Citizens' Oversight Projects (COPs)
This web site is dedicated to enabling citizens to provide needed oversight to our democracy.

Engage officials in public meetings
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Record public meetings
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Hold feet to the fire
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Sixth grader speaks to School Board.
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Press Conferences |  Rallies and Protests |
We must, as citizens, provide oversight of our local governmental bodies. They can't be trusted to oversee themselves. You can help! Read how here:
COPs Program

Citizens Oversight has recently 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.
Audits of Six counties in the 2020 General Election to demonstrate the usefulness of
Audit Engine. These county reports allowed us to substantially improve the reports and functionality.
The most recent set is regarding 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:
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:
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.
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(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.
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(M1851) 2018-06-01 Election Audit Oversight for 2018 Primary Season -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1781) 2017-07-28 Press Conf: Lawsuit Filed to Allow Ballot Review -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1735) 2017-03-19 Early VBM Discrepancies in San Diego 2016 Primary -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, CA_SanDiego, Questions to Election Official
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(SanDiegoPrimaryContest2016) 2017-02-02 San Diego Primary Contest 2016 -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, Originally filed by attorney Bill Simpich
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
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
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(M1786) 2017-09-04 San Onofre Settlement To Move the Waste FAQs -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1784) 2017-08-28 Settlement Agreement On Nuclear Waste Filed with Court, Press Conf -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1748) 2017-04-07 Settlement Talks Announced in Suit Challenging Nuclear Fuel Storage at San Onofre -- Southern California Edison, Southern California Edison,
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(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
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(M1986) 2022-09-30 2020 General Election Audit Reports for Bartow GA, Fulton GA and Dane WI -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1956) 2020-11-13 Letter to all GA counties: Save and Secure ballot images for recount -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1905) 2019-08-05 Earth Summit Series presents "Emergency at San Onofre: From Shutdown to Nuclear Waste on the Beach" -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1891) 2019-03-12 Citizens' Oversight requests status from San Onofre Expert team as anniversary approaches. -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1873) 2018-08-21 Citizens Oversight Demands Full Investigation by California Coastal Commission into San Onofre Near-Miss Incident -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1871) 2018-08-12 Citizens Oversight Calls Full-Stop and Thorough Safety Review at San Onofre after Near-Miss Incident -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1869) 2018-08-07 State Lands Commission meeting on EIR for San Onofre -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight, This event topic describes two events.
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(M1868) 2018-08-01 Election Audit Fraud Supreme Court Petition - Conf / Livestream -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(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,
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(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.
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(M1998) 2023-06-07 COPS Comments on VVSG 2.0 -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1992) 2023-01-16 Letter to San Diego Registrar of Voter regarding chain of custody -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1990) 2022-11-08 DVSorder Vulnerability: Recommendations -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1989) 2022-11-06 Dual Tabulation Issue in ES&S Voting Equipment -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1988) 2022-10-03 Election Data Use Case for IETF SCITT Working Group -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1987) 2022-07-08 Review of Jovan Pulitzer's Paper Analysis Report for Maricopa County -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1985) 2022-05-27 Letter to Clackamas County, OR regarding blurry barcodes issue -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1984) 2022-05-26 Election Hazards -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
- (M1983) 2022-02-18 GA_Bartow_20201103 Audit Narrative Report -- Ray Lutz, Citizens Oversight,
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(M1982) 2022-01-27 GA_Bartow_20201103 Audit Report -- 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