About the National Ballot Integrity Project

Archive record — page as published on ballotintegrity.org, October 2004.

The About page of the 2004 site was short, and almost all of it was structural. It set out what kind of body the National Ballot Integrity Project claimed to be, how it was organised, and what it said it intended to do. It is reproduced here in summary and in the past tense, as a record of a self-description rather than as a description of anything currently in existence.

How the project described itself

The page opened with a definition:

The National Ballot Integrity Project Task Force (NBIPTF) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization, consisting of a National Coordinating Committee as well as grassroots task forces in each state.

The National Coordinating Committee was described as including representatives of organisations already working on election administration questions. Each state task force was to begin with a core team of volunteers and might then form a number of working groups of its own. The page was explicit that this was a loose arrangement rather than a hierarchy: the structure was, in its own words, "open, highly interactive and without formal lines of authority", and the national body offered state groups a suggested template that they were free to adapt.

That is an unusual thing for an organisation to advertise, and it is worth noting as a matter of organisational history. The project was not attempting to become a membership body with officers and dues. It was attempting to be a coordinating layer over groups that already existed and intended to keep their own identities — which is also why it is largely invisible in later records. A coordinating layer leaves fewer traces than an institution.

The plan the project published in 2004

The About page carried what it called a comprehensive plan. Its six strands, as published, were:

• A nationwide citizens' movement in support of hand-counted, voter-verified paper ballots.
• Media and public education intended to explain the mechanics of vote counting to a general audience.
• Coordinated public pressure exerted through the state teams at the same time rather than piecemeal.
• Investigation and data collection on how equipment was actually performing in individual jurisdictions.
• Coordinated legislative initiatives at both state and federal level.
• Legal initiatives pursuing a specific list of procedural outcomes.

The legal strand was the most concrete, and the page listed six outcomes it sought: paper ballots counted by hand; a voter-verified paper ballot for every vote cast on any electronic system; counting done in the polling place under public observation immediately after the close of polls; results posted at each polling place before ballots were transported anywhere; official results compiled from signed tally sheets; and no reliance on vendor-supplied central tabulation servers for aggregating results.

That list is a historical position statement from 2004. It is recorded here because it is the clearest single summary of what the project wanted, not because it is being asked for now. The detailed version of the same argument is on the statement of purpose, and the operational form it took for the November 2004 election is on the plan page.

Non-partisan by declaration

The project described itself as non-partisan, and its published material is consistent with that description in one specific and checkable way: the proposals it circulated were procedural. They concerned when ballots were counted, who could watch, what was posted, and what record survived — not who should win. The joint proposal the project issued in 2004 stated in its own text that it was "not a statement for or against electronic voting", and that framing runs through the technical pages as well.

This archive takes no view on how consistently that standard was met across everything the coalition's volunteers wrote, particularly in its discussion forums, which are not reproduced here. What can be documented is the standard the organisation set out for itself on this page.

In context: what the structure was reaching for

The coordination problem the project identified was real and is a permanent feature of American elections. Elections in the United States are run by states and, in most places, by counties or townships, within a federal framework — a point set out plainly in the federal government's own summary of voting and election laws. A volunteer group with a national argument therefore has to make it thousands of times, which is exactly the difficulty the state-team model was designed around.

The institutional answer to the same problem developed on a different track. Rather than coordinating citizens, federal policy after 2002 coordinated standards: a published federal voting system certification process, administered by the Election Assistance Commission with testing performed by accredited laboratories, which states could adopt in whole or in part. Verification of results moved onto a parallel statutory track, with most states now requiring some form of post-election audit; the National Conference of State Legislatures maintains the current state-by-state summary of those laws.

In other words, several of the six outcomes listed on this page in 2004 — a durable paper record, published results, a check of machine totals against paper — became ordinary law in most states through legislatures rather than through litigation. That is a factual observation about the intervening two decades, offered so that the 2004 list is read as a document of its moment.