Dan’s organization Democracy Counts has created an app designed for any US citizen to easily participate in a crowdsourced, independent audit of today’s election. Will this idea prevent local election authorities from skimming votes and turning elections over to their preferred candidates? And more importantly, is that cool?
“It allows anybody to go to their polling place… take a picture of the polling tape and push a button” to submit their precinct’s official results to independent auditors after the election closes.
Actual Vote can be downloaded through Apple’s App Store or Google Play
Listen to Dan’s submission featured in Episode 73 of How Cool Is This? and read a transcript of the full episode below:
Dan: I'm Dan Wolf, I'm the Founder and CEO of Democracy Counts, Inc. It's a nonprofit tech startup. It's been starting up for five years. We build apps with mobile software that empower ordinary Americans to conduct independent audits of their own local elections in order to hold the local election authorities accountable so that they can be sure that their votes have been counted and reported accurately.
Actual Vote is our premier app. It allows anybody to go to their polling place when the elections have closed, and if they're in a state where the counting is done at the polling place, which is true for 46 out of 50 states, they take a picture of the polling tape and they push a button for submit… and it comes up to our central servers. We then transcribe that information it's available publicly.
Anybody can look at it, and we compare it against official results. If there are any differences between the official results and the polling tapes that they purport to represent, then that's a discrepancy that's got to be explained. They may innocent discrepancies. They may be not-so-innocent discrepancies. Whatever they are, they need to be explained, because the election is the foundation of our democracy.
And if the wrong person takes office because of some kind of shenanigans, then we are committing an abuse on our system of government… and that's something that judges have got to react to. So it's kind of like we are pulling an easy trigger in order to get the judges to pull a tough trigger.
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Brian: Okay. Nick, Dan Wolf has made an app with his company, Democracy Counts. How cool is this?
Nick: This sounds like a pretty cool app to me, and I'm really stingy with my apps. But this one makes the process of checking results from your local polling place easier than ever before. You just have to take a picture and upload it to this database where they double check with the published results.
Brian: In general apps, I agree, are a little just like, “Oh, I made an app.” It's like, “I made a podcast,” like, “all right, dude, no cares.” But this is really important. This is actually an app that can help people.Nick: This, to me, doesn't seem like a whole lot of extra effort to really like double check something, or create an election system that actually works for everybody, which is a big deal.
Brian: Yeah, it's cool when the votes are represented accurately. It's not cool when someone cheats and then wins a sham election.
Nick: I don't think that has ever been cool or will ever be cool.
Brian: But it's also not cool to just willy-nilly throw out like, “Ooh, this might happen.” This actually provides evidence.
Nick: As many times as we've done this before as a nation, human error can still creep in and cause some discrepancies. And I don't think we're trying to shame any of those people either. It's just like a, “Hey, let's just double check real quick before we make some decisions that are going to change the future of our country.”
Brian: Yeah. And he mentioned that this organization has been working on this app for five years. It is not something that they said, “Oh, hey, this current administration is going to cheat. Let's figure out a way to stop them.” It sounds like it's something that is meant more holistically.
Nick: It doesn't seem like part of the #resistance grift.
Brian: I do think that it's cool that it's not asking everybody to download an app. It's just asking one person in a 5,000 person precinct to go to the election site that they're probably already at and take a picture. And then it's cool that it's going to make all that information transparent and public.
Nick: Most people are already going to take a selfie with their “I Voted” sticker anyway, because that's just kind of standard election day content. So why not take another picture of the poll tape to make sure that what you voted for actually will get counted?
Brian: It's cool to feel like you can do something. Because I feel like I have felt very powerless and I'm sure other people have felt powerless last couple of years or years before. And this is something that you can do easily, and that's cool.
Nick: National elections can make people feel like they don't really matter. So this is a way where you can have an impact.
Brian: And if you're waiting around for the poll tapes to post, you can listen to 20 episodes of this podcast, or one Joe Rogan Experience.
Nick: I think this is a little bit cooler, but that's just me.
Brian: Yeah, we're not going to have Alex Jones on, unless he submits. We'll take anybody... and how cool is that?
Nick: Pretty cool.
To participate in this crowdsourced election audit, download Actual Vote in the App Store or Google Play.
It’s worth noting — this audit can only gather legitimate evidence on effective machines If the voting machines are tarnished, which is possible and addressed in Episode 74 of How Cool Is This?, then Dan says it’s “Garbage in, garbage out.”
We’re running daily episodes featuring your ideas about voting, democracy, and politics until the US presidential election is decided. To get your idea on the show, leave us a voicemail at (848) 863-9917.
Listen to a 5 minute episode of How Cool Is This? on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere else you find podcasts.