Georgia · The 2026 Midterms · November 3
Be an Actual Vote recorder in Georgia
Help defend correct vote reporting against bad-faith attacks — and help catch the errors that are really there.
Scrutineers is running this, and they need about 165 people
Scrutineers is putting together a volunteer effort to document every poll tape in Georgia’s largest counties this November. America Counts is providing the technology behind it.
Those counties have about 660 places where votes are counted on election night. It would take roughly 165 people, each visiting four of them, to record every single one — a mid-size congregation, or one student organization, or forty people per county. There is a role here for everyone from a first-timer with a smartphone to a trained specialist taking on the hardest tapes in the state. If you want the arithmetic, see where the numbers come from.
Scrutineers is a national, nonpartisan election-protection organization founded in 2019. It educates, trains, and mobilizes volunteers to observe and document election processes as public observers, poll watchers, and data analysts. America Counts was a founding member.
In November 2026, Scrutineers is coordinating an effort to document election-day, advance-voting, and mail-ballot results across high-priority Georgia counties — the first project of its kind. Scrutineers is recruiting and training the volunteers. America Counts provides the app, the uploading and verification pipeline, and the published analysis.
It is a good division of labor, and not a new one: Scrutineers has already trained many of the volunteers who have recorded poll tapes with Actual Vote. They bring the people; we bring the technical capability to turn what those people record into a public, checkable result. You can read more about the partnership.
You can do this, and it matters twice over
When the polls close in Georgia, each precinct’s scanner prints a poll tape — the machine’s own count of the votes it read, posted where the public can see it. Recording one takes a few minutes and a smartphone. No special access. No qualifications. No confrontation with anyone.
What comes out the other end is worth two very different things at once.
It defends the people who did their jobs right. Georgia has spent six years arguing about its elections using evidence produced almost entirely by the officials whose work is being questioned. That is a miserable position for an honest election director: accused, and holding only their own paperwork as a defense. An independent public record — produced by volunteers, not by the county — is a rebuttal that cannot be waved away as self-serving.
It catches the errors that are actually there. Vote reporting is a chain of handoffs, and handoffs fail. We have found and documented real ones. Not fraud — mistakes, the ordinary kind, the kind that go unnoticed for a year unless somebody checks.
Both of those come from the same fifteen minutes of your evening.
Where you fit
Recorder. One evening. Four stops. A smartphone. This is where most people start, and it is genuinely enough — a recorder who reaches four polling places has personally covered a meaningful slice of a county.
Driver and partner. Two people, one route. One drives and navigates, one records. Faster, and a much better night.
Route captain. You take a cluster of polling places, recruit the handful of people who will cover it, and make sure everyone knows where they are going before election day.
Advance voting recorder — the specialist role. Most of Georgia votes before election day. In Gwinnett County in 2024, seventy percent of ballots were cast during advance voting and under a quarter on election day itself. The advance-voting tapes are therefore where most of the votes are, and they are the harder job: they are long, they are posted many at once rather than spread across a county, and Georgia reports advance votes by the voter’s home precinct rather than by scanner, so making them comparable takes an open-records request for the county’s per-tabulator records. We did exactly that in Cobb County this year, and it worked.
If you want to learn a system properly and then do the part that most needs doing, take the extra training and be an advance voting recorder. A few dozen trained people would cover more votes than the entire election-night operation.
Georgia recorders have already done this
Cobb County, June 2026. Every candidate-vote comparison matched the county’s certified results — 260 of 260, across 80,449 votes, covering both election-day and advance voting, with zero apparent discrepancies. Read the report, or open ten worked comparisons and check one yourself against the state’s published file.
Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett, November 2024. 76,530 votes audited across Georgia’s three largest counties, finished before the state certified the election.
Past Actual Vote poll tape recordings in Georgia
Here are some Actual Vote poll tape videos from previous elections by users in Georgia. You can make your own in the next election.
America Counts compares the vote totals on each poll tape video to the official results to double-check the accuracy of the vote reporting. See this most recent Georgia report for an example.
Recordings live in the public Actual Vote Video Archive.
Election day is November 3
About 660 places. About 165 of us. One evening.
Where the numbers come from
The instinct is to count precincts, and precincts are daunting: Fulton County alone has 466 of them. But a recorder’s night is measured in stops, not precincts. Georgia counties group several precincts into a single polling place, and that polling place posts its tapes together. One stop at Pittman Park Recreation Center in Atlanta covers precincts 12K and 12N at once. One stop at Chattahoochee Hills City Hall covers eight.
Counted properly, Georgia’s four largest counties look like this.
| County | Precincts | Election-day polling places |
|---|---|---|
| Fulton | 466 | 177 |
| DeKalb | 191 | ~180 |
| Gwinnett | 156 | ~156 |
| Cobb | 148 | ~145 |
| Total | 961 | ~660 |
Fulton’s polling-place count is exact, and it is the striking one: 466 precincts, 177 places to stand. It comes from the county’s own polling-place list for the November 2024 general election. The precinct counts for DeKalb and Gwinnett come from those counties’ official 2024 election summaries, and Cobb’s from our own 2026 analysis of that county.
The three polling-place figures marked with a tilde are estimates. Those counties consolidate far less aggressively than Fulton does, so we have assumed roughly one polling place per precinct, which is the conservative direction — if we are wrong, the real number of stops is lower and the job is easier.
From there the arithmetic is short. About 660 places to visit; one recorder, working a route planned in advance, can comfortably reach four of them after the polls close, and some will reach five. That is roughly 165 recorders, about forty per county. Work alone or in pairs — a pair covers one route together, so 165 teams might be 165 people or 330.
One honest note about timing. In most Georgia polling places the tape stays posted through the night, which is what makes a four-stop route realistic. In some it comes down sooner, which is why routes should put the least certain stop first. A recorder who reaches three of four has still done real work.
And one about scope, because we would rather say it than have you find it: the 165 recorders above cover every election-day polling place in four counties and still reach only about a quarter of the votes cast, because Georgia votes early. Complete coverage means covering advance voting too. That is why the specialist role above matters as much as it does.
This is a public document, posted so that the public can read it. Photographing one is an ordinary thing to do, and people do it in every election. If you want the detail, we have written up where the law stands and why this holds up.
Four counties. One evening. About 165 of us.
Georgia’s largest counties are where a third of the state’s votes are counted. Full coverage is not a fantasy — it is a scheduling problem, and it is solvable.