Actual Vote for Candidates and Campaigns

A story to start with

On May 24, 2022, Michelle Long Spears voted for herself in the Democratic primary for the District 2 seat on the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners. So did her husband, at the same precinct. After polls closed, the precinct posted a poll tape outside, as Georgia law requires. The tape showed Spears with zero Election Day votes.

She drove to other precincts in the district. The poll tapes there showed the same thing. By the morning of May 25, her campaign team had photographed more than a dozen poll tapes, all showing impossible numbers — zero votes for a candidate who had received over 2,000 votes in early voting and whose support in those neighborhoods was demonstrable.

The unofficial summary that night put her in third place. After three days of campaign-led pressure, a hand recount of all 40 District 2 precincts, and a delayed certification battle, the corrected results showed her in first place with 43% — qualifying for and ultimately winning the runoff. The cause turned out to be a configuration mismatch between the touchscreen ballot marking devices (running a three-candidate program after a withdrawal) and the precinct scanners (still expecting four candidates), introduced by a programming patch pushed mid-cycle. At 32 of 40 precincts, every Election Day vote for Spears had been recorded as a vote for the candidate above her on the scanner’s reading map.

The error was caught because the candidate herself drove to her own precinct, looked at the tape, and recognized that what it said was impossible.

Read the full case study →

This is what Actual Vote does, and this is the workflow it is built to systematize. If you are a candidate, you may be the only person who can catch certain kinds of errors against your own campaign — and you deserve a tool that lets you do it without the precinct-to-precinct drive Spears had to make on a deadline, alone, in the dark.

What Actual Vote does for your campaign

If you’re running for office or managing a campaign, you already know that the integrity of vote counting and reporting isn’t just an abstract principle — it directly determines whether the person with the most support actually takes office.

Actual Vote gives you and your supporters a concrete, legal, non-partisan way to independently verify that vote reporting in your race was done correctly.

A candidate’s unique detection advantage. No one else in the world has the information you have about your own race. You know who your supporters are, where they live, which precincts you targeted, and — at the most basic level — who voted for you in your own household. When a poll tape says zero votes for you in a precinct where you and your spouse cast ballots for you, you are positioned to recognize the impossibility instantly. Other observers might shrug at small precinct totals; you cannot, because you know better. Actual Vote turns that knowledge into evidence that anyone can verify, by aggregating the precinct-by-precinct tape data your team and supporters capture into a single picture you can compare against your campaign’s expectations in real time.

Protection against post-election disputes. If your race is close and the results are challenged, having independent Actual Vote recordings from precincts in your district provides a second source of evidence about what the vote totals should be. This is valuable whether you won or lost — it either supports the official result or gives you grounds to question it, based on actual evidence rather than speculation.

A proactive transparency posture. Encouraging your supporters to use Actual Vote sends a clear signal: you believe in transparent elections and you’re willing to put independent verification behind that belief. This is a differentiator — especially in races where your opponent may be making unsubstantiated claims about election integrity.

Mobilization beyond voting. Your supporters are already energized. Actual Vote gives them something to do on election night beyond waiting for results. It channels that energy into an activity that directly serves the integrity of your race.

Evidence that holds up. Actual Vote recordings are timestamped, geolocated, and publicly archived. The underlying methodology — batch comparison auditing — is peer-reviewed and endorsed by the Election Assistance Commission, Verified Voting, and the Brennan Center. If it ever comes down to a legal challenge, this is evidence with a foundation.

How campaigns typically use Actual Vote

During the campaign: Identify which precincts in your district are most important to cover (close races, historically contested areas, high-population precincts, your own home precinct). Recruit and organize supporters to record poll tapes on election night using the Actual Vote app. America Counts can provide a training session for your volunteer team.

Election night (in states where poll tapes are posted publicly, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania): Your Actual Vote volunteers visit their assigned polling places after closing and record the posted poll tapes. Your campaign team monitors the aggregated tape data as it comes in, comparing it against your campaign’s own precinct-level expectations. This is separate from your poll watching operation, though poll watchers can also use Actual Vote.

In states where tapes aren’t posted on election night (like Texas): Instead of election night recording, your volunteers schedule an appointment with the local elections office to video-record poll tapes in bulk after election day. This approach yields broader coverage (potentially all precincts in a county) though with a slightly later chain of custody.

Check our state-by-state guide to see which approach works in your district.

After the election: America Counts analyzes the recordings and publishes findings. If the results confirm accurate reporting: you have independent evidence backing the official outcome. If discrepancies are found: you have the evidentiary foundation for a challenge, should one be warranted.

What candidates can catch that nobody else can

Most of Actual Vote’s case for independent verification is about catching errors at the reporting layer — the chain that runs from a precinct’s printed poll tape through aggregation and into the officially published total. AV’s standard workflow compares the tape against the official result, and any disagreement between the two flags an error somewhere in that chain. This is the core methodology.

Candidates have an additional capability that goes beyond the standard comparison.

A poll tape is not just a document to be compared against an official result. It is a public statement about what the scanner counted at a precinct. If that statement is on its face impossible — for example, zero votes for a candidate in the precinct where the candidate herself voted — then the tape itself is identifiable as wrong, even before any comparison is run. The kind of error that produces this signature is a counting-layer error: a problem inside the scanner, upstream of the tape, that produces a wrong number at the moment the tape prints. Counting-layer errors are not what AV’s standard comparison is built to catch; the standard tape-vs-result check would find both numbers wrong in the same way and report no discrepancy.

