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.
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.
Election Audit Oversight
It is extremely 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.
- (M1881) 2018-10-25 Oversight of November 2018 General Election -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- Election Oversight Florida 2018 August -- Recent push to video record audits in Florida.
- Election Audit Lawsuit -- Lawsuit over short-cutting the 1% manual tally in San Diego (and other counties in CA) by omitting later-received Vote-by-Mail and Provisional ballots from the audit process.
- Ballot Access Lawsuit -- We are suing the registrar of voters in San Diego to get access to the voted ballots from the 2016 election.
- (M1851) 2018-06-01 Election Audit Oversight for 2018 Primary Season -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1781) 2017-07-28 Press Conf: Lawsuit Filed to Allow Ballot Review -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1735) 2017-03-19 Early VBM Discrepancies in San Diego 2016 Primary -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, CA_SanDiego, Questions to Election Official
- (SanDiegoPrimaryContest2016) 2017-02-02 San Diego Primary Contest 2016 -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, Originally filed by attorney Bill Simpich
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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:
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 similarities with people in other districts or on obituary 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
The HELMS Proposal
- Helms Proposal - Click to read details of our technical proposal for Hardened, Extended-life, Local, Monitored, Surface (HELMS) criteria for dealing with nuclear waste
- (M1786) 2017-09-04 San Onofre Settlement To Move the Waste FAQs -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1784) 2017-08-28 Settlement Agreement On Nuclear Waste Filed with Court, Press Conf -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1748) 2017-04-07 Settlement Talks Announced in Suit Challenging Nuclear Fuel Storage at San Onofre -- Southern California Edison, Southern California Edison,
- (M1749) 2017-04-07 Edison agrees to negotiate new home for nuclear waste from San Onofre -- Jeff Mc Donald, Union Tribune,
General Overviews
Visit the
Press Room for all news releases from
Citizens Oversight
- (M1986) 2022-09-30 2020 General Election Audit Reports for Bartow GA, Fulton GA and Dane WI -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, Includes general background and narrative reports for Bartow GA, Fulton GA and Dane WI
- (M1956) 2020-11-13 Letter to all GA counties: Save and Secure ballot images for recount -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1905) 2019-08-05 Earth Summit Series presents "Emergency at San Onofre: From Shutdown to Nuclear Waste on the Beach" -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1891) 2019-03-12 Citizens' Oversight requests status from San Onofre Expert team as anniversary approaches. -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1873) 2018-08-21 Citizens Oversight Demands Full Investigation by California Coastal Commission into San Onofre Near-Miss Incident -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1871) 2018-08-12 Citizens Oversight Calls Full-Stop and Thorough Safety Review at San Onofre after Near-Miss Incident -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1869) 2018-08-07 State Lands Commission meeting on EIR for San Onofre -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, This event topic describes two events.
- (M1868) 2018-08-01 Election Audit Fraud Supreme Court Petition - Conf / Livestream -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1860) 2018-06-22 Formal Complaint Submitted to CA Secy of State to Investigate Malconduct by Michael Vu, San Diego County Registrar of Voters -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1852) 2018-06-04 Press Release: Citizens' Oversight's NRC filing 'HELMS' Public Comment Period Ends June 5 at Midnight -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
Active Projects:
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.
- (M2027) 2024-09-17 Comparison of Ballot Image Viewers -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2023) 2024-09-05 Letter to President Biden and Attorney General Garland -- Ensuring Election Transparency and Compliance with Federal Law -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2024) 2024-08-22 Email sent to GA State Election Board re certification requirements -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2025) 2024-08-22 Email sent to GA State Election Board re: new rules for certification -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2018) 2024-08-06 Letter to Jocelyn Benson, MI SOS -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2017) 2024-07-30 Letter to Joseph Kirk 20240730 -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2016) 2024-06-25 AuditEngine for Georgia (Proposal) (M2016) -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2014) 2024-06-18 Letter to Janice Johnston re BIA Classifications, Dallas Data, GA pilot (M2014) -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2015) 2024-06-18 Letter to Monmouth County Board of Elections re AuditEngine (M2015) -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M2012) 2024-06-01 Letter to Ken Bennett re: BIA Classifications, Dallas Data, AZ pilot (M2012) -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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
- Common Calendar- Month-at-a-glance format for all events relevant to East County
- List Serve - Sign up for our email lists
- NewsMedia - submitted media in all categories, and anyone who submits them.
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