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It's bad enough that millions of Americans don't trust our electoral system, argues the leader of a nonpartisan nonprofit tech group that has some ideas about how to fix things.
"Worse yet trust in our elections has eroded to the point that it is possible for an autocrat to mobilize a significant proportion of our population to support a suspension of democratic institutions," contends Dan Wolf, the founder and CEO of Democracy Counts. He also has served as a member of an election monitoring mission to Nicaragua and a senior adviser to the US Senate election monitoring mission to Taiwan.
I bet the points Wolf makes sound familiar to many readers.
Fortunately, though, there is a potential solution for rebuilding trust: "high-quality, independent verification, in the form of audits that will stand up in the court of public opinion, produce data that will stand up in court when necessary, and be conducted even in the face of opposition by election officials with something to hide."
"Just saying 'trust me' more often is not sufficient anymore," insists Wolf, a Harvard-trained attorney.
That's where Democracy Counts enters, stage left, right, and center. The San Diego-based organization has developed an app called "Actual Vote" that lets citizens independently audit the reporting of the vote count on election night. Anyone can download the free "flagship app" for Apple or Android.
It's already been tested in numerous places around the country, including in all three 2020 elections in Broward County, a Democratic stronghold in Florida with a reputation for problem-plagued election nights. That reputation may explain why residents of the second-most populous Florida county formed Citizens Audit Broward in partnership with Democracy Counts.
The local Florida organization didn't waste any time getting to work. Volunteers documented discrepancies in vote totals that the government reported in the 2020 presidential and local primaries as well as the general election.
Those citizen sleuths gathered data by downloading Actual Vote to their devices, then shooting videos of the poll tapes that display the final vote count at polling stations. That information was then securely transferred to Democracy Counts for storage and analysis.
The results were not enough to change an election outcome, but the beta test proved a point: Citizen auditors, fanning out across the land, can produce data that serves as a check on the vote counts government agents report to the public.
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