About

History

The History of the Riverside Election Integrity Team

The turmoil surrounding the 2020 election results sparked the formation of the Riverside Election Integrity Team. We had a sense the election had not been transparent or

entirely accurate, but a “sense” is not evidence and suspicions are not truth. Our team, particularly Yvette Anthony, shared a common purpose to find out the truth about the integrity of our Riverside County elections so we formed REIT. 

Beginning in September of 2023, six of us met regularly for prayer and discussion. During the next eight months we met with individual county supervisors, with our

Registrar of Voters, and made public comments at Board of Supervisors meetings. Yvette was the key member of our team because she had done extensive work at the

ROV prior to joining. She learned how to track the number of ballots cast by voters in Riverside County elections utilizing public records requests to obtain ballot collection records.

Her findings in the 2022 Primary and Midterm elections were that the results did not reconcile. The number of legal ballots cast by voters did not reconcile with the number of votes counted by the vote counting system, and the discrepancy was in the tens of thousands of votes.

The first challenge for our team was to understand how Yvette had come to her conclusions and second to convince our County Supervisors that these large

discrepancies needed to be explained by our Registrar. Yvette checked the accuracy of the 2022 elections just as a person checks the accuracy his bank account. Once we

understood the simplicity of what Yvette had done, and the validity of her data, the team explained the problem to our ROV and supervisors.

In March, before certification of the 2024 Primary, Registrar Tinoco explained to us that reconciling the number of legal ballots cast with the number of votes counted is

required by law before certifying an election in California (Calif. Election Code 15302[d]). After the 2024 Primary, our team attempted to reconcile the election results

by obtaining the ballot collection logs produced during the primary. The ROV tried their best to provide the team with all these logs, but they found that many were

unreadable, and many had math errors so REIT could not complete the audit.

In the 2024 General Election, the supervisors directed the ROV to improve their record- keeping, and they did. This allowed REIT to completed the audit revealing that 33,888 more votes were counted than the number of legal ballots cast. However, the ballot collection logs were not released to REIT until after the election was certified, so the supervisors were unaware of this discrepancy when they certified the election. REIT reported the audit results to the ROV, county supervisors, law enforcement, and the Civil Grand Jury.

Using the same process, REIT audited the Proposition 50 Election which revealed 45,896 more votes counted than the number of voters who voted.. REIT reported this

apparent error to the ROV, our supervisors, and law enforcement, again, after the election had already been certified. After REIT delivered the audit and supporting

records to the Sheriff in February, he decided to investigate this discrepancy. It is illegal to certify an election if more votes are counted than the number of voters who voted, and only an investigation will determine the truth of this claim and the cause. Once the cause is determined, then it will be possible to fix the problem before the next election.

Yvette gave REIT a simple method of testing the validity of our elections, one which is required by law and one which we hope will be utilized by other counties. Yvette

tragically died on December 22, 2024 at the age of fifty-six, so she did not live to see the fruit of her labor. REIT is committed to finishing the work she began: that Riverside

County will be an example of election integrity for other counties.