A business gets audited whether or not anyone suspects fraud. Elections should too.
Nobody takes an annual audit as an insult. It is how owners, lenders and customers know the books are right. Audit Our Vote asks for the same habit in the one count that decides who governs.
Every election, every stateNot only the close ones, and not only when our side loses. A routine check is the opposite of a grudge.
Before certificationConfidence has to arrive before results are certified and before anyone takes office in January.
Supervised by every partyManagers from all parties watch each step from a public election station, so no one has to take the result on faith.
The plan
Check a sample first. Count everything if the sample fails.
The check is on whether people voted, never on whom they voted for. The secret ballot stays secret.
Draw 20,000 names
In every state, pull a random sample of 20,000 people from the list of voters recorded as having cast a ballot.
Confirm they voted
Election officials, with supervisors from all parties present, verify that each person on the list did vote. Nothing is asked about their choices.
Apply the 3% rule
If more than 3% of the sample, more than 600 people, say they did not vote, a complete audit of all votes cast in the election is mandatory.
Finish before certification
The sample check, and any full audit it triggers, is done before results are certified. Whether a state or Washington pays, the deadline holds.
0600 is the line1,200
What the plan still has to settle
How voters are reached. Mail and phone from the election office avoid the door-knocking that the Justice Department has warned can intimidate voters.
The baseline. Some people misremember or decline to answer, so a pilot should measure the normal error rate before 3% becomes law.
The scope of a full audit. A failed sample in one state could trigger that state, or the whole national election. The law has to say which.
Who pays. Each state or the federal government, but the audit should be public money, not private.
Where audits stand today
Every state has an audit on paper. Few have one that binds.
When Alabama's governor signed its audit law in April 2026, no state was left without a post-election audit process in law. What those laws require is another matter, and the trackers do not even agree on the count.
50states with a post-election audit process in law, by the National Conference of State Legislatures' count
44states plus D.C. that the Movement Advancement Project counts as actually requiring one
36states that require the "traditional" kind: a fixed share of machines or precincts, whatever the margin
16states that conduct risk-limiting audits, the statistical method closest to this plan
The closest thing that already exists
A risk-limiting audit, or RLA, hand-checks a random sample of paper ballots and keeps expanding, up to a full hand count, until the evidence supports the reported winner. Georgia, Virginia and Maryland finish theirs before results are certified, and Maryland's law says the audit result controls if the first count was wrong.
Compare Alabama's new law. Its audit covers one precinct per county, starts no sooner than 31 days after the election, and by the state's own description is not meant to change certified results. That is an audit in name. It cannot catch a wrong result in time to matter.
So the ask is simple: upgrade every state to a real, binding audit. An RLA proves the ballots were counted right. The 20,000-voter check adds the piece an RLA leaves out, which is proof that the ballots came from real voters who cast them.
Eleven national elections, 2006 through 2026. Power changed hands again and again, in both directions. Every one of those results deserved the same proof.
How the country voted for the U.S. House
All 435 House seats are on the ballot every two years, which makes the national House vote the best single measure of how many people voted for each party. Midterm years draw far fewer voters than presidential years.
DemocratsRepublicans2026, unofficial count
Congressmen: House seats won
DemocratsRepublicans
Senators: seats after each election
DemocratsRepublicans
Governors: states held
DemocratsRepublicans
Senate counts include independents who caucus with the Democrats. One governor was an independent after the 2010 through 2016 elections, so those years add to 49. Hollow markers and dashed lines mark 2026.
Presidents
Five presidential elections. The presidency goes to the Electoral College winner. In 2016 that was not the candidate with the most votes nationwide.
Year
Winner
Electoral votes
Winner's popular vote
Runner-up
Runner-up's popular vote
How many eligible voters showed up
Roughly six in ten vote for president. In midterms it has ranged from under four in ten to half.
Presidential yearMidterm year
2026 is left off: an early estimate put turnout near 125 million ballots, but the eligible-voter rate is not final.
