Information for Candidates

Candidates have tremendous opportunities to enable and enforce decent monitoring of the vote count.

Do not concede, and do not declare victory, until all votes are counted.

Even though we hear of results with "99% of precincts reporting" on election night, this does not mean that 99% of the votes have been counted. The canvass on election night is unofficial, does not necessarily include all absentee votes, and certainly does not include provisional votes. Candidates should wait at least until the Official Canvasses are complete, usually a few days after election day.

Verification efforts, such as our work in Election Integrity and the Vote Count Protection Project, take time. Candidates can support our efforts by waiting at least a week to give us time to perform forensic analysis on the data we collect, including the Election Verification Exit Poll.

If your official vote total is less than but very close to your opponent's, and if there has been evidence of irregularities with the machines, challenge the result.

We hope to raise money for a legal fund to support candidate challenges. These challenges can be expensive -- in Pennsylvania, for example, it costs $50 per machine to insist on investigation -- but they are a crucial way to protect the following election. Candidates brave enough to make such challenges will earn the respect and affection of election integrity advocates. And think of Christine Gregoire of Washington State: they don't call her "sore loser," they call her "Governor".