Reproduce the result
The test this area is built around, stated so that it can fail:
An outside team, using only the public record, reproduces the official result.
Read the words narrowly, because each of them is doing work.
What each word rules out
- Outside — not the administering authority, and not anybody the administering authority chose.
- Team — plural, independent, and ideally including people who wanted the other outcome.
- Only the public record — no special access, no permission, no briefing, no login somebody has to grant.
- Reproduces — arrives at the same numbers by doing the work, not by being shown the work.
- The official result — the actual certified figures, not a sample or a summary.
Observing the process is not this test. Being briefed is not this test. Having a bipartisan panel sign off is not this test.
Failing it is a real finding, and not the finding people expect
An election that cannot be reproduced has not been shown to be wrong. It has been shown to be unverifiable, which is a different, separate and serious thing.
Keeping those two apart is the entire integrity of this area. Conflating them — treating unverifiable as stolen — is how a legitimate demand for checkable elections gets turned into a claim that can be dismissed, and it has happened to this argument repeatedly in both directions.
What this movement will never do
Certify who won any particular election. Not now, not later, on any door.
The moment a citizen platform starts declaring winners it becomes one more party asking to be trusted, and it forfeits the only thing that made it useful. We publish the method, the data and the gaps. The conclusion is the citizen's.
What a citizen can check without permission
With public data and open code, a person can compare published totals against published detail in their own jurisdiction, follow the arithmetic, and see exactly where the record runs out. That last part is usually the most informative — see Audits and open gaps and Naming the gaps.
Also in this area
- Open-source voting technology — what makes reproduction possible.
- Audits and open gaps — how the gaps stay visible.