After a divisive election, with record levels of public distrust for a political system dominated by Super Pacs and lobbyists, ordinary Americans joined together to begin healing our wounded democracy – by verifying the vote in three key states.

For three weeks, a historic recount campaign pushed forward in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, defying political blockades, bureaucratic hurdles, legal maneuvering and financial intimidation.

This unprecedented effort by more than 10,000 volunteers and 161,000 donors coalesced in a matter of days. It affirmed the determination of the American people to raise the bar for our democracy. At its core, the recount essentially asked one question: do we have a voting system we can trust, that is accurate secure and just, and free from modern-day Jim Crow in our elections?

The answer, we found, is a resounding “no”.

From the outset, the recount was met with resistance at every turn. In Pennsylvania, only a small minority of precincts initiated a recount due to obsolete, chaotic rules requiring more than 27,000 citizens to file notarized affidavits by undisclosed deadlines in order to conduct a statewide recount. Reliance on paperless electronic voting machines (“DREs”) for 80% of Pennsylvania voters meant that there were no ballots to recount for most of the state in any case.

And despite a judicial opinion in Wisconsin that a hand recount was the “gold standard”, nearly half of the votes in that state were recounted by the same flawed machines. In Detroit, rules forbid recounting in nearly 60% of precincts where the vote total diverged from the voter list.

Unconscionable financial costs compounded the bureaucratic hurdles. In Wisconsin, a filing fee of $1.1m was raised to $3.5m without explanation. In Michigan, state politicians threatened up to $5m in additional costs after an initial filing fee nearing $1m.

Despite these obstacles, the recount revealed shocking flaws in our election itself. In Detroit, 87 optical scanners malfunctioned on election day. Michigan’s unprecedented 75,000 blank votes for president, many centering on Detroit, is seven-fold greater than Trump’s margin of victory.

This is no coincidence, of course. The US Civil Rights Commission concluded that the odds of your vote being miscounted or tossed out are 900% greater if you vote in a community of color. This raises a serious question: did systematic discounting of votes in communities of color determine the outcome of the election in Michigan?

Voter suppression is widely recognized in policies such as stringent voter ID laws, Interstate CrossCheck, and limited polling sites in communities of color and college campuses. But systematic discounting of votes is also occurring in under-resourced communities with decades old, badly maintained voting machines in urban districts.

Elections, as Detroit recount volunteer Anita Belle put it, are “a hot mess”. We need crucial reforms to save our sick and failing democracy. These start –- but do not end – with ensuring the security, accuracy and justice of the vote.

First, we must put an end to the use of unaccountable and insecure electronic voting machines. We must institute automatic audits to crosscheck paper ballots against machine totals, using hand counts and the human eye to make sure every election is verified. We must ensure that recounts are routine and automatic when the margin of victory is close or if there are red flags that put the vote into question.

Even with that basic quality assurance in place, much more needs to be done to create just and secure elections. We must stop voter suppression, and make sure that people have not just the right to vote, but the right to know who we can vote for – with open debates sponsored by a new People’s Commission on Presidential Debates.

We must ensure the right to vote without fear by adopting Ranked Choice Voting, a system that lets you rank your choices; if your first choice loses, your vote is automatically reassigned to your second option. This effectively ends the politics of fear, and lets people vote for the greater good, instead of the lesser evil.

We need a direct national popular vote. We must abolish the obsolete electoral college, and finally institute public financing of elections, so we can get big money out and let people back in to our political system.

The effort to re-examine our votes revealed not only a broken recount process, but a deeply flawed election. The recounts represent a determination to heal our democracy, starting with a vote we can believe in.

This uprising for voting justice has taken a first step forward, and citizen-led initiatives are leading the way towards lasting reform.