Practical guide: how to verify election results and tally sheets
Goal. To offer newsrooms a simple protocol for covering election night and the days that follow without amplifying errors or manipulation. The guide draws on lessons from elections covered by Velours between 2024 and 2025.
1. Before election day
- Identify official sources (electoral body, bulletins, open-data formats) and save copies of results pages.
- Know the legal timeline: preliminary count, official tally and challenge deadlines.
- Prepare a glossary for the audience: turnout, valid vote, null and blank vote, tally sheet, scrutiny.
2. During the count
- Always report the percentage counted alongside any figure.
- Do not project winners without an explainable statistical model or a declaration from the competent authority.
- Distinguish in headlines between “leading the count” and “winning.”
3. Cross-checking tally sheets
- When a party publishes its own tally sheets, verify a random sample: signatures, stamps, polling-station numbers, consistency between voters and votes cast.
- Cross-check the totals against official data by constituency.
- Publicly document the methodology and its limits.
4. Afterward
- Follow legal challenges through legal sources, not just political ones.
- Visibly correct any published error.
Free to use with attribution to the source.