How To Be an Actual Vote Hero
New to America Counts? Check out the Overview.
What is an Actual Vote Hero?
An Actual Vote Hero is anyone who visits at least one polling place in their area on election night to video-record poll tapes with Actual Vote. It’s the quickest and easiest way to use Actual Vote.
If you’d like to be an Actual Vote Hero, follow the steps on this page.
You can be an Actual Vote Hero even if you can only commit one hour to visit one polling place and record one tape. Join our non-partisan nationwide team of citizen auditors!
Why This is Important
Actual Vote Heroes help democracy because their poll tape recordings preserve information about election-day vote totals right when they’re tabulated.
In many cases, these totals will be correctly reported, but in others, there may be error or fraud in the reporting that would ordinarily go undetected.
When America Counts gets lots of poll tape recordings from Actual Vote Heroes, that data can be compared against the officially reported totals to double-check the accuracy of the vote reporting. Without Actual Vote Heroes, this double-checking couldn’t be done.
Double-checking vote reporting is a big win for democracy!
Steps for Being an Actual Vote Hero
To be an Actual Vote Hero, you need to be in a place where poll tapes are posted at voting locations on election night so you can video-record them with Actual Vote.
If you aren’t in such a place, you don’t have the option of being an Actual Vote Hero. But you can participate in other ways.
Go to our Actual Vote State Select page and click your state to see what America Counts has already found out about how poll tapes work in your state and county. If our research shows that you can be an Actual Vote Hero in your area, we’ll clearly state it.
We also give contact info for your state and county election officials. If our research is inconclusive for your state or county, consider calling your officials and asking if poll tapes are posted on election night. If they are, you are warmly encouraged to be an Actual Vote Hero in your area!
In fact, even if America Counts has determined that you can indeed be an Actual Vote Hero in your area, it can’t hurt to call and confirm anyway! That way you can be extra sure.
Here are the prerequisites:
- You have an iOS or Android device that can take video-recordings (like a phone or tablet)
- You are able to safely visit polling places on election night (usually by car) and potentially interact with poll workers and other people
- You are willing to dedicate at least an hour or two to planning before election night and video-recording on election night
If you answered “Yes” to all of these, go on to Step 3. If not, being an Actual Vote Hero may not be a good fit for you. You can always consider contributing in some other way.
- Download Actual Vote for iOS or Actual Vote for Android
- Read the iOS instructions or Android instructions for using Actual Vote
- Practice video-recording with our Practice Poll Tape
- Let America Counts know you plan to be an Actual Vote Hero
- Tell your friends and family
- Post about America Counts and Actual Vote on social media
- Consider rating Actual Vote in the App Store or Google Play Store
- Consider donating to America Counts
- Find out when the polls close in your area and add on maybe an hour or so for poll workers to finish closing the polls and posting the tapes. If you have reason to believe that there were many voters still in line when the polls closed, it may take even longer for the tapes to finally be posted. Choose the start time for your plan accordingly
- Visit your state and county elections webpages (on our Actual Vote page for your state) to find a list of polling places near you. You might have to look around a bit to find this
- Choose one or more of these polling places and decide what order to visit them when you go out. The more polling places you visit, the more great poll tape data you collect, but the longer your Actual Vote run will take
- Don’t worry if you don’t have time later to do the work of comparing the data you collect to the officially reported results—just going out and video-recording one or more poll tapes is already a huge contribution! This is because the data you preserve on your recordings wouldn’t be available at all if you hadn’t decided to be an Actual Vote Hero! America Counts and our team of volunteers will be looking closely at all of this Actual Vote data that comes in. If we get so many recordings that it strains our resources, that’s a good problem to have!
- At your planned start time, begin your Actual Vote run
- Visit each polling place on your list, find where the poll tapes are posted, and take clear, legible video-recordings of each of them
- When you’re back at home (or anywhere with a good internet connection), go to the “My Recordings” area and make sure all of your videos have been uploaded. If any haven’t, retry the upload process
That’s all you have to do to be an Actual Vote Hero! Now you’re part of a nationwide team that will improve accuracy and transparency in vote reporting. Thanks!
⟪ Back to Actual Vote Portal