But candidates know things no one else knows. You know that you voted for yourself. You know who lives at your address. You know which precincts you and your campaign expended effort in, and where your support is. The DeKalb case is the proof of concept: the affected candidate spotted the error because she knew the most basic possible piece of ground truth — that there were at least two votes for her in her own precinct — and the tape said otherwise.

Any candidate, in any race, in any AV-active jurisdiction, can perform the same check. The aggregated AV data lets you see the tape numbers from every precinct your volunteers covered. You can compare those numbers against what you know about your support, against the early-voting numbers, against the tapes from precincts where you have ground truth. Anomalies that no one outside your campaign would notice become visible immediately.

This is an additive capability rather than a replacement for the standard AV comparison. It works only when counting-layer errors are large or patterned enough to be visible against ground truth — a subtler manipulation might escape detection. But it is real, and the DeKalb case demonstrates that it is sometimes the only thing standing between a counting-layer error and an incorrect election outcome. We documented this nuance in our Case Study Methodology and again in Case Study 19: DeKalb County, Georgia, 2022.

This works regardless of outcome

One of the most important things to understand about Actual Vote is that it’s equally valuable whether you win or lose.

If you win and the loser alleges fraud or error, Actual Vote recordings that confirm accurate reporting are powerful evidence that the result is legitimate. Your win is defended by independent data, not just official counts.

If you lose and you have reason to believe the reporting was inaccurate, Actual Vote recordings give you something specific to point to — a concrete discrepancy between the poll tape totals and the official results, or a poll tape number that is impossible against what you know — rather than making vague allegations. Courts respond to evidence, not suspicion.

If you lose and the reporting was accurate, Actual Vote recordings help you accept the result with confidence and move on. That’s valuable too.

If you appear to lose but actually won — the Spears case — Actual Vote may be the only mechanism by which the error is caught in time to matter.

Common questions from campaigns

“Won’t this make us look like we don’t trust the system?” No — it makes you look like you take election integrity seriously enough to invest in independent verification. This is the same principle behind financial audits: nobody thinks a company is suspicious for being audited. They’d think it was suspicious if it resisted auditing.

“Is this legal?” Yes. Recording poll tapes in public areas is legal and protected. The poll tape data is public information. Your volunteers aren’t accessing anything they’re not entitled to see.

“What if the other side uses Actual Vote too?” Good. That’s how the system is designed to work. If both campaigns independently verify vote reporting and the findings agree, that’s an exceptionally strong confirmation of accuracy. Actual Vote is structurally resistant to partisan abuse — it can only produce honest evidence about what the vote totals actually were.

“We already have poll watchers. How is this different?” Poll watchers observe the process. Actual Vote volunteers record specific data — the vote totals on poll tapes — that can later be compared against official results, and that can be inspected immediately for impossible-on-their-face numbers. They’re complementary. In fact, your poll watchers may be able to record poll tapes during the closing procedure, giving you even stronger chain-of-custody evidence.

“Does America Counts share our data with anyone?” All Actual Vote recordings are publicly archived at av.democracycounts.org — that’s a feature, not a risk. The data is public information (poll tape vote totals and official results). There’s nothing in the recordings that could be used against your campaign. The transparency is what gives the findings their credibility.

“What if I just want to spot-check my own precincts personally?” You can. The Spears case is the model: a candidate visiting her own precinct, photographing the publicly posted tape, and recognizing an impossible number. The Actual Vote app makes this easier — your photo gets timestamped, geolocated, and added to a public archive — but the underlying capability is one any candidate can use. We strongly recommend doing this for at least your home precinct and any precinct where you have firm knowledge of how the result should look. It costs ten minutes and provides the single best detection point your campaign has access to.

A note on capacity and self-analysis

America Counts is a small organization. We dedicate resources to analyzing as many recordings as we can before the election certification deadline, and we naturally prioritize close races where errors in vote reporting have the biggest potential impact. We may not be able to analyze every recording from every campaign that uses Actual Vote.

But here’s the thing: because all Actual Vote recordings and official results are public information, your campaign can do the comparison analysis yourselves. Some campaigns have done exactly this. You don’t need to wait for America Counts — your data team can pull up the recordings from av.democracycounts.org, download the official results from the county website, and run the comparison independently.

This is also true of the candidate-knows-best detection mode described above. You don’t need our analysis to recognize that a poll tape from your home precinct shows zero votes for you when you voted for yourself. That’s a check you can run on the spot, the moment the tape is posted, with nothing more than the photograph and your own knowledge of who voted in your household.

If your race turns out to be a comfortable margin, the urgency of analysis is lower. But if it turns out to be a nail-biter with accusations flying — and you didn’t have poll tape recordings to analyze — you’d have missed the chance to have independent evidence when it mattered most. The recordings cost a few hours of volunteer time. Not having them when you need them costs much more.

Get started

Contact America Counts to discuss how to integrate Actual Vote into your campaign’s election night operations. We can brief your campaign manager, train your volunteer team, and help you identify priority precincts.

For the full background on how the system works: Start Here.