Apply your professional skills to the work of making American elections more transparent.
America Counts is a small organization doing work that should be happening at national scale. We need people with real skills who want to contribute something meaningful — not busywork, but the kind of work that directly moves the needle on election transparency in the United States.
If you’re looking for a way to contribute to democracy that goes beyond voting and yard signs, read on.
We don’t have a large paid staff. Most of what America Counts accomplishes is done by a small team supplemented by volunteers who bring professional-grade skills to specific problems. Contributions at any scale — a few hours a month or a sustained commitment — have direct, measurable impact.
Our core product is data — poll tape transcriptions compared against official results, discrepancy investigation, statistical analysis. If you’re comfortable with Python, spreadsheets, data cleaning, or quantitative analysis, your skills plug directly into the Actual Vote pipeline. This is the closest thing we have to "the work itself."
The Actual Vote app, our data pipeline, our analysis tools, and our public-facing archive all need ongoing development. We're also building Wanna Vote, a new system for documenting voter suppression and conducting parallel vote audits — a PWA, native mobile apps, a backend API, client-side encryption, and an analysis dashboard. If you build software professionally and want to apply those skills to something that matters, we have real work for you.
We produce reports, website content, a technical manual, blog posts, and public communications that need to be clear, precise, and credible. If you can write well — especially if you have experience with technical writing, journalism, or policy communications — that skill is always in demand.
Our reports include maps, charts, and data visualizations. Our website needs graphics. Our training materials need visual design. We also produce video content for social media and volunteer training. Good visual communication makes our work more accessible and more credible.
Election law, nonprofit compliance, intellectual property, and public records law all intersect with our work. We occasionally need legal guidance on public records requests, poll tape access rights, nonprofit governance, and the legal framework for independent election auditing. If you practice in any of these areas and are willing to take occasional questions, that's enormously valuable.
Getting independent election auditing into mainstream awareness requires media relationships, press strategy, and the ability to communicate technical findings to a general audience. If you have PR or media experience, you can help us reach the people who need to hear about this work.
Many people haven't heard of independent election auditing, and don't know how easy it is to participate — we want someone who can change that. If you work in marketing, social media, or PR (a recent graduate in the field would thrive here), you'd have the room to innovate, build our voice from the ground up, and have some fun making serious work reach the people who need to see it.
We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Grant writing, donor cultivation, and fundraising strategy are essential to sustaining and growing our work. If you have nonprofit development experience, we need you.
Nonprofit governance, financial management, strategic planning, and operational logistics. If you've run or helped run an organization, we can use your experience.
Our sister initiative, the Middle Majority Movement, tackles a different problem: most Americans never vote in the low-turnout primaries where candidates are actually chosen. If that mission resonates with you, take a look and see whether you'd like to contribute there — it needs research, organizing, data, and communications help too.
We’re not going to hand you a clipboard and ask you to staff a table. Volunteering with America Counts means applying your actual professional skills to real problems we need solved.
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Tell us what you're good at and how much time you have.
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Sometimes that's an immediate project. Sometimes we keep you in mind for the next time something in your area comes up.
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Not make-work. Work that ships, gets published, gets used, or solves a problem we couldn't solve without you.
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Every Actual Vote report published, every tool improved, every new volunteer trained, every new state reached — that's the scoreboard.
We respect your time. If you have four hours to give, we’ll find something useful for those four hours. We won’t ask you to attend meetings about meetings.
Not everyone has professional skills to volunteer — or wants to commit to ongoing work. These are the highest-impact things you can do without making a long-term commitment.
The single highest-impact thing any individual can do for election transparency. Takes 1–3 hours, requires no special skills, and directly produces the evidence our entire analysis pipeline depends on. Check how poll tapes work in your state first.
Start Here →If people in your community trust you — neighborhood organizer, faith leader, local official — you can coordinate Actual Vote participation in your area. We provide training, materials, and analysis support.
For Community Leaders →Financial support funds app development, data infrastructure, report production, and the operational costs of running a national nonprofit. Every dollar goes directly to building the tools.
Donate →Share our work with people who might care. The more people who know independent, people-powered election auditing exists and is producing real results, the closer we get to making it routine practice nationwide.
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