Partnerships
Election verification is teamwork. These are the organizations and people we do it with.
The United States already has an infrastructure of election observation — partisan poll watchers, non-partisan civic observers, local election-integrity groups. What it has lacked is a way to turn observation into evidence.
A poll observer who watches the poll tapes being printed and posted holds that observation only in memory and notes. Actual Vote changes what observers can do with what they see: a permanent video record with metadata, chain-of-custody documentation, and integration into a comparison pipeline that checks poll tape totals against officially reported results.
That is why America Counts partners rather than recruits from scratch. The observer networks exist. We supply the evidence-producing methodology, the app, the public archive, and centralized analysis. Our partners supply local knowledge, volunteers, and sustained presence in their jurisdictions.
Official partnerships
Scrutineers
Scrutineers is a non-partisan coalition of election-integrity organizations and individuals founded by Emily Levy in 2019. Democracy Counts was a founding member, and Scrutineers remains the partner organization most directly aligned with our mission — its work spans voter education, observer recruitment, and verification activities that overlap with ours.
The partnership is operational, not nominal. In the January 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs, Scrutineers ran a three-part election-protection effort that included widespread Actual Vote poll-tape recording and poll-watcher training, with Democracy Counts managing the Actual Vote back end and helping train observers. Scrutineers continues to connect volunteers with America Counts and support poll tape recording efforts across multiple jurisdictions.
Transparent Elections NC
Transparent Elections NC was a non-partisan group of North Carolina volunteers, active from 2017 to 2022, whose mission was to improve confidence in elections. Its volunteers attended Board of Elections meetings, voting-equipment testing, canvasses, audits, and other publicly observable election processes — helping their communities stay informed and helping keep North Carolina's elections transparent, secure, robustly audited, and publicly verified.
America Counts, in partnership with Transparent Elections NC, audited vote reporting in Wake County for the November 2022 Midterm Election. Transparent Elections NC worked alongside volunteers from the North Carolina Election Integrity Team to record poll tapes from 130 of Wake County's 208 election day precincts at the Wake County Board of Elections office — the groundwork for ongoing Actual Vote efforts in North Carolina.
Citizens Audit Broward
Citizens Audit Broward (CAB) was Democracy Counts's first local affiliate and the prototype for the audit committee model — a non-partisan local civic group that runs the entire Comparison Analysis pipeline itself: video-recording, transcription, comparison, investigation, and reporting.
In 2020, CAB organized full-pipeline analyses of two Broward County elections, viewing and recording poll tapes by appointment at the Supervisor of Elections office. CAB members did the recording, the transcription, and the comparison, and produced findings. CAB later transitioned to operating as a video-recording team — mobilizing volunteers who record poll tapes and submit them for central analysis — a shift that shaped our standing recommendation for how local groups can participate sustainably.
Unofficial partnerships
Not every collaboration is formalized. Much of Actual Vote's coverage comes from informal working relationships with local groups and individual volunteers.
Unlike our official partners, these unofficial partners are not necessarily non-partisan — and that has no bearing on America Counts's own strict non-partisanship, or on the trustworthiness of Actual Vote. The method compares the totals recorded from a poll tape against the officially reported results, so the evidence it produces is exactly the same regardless of who records the tape (see why Actual Vote is trustworthy). In fact, we encourage everyone — including strong partisans — to use the app to video-record poll tapes and strengthen election transparency.
America Counts works with these groups solely on Actual Vote poll-tape recording. Such a working relationship is not, and must not be construed as, an endorsement of any partner's other activities, positions, candidates, or advocacy. America Counts takes no position on their non–Actual Vote work, and nothing on this page expresses or implies any such endorsement.
North Carolina Election Integrity Team (NCEIT)
Six volunteers from the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, working with Transparent Elections NC, formed the audit committee for our Wake County 2022 Midterm analysis. In a single supervised recording session at the Wake County Board of Elections office in March 2023, the team video-recorded poll tapes from all 208 of Wake County's election day precincts and all 13 one-stop voting sites.
We've also received Actual Vote video submissions from other individual NCEIT members in other elections.
Partner with us
If your organization observes elections — or wants to — we can make that observation produce evidence. Tell us where you work and what you have in mind.
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