The 2026 midterm, as counted so far
On Nov. 3, 2026, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, according to network projections, and flipped five governorships to hold a majority of states for the first time since 2010. As of Nov. 8 and 9 the unofficial count showed Democrats with about 55.7% of the national House vote to 42.8% for Republicans, at least 54 Senate seats with Alaska and Mississippi uncalled, and 28 governorships with Alaska and Kansas uncalled.
A conservative can dislike that result and still say this: it should be proven the same way a Republican win should be. That is the whole point.
Sources, 2006 to 2024: Clerk of the U.S. House, Statistics of the Congressional Election; Federal Election Commission; National Governors Association; University of Florida Election Lab (turnout, rounded). Sources, 2026 (unofficial, still changing): NBC News projections; CBS News; CNBC; Cook Political Report House vote tracker as quoted by ElectionsUSA; Popular Vote Analytics for House seats called or leading. These figures will be replaced with certified results.
The polls before Nov. 3, 2026
Polls are an estimate. Ballots are the evidence.
In the last month before the midterm, national polls put Democrats ahead for Congress by about 8 to 9 points. The unofficial count had them ahead by about 13. When the polls and the count differ, in either direction, the right answer is not suspicion. It is a routine audit that settles it.
Generic ballot for Congress, final month
Each row is one national poll asking which party's House candidate the voter would choose. The last three rows compare two polling averages with the votes counted so far.
Four arguments, written from a conservative point of view. Each one names what the left says in reply and lists the sources, so you can read them and judge.
Audit every election, the way every business is audited
Conservatives believe in checks on government power. Counting votes is government power at its most consequential, and it is the one place we are asked to accept the total without a receipt. A routine audit carries no accusation. It is what honest bookkeepers expect, and a clean audit is the best answer an election official can give a skeptic.
The Brennan Center agrees that official tabulation audits are a standard integrity measure. Its objection is to partisan reviews run by outside contractors months after certification, which it found failed basic tests of security, accuracy and objectivity.
Our answer: agreed. That is why the audit should be written into law in advance, run by officials, and finished before certification.
Make it binding, and finish before anyone is certified
An audit that reports a month after the winner is sworn in is a history lesson. The check has to come first and it has to have teeth: if the sample fails, the full count happens, and the full count controls. Georgia shows the timing can be met. Its statewide audits are completed before certification, and they have confirmed winners of both parties.
The Nation reported that election-security experts want hand-marked paper ballots followed by risk-limiting audits, and pointed out a weakness in Georgia's 2020 process: state law did not let the audit change the outcome.
Our answer: here left and right want the same fix. Make the audit binding.
Verify the list: confirm that recorded voters really voted
A recount can only recount the ballots it is handed. If a ballot was cast in the name of someone who never voted, the machines will count it perfectly every time. Voter lists are known to carry errors: a 2012 Pew study found about 24 million registrations that were invalid or significantly inaccurate. Checking a random 20,000 voters in each state is the cheapest way to learn whether the list of who voted can be trusted.
Talking Points Memo covered the Justice Department's 2021 guidance warning that sending canvassers to ask voters whether they cast ballots raises concerns about voter intimidation under federal law. Arizona's Senate dropped that part of its review.
Our answer: a fair point about method. The check should be run by election officials by mail or phone, under all-party supervision, asking one question only.
Put supervisors from every party at every step
People trust what they can watch. Give each party a supervisor at the election station where the sample is drawn, the calls are logged and the results are tallied, and let the press in. Alabama's new audit law already requires public notice so poll watchers and reporters can observe. A count that both sides watched is a count both sides can accept.
The Brennan Center says observers play an important role in transparency, and warns they can also become a source of disruption or intimidation, which is why states limit who may serve and what they may do.
Our answer: credential and train every supervisor, in equal numbers from each party. They watch the officials. They do not approach voters.
Election news, updated daily
Voting, audits, fraud cases and charges
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Each morning this page reads those outlets' feeds and keeps only items about voting, elections, election fraud, and election crimes or charges. Headlines link to the publisher. A charge is an allegation, not a conviction.
Take part
Ask for proof, whoever wins.
Find out what your state's audit law requires, when it happens, and whether it can change a result.
Ask your state legislators to make the audit binding and to finish it before certification.
Share this page with someone who votes the other way. The plan works for them too.
Audit Our Vote
