How Candidates Can Use Actual Vote
Your campaign is important. Our Actual Vote system can help defend it against false accusations of error or fraud in vote reporting.
Hi candidates!
We’re America Counts, a non-partisan non-profit organization dedicated to making apps that help force elections to be trustworthy.
Here’s why you should harness the power of our vote report auditing app, Actual Vote, in the upcoming election.
As you are probably aware, vote reporting in the US is vulnerable to error and fraud:
- Humans can make mistakes when tabulating
- Thumb drives and tabulating computers can get corrupted or make mistakes
- Bad actors can intentionally misreport results
- Computer software can be maliciously altered to misreport the results
In previous elections we’ve observed anomalies like the following, that could definitely be explained by error or fraud in vote reporting:
- Exit polls differing significantly from official totals
- Unexplained partisan swings in results compared to prior years
- Sudden suspicious shifts in officially reported totals in close races during or after tabulation
You can also check out this page of ours, that has six real stories about how vote reporting can go wrong, and how Actual Vote can help.
Elections are too important to tolerate such vulnerabilities. It’s critical for US society that we be able to trust the official results.
That’s why we created Actual Vote. Actual Vote is our app that enables independent citizen-led vote report auditing, which improves transparency and accuracy in vote reporting. You can learn all about how the app works in our Get Started! section.
When you invest money, time, and personnel into using Actual Vote to strategically audit the vote reporting in your election, you:
- Enhance trust in the results, where trust is warranted
- Help defend against bad-faith accusations of election fraud from your opponent and their political party
- Are able to expose and repair problems in the reporting of votes in your election, should they exist, and whatever the truth might be
Here’s Actual Vote in action.
An Actual Vote user is at a polling place on election night. Two poll tapes are posted. They’ve taken out their phone, opened up the Actual Vote app, and are ready to record.
They carefully video-record both tapes so that the numbers are in-focus and legible.
Their poll tape videos will appear on our poll tape archive website. Then, your campaign analysis can pull up shots like this, transcribe the totals, and compare to the officially reported totals. You can also work with America Counts to have us do this analysis process for you.
How to use Actual Vote for your campaign
First, find out how poll tapes work in your state by consulting our handy guide.
If you are in a state like Florida or Georgia that posts poll tapes on election night, here’s what you can do:
- Get a team of Actual Vote users together—staffers, volunteers, poll workers… whoever has an hour or two to go out on election night and record poll tapes
- Have them each follow the steps on the page How to Be an Actual Vote Hero
- Make a plan for which voting locations to record. You may wish to strategically choose these locations
- Let America Counts know you’ve put a team together! We can help out with the details
- Send your team out on election night to video-record poll tapes with Actual Vote
- The data you capture can be compared with the officially reported results, and you get all of the benefits cited above
If you’re in a state like Texas where tapes aren’t usually posted on election night, you won’t send people out on election night to record tapes. Instead, you’ll have them make an appointment with the local Elections Office to video-record the poll tapes in bulk onsite after election day. (Of course, this isn’t strictly as good as election night recordings, since this isn’t the beginning of the chain of custody. But you reap almost exactly the same benefits from using Actual Vote in this case as in the case above.)
Now, at this point, you’re probably wondering how the comparison step will get done.
Of course, your team may certainly download the officially reported results and do the comparison themselves. In fact, anyone can, because at that point, the poll tape data and the official results are all public information.
America Counts will dedicate resources to helping as many Actual Vote users as we can with the comparison step, though we will naturally prioritize users in tight races where errors and fraud in vote reporting have the biggest impact. We may also be able to recruit volunteers from our network to help as well.
But we’re a small organization, and we can’t guarantee we will be able to help everyone. It’s possible that if you
- send a team out to take recordings,
- your race turns out to be a landslide
- there’s lower-than-average suspicion of errors and fraud in the vote reporting for your race, and
- your team gets busy with other stuff after election day,
that your poll tape recordings won’t be analyzed.
But if your race turns out to be a hotly-contested nail-biter with a razor-thin margin and accusations of fraud flying around and you didn’t have poll tape recordings to analyze, you’d miss out on the opportunity to harness the power of Actual Vote to independently check the accuracy of vote reporting in your election.
So we highly encourage you to use Actual Vote in your race. You deserve trustworthy vote reporting. With Actual Vote, you can create it for yourself!