Yes, someone may be tampering with your vote! Citizens can use Poll Tape Capture to review election results at the polling station before the tapes are taken away and corrupted by officials.
Bev Harris, an activist who fights against vote-tampering, often travels to vulnerable polling sites to help locals. Harris founded the nonprofit called Black Box Voting. When Georgia changed its voting to all-touchscreen, she recommended Poll Tape Capture in 2012.
Ms. Harris writes: “The state of Georgia has installed a results-reporting middleman for all Georgia counties. What this means is that all voting machine aggregations will be electronically transferred to the state before reporting them to the public. This process allows middleman alteration by persons at the state level.”
Ms. Harris urges citizens to fan out, capture poll tape results, and compare it to the state-gathered results. Further, “it is crucial to take photographs or video, not just notes, because if there are discrepancies, your say-so won't prove anything.”
The guidelines for Poll Tape Capture are outlined below. Garland Favorito, Elections Director of the Constitution Party, author of Our Nation Betrayed, and founder of VoterGA, made the following announcement in an email, in which he bullets the actions citizens must take to protect their votes.
CRITICAL: ELECTION DAY REPORTING
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2012
VoterGa Supporters,
The Secretary of State has implemented a new statewide reporting system that will report election results for all counties. Each county will no longer report its own results online but will instead have their websites link to the state website that will report uploaded results for that county. The results will be uploaded from the county servers to the state server before any hard copy reports are produced at the county election office. Therefore, the county servers must utilize their remote connection to report interim results prior to producing final county results. As you can probably recognize, this exasperates a potential vulnerability where remote tampering with county election results could take place prior to county reports being produced. It represents another security risk in an election counting and reporting system that is already riddled with security flaws.
- Have representatives present as observers at selected precincts just before 7pm when the polls close (author's note: polls close at different times throughout the country).
- Observe and record the precinct and/or machine totals for the candidate or referendum.
- Visit other precincts as necessary to get more totals that will be visibly posted on the door of the precinct when the precinct workers leave.
- Visit the county office(s) around 9 pm to view an election results report when the report is printed by the office.
- Verify that the totals from the precincts and counties are incorporated correctly into the state totals on the county website.
The county website may not be available in the county office lobby so the observer may have to use a smart phone browser to access the county site from within the lobby.
Garland Favorito, Voterga.org
For more information about Poll Tape Capture and taking video footage at the polls, refer to the following:
When activists were worried that votes wouldn’t get counted correctly to pass Proposition 37 in 2012, the labeling of GMOs in California, they recommended poll tape capture and videotaping, along with instructions here: https://www.organicconsumers.org/old_articles/letter-11-5.htm or just google "Poll Tape Capture."
Election Defense Alliance, a nonpartisan nonprofit, gives voters a comprehensive toolkit for verifying votes at your polling location here: http://electiondefensealliance.org/?q=verified_voting_transparency_project_election_monitoring_checklists
To learn how to observe the polls for a measure of election integrity, watch this video prepared by the Institute for American Democracy and Election Integrity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2kSACBfaJQ It's called “Observing California 2012 Election handbook and Video instruction” with Lori Grace.
At Video the Vote dot org (http://www.videothevote.org/resources/), a grassroots organization that organizes videotaping the polls, you can learn how to document long lines, intimidation, and other obstructions to voting. John Ennis’s documentary film called Free for All will enlighten even the most adamant denier of election shenanigans.