Why Actual Vote is Trustworthy
It’s easy to find claims about election audits and election integrity. Not all of these claims are trustworthy.
Now America Counts is inviting you to participate with Actual Vote… but why should you believe that the process is trustworthy?
- Actual Vote uses only public information.
Poll tapes are like books at a public library—the information is open to the public if you do the correct steps to access it.
An Actual Vote analysis for a given election in a given county requires only two things:
- Video-recordings of poll tapes from that election and county with the Actual Vote app
- The officially reported results for that county
It is generally legal to observe and video-record poll tapes. And the vote totals on the poll tapes are public information. That’s why they can be displayed in public at polling places after the polls close. When one video-records a poll tape with the Actual Vote app, one is merely making these public totals more easily available to a wider number of people.
And, of course, anyone can download the officially released results from the county website. If the vote reporting was done accurately, these numbers should match exactly to the numbers on the corresponding poll tapes.
The point is that to do an Actual Vote analysis, one doesn’t need any kind of private information that could be abused for partisan gain.
One also doesn’t need access to sensitive parts of the election procedure like the tabulation or the vote reporting process itself, where one might be able to attack the election.
Instead, an Actual Vote analysis is merely a strategic way of cross-referencing the public vote totals on the poll tapes from the beginning of the vote reporting process with the public vote totals on the officially reported results.
2. Any person can participate.
Everyone in this picture is invited to participate with Actual Vote in the next election. You are too!
There are three basic requirements for video-recording poll tapes with the Actual Vote app:
- Have a mobile device that can run the app—and nearly everyone these days has one
- Have a method of accessing poll tapes—and there’s at least one method available to everyone
- Be able to safely do this method (going out to record at polling places on election night, for example might be outside of some people’s risk tolerance, and not appropriate for people who are too young)
In particular,
- The app is free, so there’s no artificial cost barrier preventing people from using it
- There’s no training of any kind required, though America Counts offers helpful training to anyone who wants it (let us know if you want to schedule a session!)
- There are no partisan prerequisites—partisans of all stripes, and non-partisans alike are welcome to use the app
3. Anyone can double-check an Actual Vote analysis
If you find an error in this 2024 Actual Vote report of ours, please let us know!
Imagine a situation in which the vote reporting is fully accurate, but a partisan bad actor fabricates an Actual Vote analysis that they claim reveals an error in vote reporting that cost their candidate the election. Since all of the underlying data is public information, analysts from the other candidate’s campaign would be able to immediately look for any errors in that analysis by doing their own comparison of the underlying poll tape videos with the officially reported results.
And, of course, they’d find that the claim is false, because their Actual Vote analysis would easily show the actual truth, that the vote reporting was indeed fully accurate.
In this way, Actual Vote analyses are completely open to double-checking by candidates, campaigns, and the general public. In other words, they are highly transparent, which is a great property to have for something intended to help increase transparency in the vote reporting itself.
4. It would be difficult and inefficient for someone to use Actual Vote to attack an election
This contraption is a highly inefficient way to use a napkin.
We just saw that it’s easy to detect that an Actual Vote analysis has been done incorrectly. But are there other, hard-to-detect ways a partisan bad actor might abuse Actual Vote?
Of course, with any complicated system like an election auditing tool, there may, in principle, exist some convoluted scheme to commit fraud.
But in practice, the key fact is that even if a staunch partisan undertakes an Actual Vote project in a particular county with the sole motivation of helping their party in any way possible, the most they could accomplish with an Actual Vote analysis would be to generate independent evidence about what the vote reporting should be—regardless of how that impacts their party.
In particular, strongly partisan groups and campaigns are highly encouraged to use Actual Vote in areas where candidates of the opposing party are likely to win, since they will be highly motivated to verify that there were no errors in vote reporting that could have hurt their candidate. But regardless of what hypothesis they have at the outset, their Actual Vote analysis will only reveal the ground truth of what happened—that is, it will be strong evidence of what the vote reporting should be, regardless of of how it may impact their candidate.
For this reason, if a group of strong partisans were determined to attack the election to benefit their candidate, there’s simply not much they could realistically do with Actual Vote itself to accomplish this.
This is why America Counts is confident in making Actual Vote free and open to everyone—because using it can only have a neutral or positive impact on election transparency and accuracy.
For much more on this topic, see this essay.
Learn more!
Go back to the Get Started! page or go on to one of these pages:
- How Actual Vote Works
- Why You Should Care
- Make Your Actual Vote Plan
- The Benefits of Actual Vote
- Why Actual Vote is Trustworthy (you are here)
- Non-Partisan Election Advocacy
- Simple Example of an Actual Vote Analysis