Citizens Oversight
Home
NOTICE: This is a static version of the wiki site. Please excuse our dust, not all features are operating, but response will be much faster. This site no longer support direct editing.

Citizens' Oversight Projects (COPs)

This web site is dedicated to enabling citizens to provide needed oversight to our democracy.

At present, Citizens Oversight is focused on ElectionIntegrity and on deploying AuditEngine. Our goal is to audit all elections, contests, and ballots independently.

Our most recent prior large project was the emergency shutdown and eventual closure of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. We are no longer providing intense oversight of that situation as we have already provided our best suggestions. All the information about that project is still on this site.

Special Projects

ATTENTION PA VOTERS

HearYeHearYe-PA-Volunteers-Needed.jpeg We have been worried about the results in 2024 in PA. Why? Well for one, they decided not to audit the presidential contest, and instead audit the State Treasurer's contest, which is obviously a much more important contest than the Harris/Trump contest.

Unlike other states, it was impossible to get to any election evidence like CAST VOTE RECORDS and BALLOT IMAGES, which we can use with our auditing platform, AuditEngine.

That is, until the PA Supreme Court ruling that made these records available. But there is a limitation. You have to be a voter in that county. So that's where you come in, if you live in PA. You can read a recent substack article on this subject here: Election Transparency Progress in Pennsylvania -- baby steps.

  • VOTERS: IF YOU CAN HELP:

  • Send email to signup@citizensoversight.org

  • Use subject: # PA AUDIT PROJECT

  • Please provide your Name, County, and email.

Other than that, we don't need you to do anything yet, but we might need to ask you to sign an affidavit certifying your county of residence in PA. If we have to file court cases, you can decide to participate at that time.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!!

AuditEngine

Citizens Oversight has been involved in election oversight, including audits and procedural review, since 2005. In 2019, announced an important project to create Ballot Image Audit service which can be used by election officials, campaigns, candidates, and oversight groups to audit any election that uses hand-marked paper ballots or touch-screen machines (Ballot Marking Devices, BMDs) that produce barcode and QRcode ballots. In fact, all modern voting machines create ballot images and process them this way. We are now working to deploy this solution nationally.

Realize that this sort of audit will check that the tabulation is correct. What it does not do is check that the corpus of ballots processed by the election are all from eligible voters, and that none were added or removed. That takes a chain-of-custody audit. We must additionally check that:

  • The set of voters who voted were all registered and properly eligible to vote.
  • The number of ballots received should be equal to the number of voters who voted.
  • The number of ballot images and Cast Vote Records should be consistent with the number of ballots received, and the number of voters who voted.
  • The chain-of-custody documents, such as the number of ballots received from the USPS each day, the number brought in from drop boxes, and the number of ballots from polling places, should all be consistent.

Election Audit Oversight

It is extremely important for citizens to participate in providing oversight of election audits, where election officials are auditing themselves. That's like asking people to flag down a police officer and ask for a ticket if you are speeding. Self-audits will rarely find anything because the people conducting the audits tend to "fix-up" the audit results innocently, not realizing that the audit samples should not be corrected.

Citizens' Oversight is expanding our election oversight scope to the entire US! However, we will be focused primarily on the TOP 175 counties in the nation, comprising more than 50% of registered voters, and then secondly turning our attention to the TOP 20% of the the top 20% of the states (i.e. the top ten states). At this point, we are most specifically focused on providing oversight to the audits in the top counties in CA and FL.

Risk Limiting Audit Research

Citizens Oversight has conducted Monte Carlo simulations of various types of audits that are based on a sample of ballots or batches of ballots. As a result, our recommendation is to focus primarily on Ballot Image Audits and use RLAs only to validate the images of consequential races.

  • BRAWL Whitepaper -- Balanced Risk Audit with Workload Limitation
    Learn about Risk Limiting Audits and compare them with Ballot Image Audits and more traditional Batch Comparison audits. We introduce a method that arose from our Monte Carlo simulation.

As a result of this analysis and our experience with the reality of how election officials cut corners and "fix-up" audits so the result looks clean, we have now decided that long-term RLA audits are not feasible. Read more:

EasyVoting Project

Citizens in our democracy should NOT be faced with ridiculous hurdles to be able to vote. In this project, we fight voter-suppression scams, such as:

  • Registration deadlines far ahead of the election.
  • Purging voters from rolls based on name similarities with people in other districts or on obituary lists.
  • Too-few voting locations with limited capacity.
  • Long lines at polling places.
  • High registration documentation requirements or with partisan bias.
  • Confusing information sent out about the date of the election or location.

Visit the project page: EasyVoting

StopNukeDump -- Deal with the 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste at Camp Pendleton

We took the California Coastal Commission and Southern California Edison (SCE) to court, and we reached a settlement where they had to work to move the waste to a new location. This also meant that unfortunately, they will continue to move the waste into the ridiculous facility only about 100 ft from the water and literally inches over the high-water mark.

Here is some references about our lawsuit and the result.

We are now promoting two main solutions:

Pendleton Option

MoveTheWasteBanner

The HELMS Proposal

HelmsMeme.jpg

General Overviews

Latest News Releases from CitizensOversight

Visit the PressRoom for all news releases from CitizensOversight

LATEST Publications from CitizensOversight

News Releases can be found at PressRoom. These are other documents such as white papers, research and letters. Click CitizensOversight for all publications and news releases.

PressRoom | [[Common.CitizensOversight][All Publications from Citizens' Oversight]] | [[Common.NewsMedia][All Submitted Media]]

Projects

See Common.COPsProgram for a list of all projects and an overview of our project concept.

Collaboration Areas

References and Resources

Metadata