How Actual Vote Works
Actual Vote is our app-based system for double-checking vote reporting. Here’s how it works.
On election day, many voters will show up in person at their polling place to vote on a voting machine, like like this ExpressVote machine from the Election Systems & Software company.
Others voters will have already done early voting or absentee voting.
Once voting is over, each precinct then needs to count all the votes that have come in from each voting method. This is also called tabulating the votes.
Almost all precincts in the US use tabulating machines to do this, like this DS200 machine made by Election Systems & Software.
A tabulating machine outputs its results in whichever formats are required by local law. This can include a USB drive with the results in electronic format.
It can also include printing poll tapes (also called results tapes or election tapes). A poll tape is a long strip of paper showing the tabulated results:
Poll tapes can look different depending on what county, voting equipment, and election they’re from, but they all contain the same basic information.
To learn more about poll tapes, let’s use a fictional place called “Crow County” as an example.
Here’s what a poll tape from Crow County looks like:
① The Header Section
This poll tape is from Crow County from the November 2022 Midterm election.
The Voting Location is Corvus 01.
The way things work Crow County, this means that this poll tape shows election day votes from the Corvus Hill Community Center voting precinct.
There will be three other poll tapes from this election—one from each of the three other in-person voting locations.
For simplicity, we’ll say that there was no Absentee or Early Voting in this specific election (if there were, there’d be poll tapes for both of these as well).
② Vote Total Section
This section is the most important. It shows that the only race in this precinct for this election was US Senate. (Poll tapes from real elections can contain dozens of races).
We can see that Gina Gold received 60 election day votes in this precinct, and Sam Silver received 40 election day votes.
Once all four precincts in Crow County have tabulated their votes and forwarded the results to the Crow County elections office, they are combined into official results for Crow County and released to the public.
This process is called vote reporting.
The official results should be completely consistent with the vote totals on the poll tapes, since they’re just different views of the same information.
Unfortunately, vote reporting in the US is vulnerable to error and fraud!
If we could somehow compare the vote totals on the poll tapes with the official results, we could check if they’re consistent with one another. If there were error or fraud in the vote reporting, this comparison could detect it!
This is where you come in!
With the Actual Vote app, you can help America Counts double-check the vote reporting in your area. This process is also called auditing the vote reporting.
This is a powerful and exiting way to help strengthen democracy, and a new and exciting way to participate in democracy!
With the Actual Vote app, you take video-recordings of poll tapes, like this:
Your videos are automatically uploaded to America Counts. This preserves the information on the poll tapes. Other users from your area and around the US do the same thing.
America Counts then uses our expert knowledge and AI-powered software to compare the numbers on your poll tape videos to the official results:
Most of the time, we find that all votes were reported correctly. In this case, your effort with Actual Vote helps to improve election transparency.
But every once in a while, we uncover an apparent discrepancy in vote reporting! At that point, we work with election administrators to try to explain the discrepancy. Often, this results in a satisfactory resolution.
If we ever couldn’t resolve the discrepancy this way, Actual Vote videos can be used as evidence in a court challenge to the official results that could force them to be restated.
In this case, your effort with Actual Vote can help to improve both election transparency and election accuracy.
To fully realize the election transparency impact of our Actual Vote analyses, we release reports of our findings, like this one from North Carolina’s 2024 Primary Election.