America Counts is proud to provide our free app, Actual Vote, to empower people all over the world to improve election accuracy and transparency by auditing vote reporting.

Before you use Actual Vote, though, it is critical that you are aware of each of the following points about safety, privacy, and scope when using the app. This will help ensure that you have a safe, positive, and empowering experience.

By using Actual Vote, you agree that you have read and understood each of the following:

1. Volunteer status. As an Actual Vote user, you are a volunteer unless explicitly contracted as an Independent Contractor. This means that you are not officially affiliated with America Counts (unless there is a specific written agreement that overrides this). You agree to hold America Counts and its employees and volunteers harmless for incidents you may encounter while using the Actual Vote app.
2. Follow the rules. Using Actual Vote as intended to video-record poll tapes is legal. But whenever you use Actual Vote, you should be aware that there may be additional local laws as to when and how (if at all) you may access and observe poll tapes, and how (if at all) you may video-record them, which you must follow. You are responsible for making sure the recordings you submit do not contain anything inappropriate or illegal. America Counts carefully reviews all Actual Vote submissions to make sure only poll tape videos with no inappropriate or illegal material get approved and displayed, but we are only human and cannot guarantee that we will always do this review process perfectly.
3. COVID-19. Please read and understand America Counts’ COVID-19 Policy.
4. Safety. Using Actual Vote involves going out in public (sometimes at night) and engaging in legal, non-partisan election auditing activities. This means that when you use Actual Vote, America Counts encourages you to take the appropriate common-sense safety measures, and not to do anything outside of your risk tolerance. America Counts is not responsible for your safety when you are using Actual Vote. Please read and understand our Safety and Privacy When Using Actual Vote statement for more information. 
5. Privacy. Please read and understand America Counts’ Privacy Policy. Please understand that Actual Vote video-recordings that you take and submit will be available to be viewed by the public as soon as they clear America Counts’ vetting process and get approved, and that you must avoid taking any videos in which the audio or video contains anything private or anything that you don’t want to be available to the public. If you stick to silently recording only poll tapes, this shouldn’t be a concern. Please read and understand our Safety and Privacy When Using Actual Vote statement for more information.
6. Your videos as legal evidence. Please read and understand our Safety and Privacy When Using Actual Vote statement for more information on how video-recordings you take with Actual Vote can be used as evidence in a court case that presents a legal challenge to the official results.
7. Election rules and policies vary. This means that the ways in which it’s possible to use Actual Vote may differ by jurisdiction and may change from election to election. America Counts works hard to provide up-to-date information and customized consulting and planning support, but we can’t guarantee that such information will be accurate 100% of the time, or that it won’t change at the last minute in a way that forces you to change how you plan to use Actual Vote. It’s always a good idea to double-check poll tape-related information by calling your county election office (select your state from this list to get a list of contact info for your state’s counties). It also means that for people who live in certain areas, there may not be an obvious way, let alone any way at all, for them to use Actual Vote to audit the vote reporting in an upcoming election in their area (usually because poll tapes are either not printed, or printed but not posted in those areas). Such people can still help America Counts and other Actual Vote users in other ways, of course.
8. Incorrect Poll Tape Procedures. America Counts works hard to accurately document poll tape procedures across the US. The goal is to give Actual Vote users correct and up-to-date information to help them plan properly. Unfortunately, situations of the following sort can occur, in which an Actual Vote user goes to the effort of traveling to a vote center, only to be disappointed that they can’t video-record the poll tapes as they intended to. America Counts works with Actual Vote users to minimize the possibility of these incorrect poll tape procedure-related situations, but we can’t guarantee that something like the following won’t happen to you:
   1. An Actual Vote user shows up to a voting center hours after the polls close (which is usually plenty of time), but the poll tapes aren’t posted yet. This could happen if there were many voters still in line when the polls closed, or if there were unexpected complications in the poll closing process. This is technically not an incorrect poll tape procedure if they intend to post the tapes when they are able, but it’s still an unexpected obstacle for the Actual Vote user, who would have to return to the vote center at a point after the poll tapes are posted (and they can’t know exactly when this will be) to record these tapes.
   2. An Actual Vote user shows up to a vote center on election night in which the tapes were technically posted in a reasonable amount of time in a location that was accessible when the polls closed, but they can’t access that location when they reach the vote center later (say, because the poll tapes were posted on the window of the school library, and are still there, but the outer fence to the school was closed and locked after the last poll worker left, which was hours ago).
   3. An Actual Vote user shows up to a vote center on election night, and the poll tapes are posted in plain sight, but critical information is missing or obscured (for example, they could be posted inside of the vote center behind a window such that some vote totals are obscured behind a thick window grille, or they can be posted outside but key information is redacted or torn off).
   4. An Actual Vote user shows up to a county elections office for a planned appointment, but is not able to view all of the tapes they were promised, and/or key information on tapes is redacted or torn off.
   5. An Actual Vote user shows up to a vote center on election night in a state where it’s mandatory to post poll tapes, only to find that the tapes aren’t posted anywhere (and that there are no obvious accessible locations that the tapes could be). In some cases, they may have simply been (improperly) taken down by a member of the public, blown away, or rained on. In other cases, poll workers may (improperly) forget to post the poll tapes amid the flurry closing procedures. 
