AB 813: Election Data Access

THE BILL PASSED UNANIMOUSLY!

Brad Friedman wrote an article here: New Law Brought to State Legislature by Citizen Election Integrity Advocate Now Makes It Slightly Easier to Oversee Election Results in CA

This has become section 15372(b) of the California Elections Code (2016 version).

AB 813, a bill that would require California counties and the Secretary of State to post their certified statements of the vote on their Internet Web sites in a downloadable spreadsheet format. This is groundbreaking legislation that would allow any citizen to easily review and check the announced results, and especially, to check the totals for each candidate. This is critical in large counties such as Los Angeles, where there are over 4,000 precincts. Attempting to enter 4,000 numbers for each of 5 candidates would require typing in 20,000 numbers. That’s for one race.

The data is in the election databases. All that should be required is a few simple commands to generate a complete report, and then transferring the file(s) to the Internet for posting. From there, anybody can download the files, load it into a spreadsheet, write a quick formula to total the columns, and voila, you have a check on the totals across thousands of precincts. Plus, you can write more elaborate formulas to check for other irregularities, precinct by precinct. Publishing election data on the Internet is a comparatively small amount of work that will allow citizens to actually check the results of important elections.

Bill Info

• The bill has passed the Assembly, 75-0!
• (6/21/13). AB 813 is now headed for the Senate floor!
• Official AB 813 Page
• AB 813 Fact Sheet (Adobe PDF)

What To Do

• Please contact your Calif. state senator and ask them to vote for this bill.
• A sample letter of support is [here]. 1 short paragraph is sufficient. If you live in California, please include your address.