Citizens Oversight
Home

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.

Special Projects

Auditing the 2026 General Election with AuditEngine

Our top priority is to audit the November 3, 2026 General Election with AuditEngine. AuditEngine processes every ballot image and compares our independent reading of each ballot with the Cast Vote Record from the voting system.

We are asking for ballot images and Cast Vote Records where contests are close, or where questions have been raised about the count. As of 2026-11-11 we have sent 17 records requests, to counties in Florida, Mississippi, Ohio and New York. Three counties have acknowledged them. No records have arrived yet.

Our top target is Alaska. The U.S. Senate contest there is extremely close, and it uses Ranked Choice Voting. We have offered the Division of Elections a full audit, with grant funding already in hand: Offer To Audit The 2026 General Election Using Ballot Images

The full list of letters and requests, with the status of each, is on this topic. It is updated as they go out and as offices reply.

Read more here: Auditing the 2026 General Election

Audits of Prior Elections

Citizens' Oversight audits elections from their ballot images, with AuditEngine. AuditEngine reads every ballot image on its own, then compares its reading with the voting system's cast vote record, ballot by ballot.

Below are the elections audited so far, where each audit stands, and links to its reports. Several earlier audits are being run again with improved software, and some will get amended reports.

Read more here: Audits of Prior Elections

Recent Projects

Recent Substack Articles

Date Article
2026-10-07 California’s Voter ID Fluster-Cluck
2026-07-29 Seizure: Trump's predictable move in the 2026 midterms and how we can recover
2026-06-17 Ten Years After Our Lawsuit, San Diego County Finally Expanded Mail Ballot Audit Coverage from 58% to 88%
2026-05-09 Election Transparency Progress in Pennsylvania -- baby steps.
2026-04-19 Detecting Ghost Ballots: Noninvasive Inventory

All articles: Substack Articles

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
Attachments
NameSizeDate
sixthgrader_on_obama267x150.jpg 19451 26 Jun 2014
HowToVideoRecordMeetings200x100.jpg 14644 26 Jun 2014
JimBellSRPL2-286x150.jpg 27314 26 Jun 2014
CA_Democratic_Convention_2007-200x150.jpg 21095 26 Jun 2014
ScahillAtProtest200x150.jpg 16467 26 Jun 2014
COPS-Brochure-V5.pdf 142298 26 Jun 2014
StopBlackwaterWestMarch200x150.jpg 24066 26 Jun 2014
SnapshotProtocolEventHeader_v2.jpg 204389 10 Oct 2014
AnnAtRiversideBOS-200x150.jpg 16104 26 Jun 2014
AnnWestonInRiverside200x148.jpg 14605 26 Jun 2014
EyesOpenHeader.png 105018 08 Nov 2016
REVOKE_PERMIT_FOR_WASTE_DUMP.jpg 96789 22 Mar 2017
PressConf200x150.jpg 24310 12 Nov 2017
HelmsMeme..jpg 141594 16 Nov 2017
HelmsPetitionMeme.jpg 141594 16 Nov 2017
crowdwatch_text2_xxhdpi_vert.png 67677 19 Oct 2020
CrowdWatch_logo.png 102533 19 Oct 2020
AuditEngineLogo.png 71748 19 Oct 2020

View MD Edit MD Attach