   6. In a worst case scenario, it can happen that poll workers are (improperly) instructed not to post the poll tapes (or not even print them in the first place).
9. Scope of Actual Vote. The video-recordings of poll tapes that you take with Actual Vote provide evidence about the accuracy of vote reporting, which is great for election transparency and accuracy. But you should be aware that they can’t provide evidence about the accuracy of vote counting—to do this, you’d need a different technique or tool, such as our upcoming app, Wanna Vote (still in beta). For America Counts, vote reporting is the portion of election procedure in a given county that starts when votes (from voting machines, mail-in-ballots, etc.) are counted on tabulating machines and ends when the county certifies the official results. Vote counting is everything else, including determining and registering eligible voters, enabling them to vote in a reasonable way, and operating voting machines properly. In particular, Actual Vote doesn’t provide any evidence about voter suppression or incorrect behavior of voting machines.
10. Use of your Actual Vote videos. The Actual Vote process depends critically on people like you putting forth the effort to volunteer your time to video-record poll tapes. These recordings are hard evidence about vote reporting at the beginning of the chain of custody. But in order for this evidence from your videos to actually contribute to election transparency and accuracy, someone must transcribe and analyze those videos, which is painstaking, detail-oriented work. If the analysis uncovers apparent discrepancies, to get these discrepancies explained or corrected, someone must follow up on them, which is also painstaking, detail-oriented work. Meanwhile, US election procedures (which includes poll tape design and procedure) vary widely by region and election. So while America Counts has made great strides in speeding up or automating parts of the poll tape transcription and analysis process, for the time being, for a given election, each distinct county from which we receive poll tape videos may require additional individualized attention to understand exactly how the transcription and analysis procedure must be done (for example, while many counties print one tape per one precinct, others may print multiple tapes for one precinct, or put several precincts on one tape). America Counts will participate in all of this work to the extent we are able to (we are a small organization), and provide support to people who are doing this work on their own. But for a given election, we can’t guarantee that we will be able to transcribe and analyze all videos (especially those submitted by people who we weren’t aware were planning to submit) before the election certification date, unless you reach out to us in advance with your plan and we give you a specific written pledge that we will transcribe and analyze your recordings before the certification date. This means that if you decide to go to the effort of video-recording poll tapes with Actual Vote without pre-arranging with America Counts, and we’re swamped with other work, and you don’t wish to analyze your recordings, and you don’t get anyone else to do it, your recordings may get analyzed later than you’d like, or not at all. Furthermore, if the data in a given video of yours is hard to read (say, because it was dark and you had to hold your phone at an awkward angle), it may not be practical or possible to analyze it, which means that that particular video won’t contribute to improving the transparency or accuracy of the vote reporting, despite the fact that you went to the effort to take it.
11. Impact of your Actual Vote efforts. While the Actual Vote process is designed to amplify the civic motivation of democracy-loving people like yourself into improvement in the accuracy and transparency of vote reporting, we cannot guarantee that a given effort that you may put forth with Actual Vote will result in a particular outcome that you might desire, such as improving transparency and accuracy in vote reporting in a given location to some specific degree, uncovering evidence to support a particular hypothesis you may have about vote reporting in a given area, generating a legal challenge to the official results in a given area, or a court forcing official results to be overturned as the result of a legal challenge. In particular, 
    1. If your efforts uncover apparent discrepancies that are escalated to the relevant elections officials, we can’t guarantee that they will respond on a specific time table (or at all), and if they do respond, we can’t guarantee that their response will be helpful to a specific degree.
    2. If your efforts help to show that a legal challenge to the official results is warranted, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to put forth the funding to hire qualified lawyers, or find qualified lawyers who are willing to work pro bono. 
    3. In general, America Counts will work to the extent that we’re able to help all Actual Vote efforts fulfill their innate potential, whatever that may be.
12. Actual Vote software performance. America Counts makes every reasonable effort to ensure that the Actual Vote app works as expected and delivers an outstanding user experience. But due to variability in mobile device makes and software, frequent updates from Apple and Google, the potential for unexpected conditions when using the software, the complexity of the software itself (including maintaining scalable cloud architecture on a small budget), we can’t guarantee that you won’t run into a software issue using Actual Vote, despite our best efforts. In the unlikely and unfortunate event that you do run into an issue with the Actual Vote software out in the field, you still have the option to video-record poll tapes using your device’s camera app and send us your videos directly. It won’t be as convenient as the usual process, but at least we can still receive and analyze the poll tapes you were planning to video-record. Before you use Actual Vote in the field, please download it and familiarize yourself with it (using the instructions for iOS or Android) and take a practice recording (say, of our practice poll tape) and confirm that it got uploaded. This makes sure that the app works properly on your device.
13. America Counts’ bandwidth allocation. America Counts is a small organization. In the happy event that we reach a point in which we have more interest in Actual Vote than our bandwidth allows, we will have no choice but to prioritize incoming requests for consulting, planning assistance, transcription, and analysis. This means that your request may end up lower in the queue than you’d prefer, and we may not get to it at all. In situations like this, we will try to notify you as soon as possible of the state of affairs. We may also seek volunteers from your circle or your organization with spreadsheet skills who might wish to do a quick orientation and donate time helping with these requests to increase the probability that your request gets handled.