This is not enough to prove that they are real, but it at least shows that they are not discarding the votes outright. I'm from Poland, so the election system is different, but you might be able to adapt this for some local US elections.
You need an election where you vote for both a party and a candidate. You also need the results to be reported per candidate, not just per party, and you need results from every polling location, not just the totals.
You take a party you support and vote for the 15th–20th candidate on the list. This should give you confidence that your vote will be the only one for that candidate at your polling location. Then you can check the results and see that, at the place where you voted, your candidate received one vote, while candidates in similar positions received zero.
I tried this in the last election, and I did not detect any fraud. The candidate received one vote at my polling location and around 50 votes in total.
This is not enough to prove that they are real, but it at least shows that they are not discarding the votes outright. I'm from Poland, so the election system is different, but you might be able to adapt this for some local US elections.
You need an election where you vote for both a party and a candidate. You also need the results to be reported per candidate, not just per party, and you need results from every polling location, not just the totals.
You take a party you support and vote for the 15th–20th candidate on the list. This should give you confidence that your vote will be the only one for that candidate at your polling location. Then you can check the results and see that, at the place where you voted, your candidate received one vote, while candidates in similar positions received zero.
I tried this in the last election, and I did not detect any fraud. The candidate received one vote at my polling location and around 50 votes in total.