Election Log Transparency Portal

🗳️ Election Reconciliation Explained

In any certified election, the law requires a basic accounting security check called reconciliation. The concept is simple: you must match the physical paper footprint left by voters with the digital footprint recorded by the voting machines.

Think of it like a bank audit at the end of the day. The bank manager must compare the total cash physically sitting in the vault with the digital transaction logs on the computer network. If the computer says the bank processed $650,000, but there is only $610,000 worth of cash and deposit slips in the building, you have an accounting failure that must be investigated before the books can be closed.

In this audit, the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT) manually compiled the physical paper trail from every legal voting channel used in the November 2025 Proposition 50 Special Election. By gathering the actual chain-of-custody logs, they calculated the Gross Ballots Cast and subtracted legally rejected ballots to find the true number of physical votes that should have been counted.

📊 The Math Breakdown

Here is how the physical paper receipts stack up against the machine-certified results:

• Mail Ballots from Public Drop Boxes/locations: 139,585 ballots

• Mail Ballots Dropped Off at Vote Centers: 86,513 ballots

• In-Person Paper Ballots (Cast at Vote Centers): 51,443 ballots

• Conditional (CVR) & Provisional Envelopes: 6,391 ballots

• Ballots Received via Secured Facsimile (Fax): 255 ballots

• Direct Mail Intake from the U.S. Post Office: 343,572 ballots

• Confidential Ballots: 43 ballots

• 🟰 Gross Paper Ballots Received: 627,802

The Deductions

Not every ballot cast is legally allowed to be counted. Ballots are excluded if a voter forgets to sign their envelope, fails to cure a signature mismatch, or turns the ballot in past the legal deadline.

• Minus Total Ballots Rejected by the ROV: -16,376 ballots

• 🟰 Total Net Ballots Cast (The True Paper Footprint): 611,426

The Discrepancy

When the Registrar of Voters (ROV) released the final, machine-certified count of the election, 

the numbers did not align:

• ROV Final Certified Election Results: 657,322

• The Unexplained Variance: 45,896 extra votes

🚨 Why This Matters

This represents a 7.0% error rate. To put that into perspective, both California State Standards and the Federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) mandate a voting system accuracy tolerance of no more than one error per 125,000 ballots —which translates to a strict standard of 0.0008%.

An unexplained gap of nearly 46,000 votes means the digital system counted tens of thousands of ballots that have no matching physical documentation in the logs. Because certification legally requires election results to be "full, true, and correct," the audit team concludes that this discrepancy invalidates the current certification and demands a formal root-cause investigation.

Sample of One Vote Center (#32) Daily Sheets

✍️ The Chain of Custody & Certification

At the very bottom of the document, you will see the Signatures of All Members of the Board.

🔍 Why this matters: Election workers (often neighbors from your own community) are legally signing a binding oath under California Election Code § 14107. By signing, they collectively certify under penalty of law that every ballot received, voted, rejected, or spoiled matches the final counts precisely.

✍️ The Chain of Custody & Certification

At the very bottom of the document, you will see the Collector & Observer's Name and Signatures.

🔍 Why this matters: Election workers (often neighbors from your own community) are legally signing a binding oath under California Election Code § 14107. By signing, they collectively certify under penalty of law that every ballot received, voted, rejected, or spoiled matches the final counts precisely.