Voting in Rural America: Polk County Oregon, Ballot Image Tabulating PolarisRecount.com

Polk County Oregon, Ballot Image Tabulating PolarisRecount.com website

PolarisRecount.com t.me/ALoneRaccoon MAGARaccoon.com

Here is the Polaris Recount website, you may volunteer to help tabulalte 48,000 ballot image votes. Do this so that we can compared the hand tabulated votes from the scanned ballot images and compare to the machine counted vote totals that are provided by Polk County Oregon government.

Comments from MamaRaccoon:

Replies, [3 Apr 2023 12:59:24]
This isn't quite accurate. What you see on Polaris is the ballot image that was taken when the ballot was scanned. The image was saved and the paper ballot (if the county used paper) was eventually put into a sealed box and saved separately. We use the ballot images in Polaris.

A CVR is different. It is just a spreadsheet of which candidates were selected on that ballot in the order the ballots were processed. It will usually include a time stamp of when the ballot was recorded, the method of voting (mail, in person, early, etc.), which tabulator was used to scan the ballot and the votes cast on that ballot. It may have some other things, but there is nothing in a CVR to indicate the identity of the voter.

We can use the info contained in the CVR to "replay" the election. We can see what the total votes for each candidate was at any given point in the processing. We can see the ratio between 2 candidates (and so can you if you look at the ratio graphs on https://votedatabase.com.) There are many things we can learn from replaying the election from the CVR.

Replies, [3 Apr 2023 13:06:04]
I can give you a real time update right now...

Polk County, OR has 48,794 ballot images. Of those, 16,750 have been adjudicated once. An additional 6,102 have been adjudicated twice. We have 97 auditors who are actively working on Polk County. (WE'VE GOTTA PUMP UP THOSE NUMBERS!!!)

We have a few other counties that are almost ready for release. We just need more auditors to help work on the Polaris Recount Project.

Replies, [3 Apr 2023 16:50:05]
We would love to include every county that has provided ballot images to be adjudicated in Polaris, however we are hampered by time to set the counties up, as well as not enough people interested in working to adjudicate the ballot images. I think this is due more to the fact that word has not gotten out to people instead of a lack of interest.

We have done several counties already and have learned much from the results in those areas. Polk County, OR was chosen because the set of ballot images was complete and were in a form that was easy for us to process and setting everything up didn't take a huge amount of time.

So far, we have looked at the ballot images for about 15 counties in Polaris. We have ballot images from a few other counties, so there will be more upcoming in Polaris, however a lot of the ballot images we have received have not been complete, so we probably won't be able to run those counties unless we can do it just for certain precincts. We're still undecided as to how to handle that.

If anyone can get ballot images from their county, we'd love to include them in Polaris. The results from the citizen adjudication is then compared to what we know from the CVR and the analysis is quite interesting and informative.