Steven Rosenfeld discusses an Arizona measure with the backing of both Adrian Fontes and Ken Bennett, which would publicly release registration rolls, voter lists, scanned ballot images, and final electoral tallies.  Much of that information is already available (voter rolls are currently available for a fee), but general availability of the ballot images would be new.

I’m a fan of reasonable transparency.  But I’m skeptical that releasing this raw data will do much to tamp down conspiracy theories, which rely on the veneer of data analytics and the pretense of expertise but are notoriously fact-resistant.  (To be clear, because the underlying facts don’t matter much to peddlers of conspiracy, I’m also not sure whether the marginal oxygen makes the existing fire that much worse either.  If we better supported local journalism, I suppose the extra data might allow a greater number of responsible stories about what actually happened, to accompany the greater number of irresponsible cherry-picking posts driven by confirmation bias.)  

I’ve written before about the danger of enthusiasm without precision, and of citizen vigilantes seeing the law as they want it to be rather than as it is.  There will continue to be purveyors of nonsense, from those who are mistaken and from charlatans seeking profit, and people inclined to believe the nonsense don’t seem to me to be easily dissuaded by the incremental availability of data.