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Citizens' Oversight Projects (COPs)

This web site is dedicated to enabling citizens to provide needed oversight to our democracy.

At present, Citizens Oversight is focused only on deploying Audit Engine. Our goal is to audit all elections, contests, and ballots independently (and not by insiders).

Our most recent prior large project was the emergency shutdown and eventual closure of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. We are no longer providing intense oversight of that situation as we have already provided our best suggestions. All the information about that project is still on this site.

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Audit Engine

Citizens Oversight has been involved in election oversight, including audits and procedural review, since 2005. In 2019, announced an important project to create Ballot Image Audit service Audit Engine, which can be used by election officials, campaigns, candidates, and oversight groups, to audit any election that uses hand-marked paper ballots and scanners that create ballot images. We are now working to deploy this solution nationally.

Audit Engine Audit Reports

Audits of the 2020 General Election demonstrate the usefulness of Audit Engine.

Bartow GA, Fulton GA, and Dane WI.

Audit Engine was used to audit three counties in Florida: Collier, Volusia, and St. Lucie Counties. Learn about audit engine and its unbelievable accuracy, which at least 3x better than the official voting systems on contests where we have located a disagreement.

Other references:

Election Audit Oversight

It is extrenely important for citizens to participate in providing oversight of election audits, where election officials are auditing themselves. That's like asking people to flag down a police officer and ask for a ticket if you are speeding. Self-audits will rarely find anything because the people conducting the audits tend to "fix-up" the audit results innocently, not realizing that the audit samples should not be corrected.

Citizens' Oversight is expanding our election oversight scope to the entire US! However, we will be focused primarily on the TOP 175 counties in the nation, comprising more than 50% of registered voters, and then secondly turning our attention to the TOP 20% of the the top 20% of the states (i.e. the top ten states). At this point, we are most specifically focused on providing oversight to the audits in the top counties in CA and FL.

SIGN UP NOW Click here to sign up!

Risk Limiting Audit Research

Citizens Oversight has conducted Monte Carlo simulations of various types of audits that are based on a sample of ballots or batches of ballots. As a result, our recommendation is to focus primarily on Ballot Image Audits and use RLAs only to validate the images of consequential races.

  • BRAWL Whitepaper -- Balanced Risk Audit with Workload Limitation
    Learn about Risk Limiting Audits and compare them with Ballot Image Audits and more traditional Batch Comparison audits. We introduce a method that arose from our Monte Carlo simulation.

As a result of this analysis and our experience with the reality of how election officials cut corners and "fix-up" audits so the result looks clean, we have now decided that long-term RLA audits are not feasible. Read more:

Easy Voting Project

Citizens in our democracy should NOT be faced with ridiculous hurdles to be able to vote. In this project, we fight voter-suppression scams, such as:
  • Registration deadlines far ahead of the election.
  • Purging voters from rolls based on name simularities with people in other districts or on obiturary lists.
  • Too-few voting locations with limited capacity.
  • Long lines at polling places.
  • High registration documentation requirements or with partisan bias.
  • Confusing information sent out about the date of the election or location.

Visit the project page: Easy Voting


Stop Nuke Dump -- Deal with the 3.6 million pounds of nuclear waste at Camp Pendleton

We took the California Coastal Commission and Southern California Edison (SCE) to court, and we reached a settlement where they had to work to move the waste to a new location. This also meant that unfortunately, they will continue to move the waste into the ridiculous facility only about 100 ft from the water and literally inches over the high-water mark.

Here is some references about our lawsuit and the result.

We are now promoting two main solutions:

Pendleton Option

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The HELMS Proposal

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General Overviews

Latest News Releases from Citizens Oversight

Visit the Press Room for all news releases from Citizens Oversight

Active Projects:

Issue Oversight
Govt Oversight:
Infrastructure Project:

Events

LATEST Publications from Citizens Oversight

News Releases can be found at Press Room. These are other documents such as white papers, research and letters. Visit Citizens Oversight for all publications and news releases.

Press Room | All Publications from Citizens' Oversight | All Submitted Media

Projects

See COPs Program for a list of all projects and an overview of our project concept.

Collaboration Areas

References and Resources

Other Stuff

  • Basic Instructions - When you first start using this wiki to report on a strange event, I will refer you to this topic to get you started!
  • Wiki Usage Tips - Some secrets about using this wiki

Common Web Utilities

I Attachment Action Size Date Who Comment
AuditEngineLogo.pngpng AuditEngineLogo.png manage 70 K 19 Oct 2020 - 22:32 Raymond Lutz  
COPS-Brochure-V5.pdfpdf COPS-Brochure-V5.pdf manage 138 K 26 Jun 2014 - 21:23 Raymond Lutz COPS Brochure
CrowdWatch_logo.pngpng CrowdWatch_logo.png manage 100 K 19 Oct 2020 - 22:27 Raymond Lutz  
EyesOpenHeader.pngpng EyesOpenHeader.png manage 102 K 08 Nov 2016 - 01:19 Raymond Lutz Eyes Open Campaign Header
HelmsMeme..jpgjpg HelmsMeme..jpg manage 138 K 16 Nov 2017 - 18:55 Raymond Lutz Helms Petition meme
HelmsPetitionMeme.jpgjpg HelmsPetitionMeme.jpg manage 138 K 16 Nov 2017 - 19:00 Raymond Lutz  
PressConf200x150.jpgjpg PressConf200x150.jpg manage 23 K 12 Nov 2017 - 20:02 Raymond Lutz Press Conf Image
REVOKE_PERMIT_FOR_WASTE_DUMP.jpgjpg REVOKE_PERMIT_FOR_WASTE_DUMP.jpg manage 94 K 22 Mar 2017 - 20:02 Raymond Lutz  
crowdwatch_text2_xxhdpi_vert.pngpng crowdwatch_text2_xxhdpi_vert.png manage 66 K 19 Oct 2020 - 21:57 Raymond Lutz Crowd Watch Logo
Topic revision: r310 - 26 Oct 2023, RaymondLutz
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