The images could be easily accessed, viewed, and counted without actually handling the paper ballots.

Pioneering election integrity activist Bev Harris of Black Box Voting recently called ballot images "a new way to verify if the results are true."

The presence of digital ballot images provides an avenue for verifying machine-counted totals, which does not require the overtime costs and special skills required to perform hand-counts of paper ballots. The kind of optical scan, paper ballot vote-counting machines in use across much of the US have been roundly criticized as being vulnerable to "hacking."

The New York Times reported last week in "Five Possible Hacks to Worry About Before Election Day":

"the [Election Systems & Software] DS200, an optical scanning model used in many districts, comes with an optional wireless ability. The good news: They can report results automatically. The bad news: Any wireless connection is a vulnerability."

Election integrity activists are puzzled as to why election officials would want to keep the images from public view, except as a precursor to massive election fraud.

The ease with which US vote-counting machines can be accessed and manipulated has been demonstrated in numerous films and documentaries, including by a team at Princeton and in the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy.

Click here to see video clip below, from HBO's Hacking Democracy (mirror)