A process is transparent if we can observe its inner workings to see how the final result is achieved.

If I bake a cake in front of you, that baking process is highly transparent, since you’re watching me do each step leading up to the finished cake. On the other hand, the processes that got my flour, sugar, and eggs onto the store shelves are not as transparent, since we didn’t observe them and are not told anything about them.

Election transparency means the extent to which the individual procedures of an election are open to public scrutiny and receive legitimate independent audits.

In a highly transparent election, each process is independently audited, meaning that voters have a strong shared evidentiary basis upon which to formulate a belief about the accuracy of the election.

In a highly non-transparent election, even if votes were indeed counted and reported completely correctly behind the scenes, people won’t have a big enough “window of evidence” to look through to easily see this. In other words, it’ll be theoretically impossible to form a strong and full belief that everything was correct. At best, one could form only a weak and unsatisfying belief. This is unacceptable in a democracy.

Election transparency is very important. We deserve reasonable assurance that vote counting and vote reporting are done correctly, since these processes are vulnerable to error and fraud.

In practice, US elections should be more transparent than they are. Achieving this is hard, though, since our election systems are complicated, have widely varying procedures, and must strike a delicate balance between transparency with voter anonymity. While some such procedures are fairly transparent, many others take place behind closed doors, out of the view of the public. To top it off, doing proper election audits is difficult, time-consuming, and, provocative. This helps explain why US elections don’t receive sufficient audits.

Of course, many election authorities do certain kinds of self-audits, which add a welcome dose of transparency to the picture. But this isn’t a substitute for independent election audits—that is, audits by an entity other than the election authority itself. 

We learned this all too well when it was revealed that deadly Boeing plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 were partially caused by the government allowing Boeing itself to run much of their airplane certification process. The airplane certification process is supposed to be handled entirely by the FAA, of course, since they’re an independent entity with no bad incentives to cut corners to help Boeing’s bottom line. When Boeing lobbyists successfully got the rules bent to compromise the independence of this audit process, tragedy was the eventual result.

The lesson is that no matter the organization or industry, independent audits should be a non-negotiable part of the process of obtaining trustworthy evidence about the integrity of a high-stakes process. This is because independent audits provide transparency into the underlying procedures in a way that self-audits can’t. 

Since elections are high-stakes processes, they too should be independently audited. This is true despite the fact that it is certain that most all election administrators in the US are honest and hard-working professionals. 

America Counts thanks all of the honest and professional election administrators around the nation for their hard work on behalf of democracy. At the same time, since elections are ultra-high-stakes and vulnerable to error and fraud, we are inviting everyone to join us in conducting independent audits of vote reporting in as many states and precincts as possible. These audits will add transparency to the vote reporting process above and beyond what such election administrators could ever provide, since they are independent.

We created our Actual Vote app to make it as easy as possible for people like you to help bring about such transparency. When we go to the effort to video-record poll tapes and compare the data to the official results there are three basic outcomes:

1. It’s an exact match. The independent evidence we’ve created has increased transparency by helping to protect against potential false allegations of error or fraud in vote reporting. It also represents that in addition to the election officials’ hard work in reporting the votes correctly and accurately (as is our default expectation), but we still appreciate having independent confirmation of this fact, since elections are so high-stakes and are vulnerable to error and fraud
2. We discover apparent discrepancies that end up having a satisfactory explanation that election administrators provide when we ask about the apparent discrepancies. This can happen if there is undocumented reporting logic around reporting write-in votes, for example, which can make the results seem discrepant when in fact they are equivalent in a not-obvious way. Here, at the end of the day, we gain the transparency boost from point (1) since we end up with an exact match, but we also have made people aware of non-trivial details about how their votes are reported
3. We discover discrepancies for which we can’t find a satisfying explanation. Here, we’ve surfaced critical evidence that the vote reporting may indeed be inaccurate due to error or fraud. Without the transparency boost from our work, such evidence would have otherwise gone unnoticed. The next section describes how Actual Vote can improve election accuracy in this situation

Increasing election transparency, like we do with Actual Vote analyses, strengthens democracy by increasing the extent (on average) to which reasonable people can agree that the election in question properly realized its goal of expressing the will of the people. We can quantify the amount of transparency generated by an Actual Vote analysis using different metrics:

• Number of precincts covered
• Number of videos with transcribable poll tape data
• Number of vote total comparisons made
• Number of contest-choice combinations analyzed
• Total number of votes analyzed

Each of these metrics gives a different and useful way to view election transparency.