Action Center, 2004-2005: an Archive

Archive record — page as published on ballotintegrity.org, March 2005.

This page is a historical record and contains no calls to action. The organisation described here stopped operating around 2006 and does not exist. Nothing on this page asks the reader to do anything, and no contact details, sign-up material or campaign instructions from the original site are reproduced anywhere in this archive.

What the page does contain is an account of how a mid-2000s volunteer coalition actually coordinated itself, which is a legitimate and rather under-documented subject. The original page, in its 2005 form, was largely site furniture — navigation, a working-group selector, a list of linked organisations and rolling digests of forum activity, including the names members posted under. None of that is reproduced. The account below is drawn from the structural material across the site as a whole.

The three coordinating layers

The campaign ran on three overlapping structures, none of which had authority over the others.

Working groups organised the subject matter. Sixteen of them covered everything from legal strategy to disability access, each with a stated remit, and a volunteer chose one on arrival. Their function was to prevent sixteen people in different states from independently researching the same question. The full list is on the working groups page.

State teams organised geography. Because the decisions the campaign cared about were made by state legislatures and county election offices, a national argument had to be translated into a state one; the state organising team was the unit that did that translation. The model is described on the state teams page.

The discussion forums connected the two. They carried per-state boards, per-working-group boards and a general board for reports of election problems, and functioned as the campaign's shared memory: what had been tried, what an official had said, what a local newspaper had printed. They are described, and explicitly not reproduced, on the forum archive page.

What the campaign asked volunteers to do in 2004

Described historically, the requests the campaign made of its volunteers in the autumn of 2004 were: to contact their own congressional and county officials about the proposal; to write to local newspapers; to distribute printed material locally; to collect signatures on a printed petition; and to report back through the forums on what they encountered. The materials supplied for those purposes are described, without being reproduced, on the campaign materials page.

Two things are notable about that list from a distance. First, every item required physical or telephone effort — printing, posting, calling, standing somewhere with a clipboard. The only online action was posting on a message board. Second, the requests were all directed at individual officials rather than at a public audience. This was a campaign designed to reach roughly five hundred and thirty-five federal offices and a few thousand county election offices, not to reach a mass public. That is a coherent theory of change for a procedural demand, and it is also why the campaign left so little trace in the general record.

Why the model did not last

The action centre disappeared along with the rest of the site after 2006, and the reasons are structural rather than mysterious. A coalition with no membership, no formal authority and no revenue depends entirely on sustained volunteer attention, and volunteer attention concentrated around a specific election reverts afterwards. The measure the campaign was organised around was tied to a single election date, so the organising problem after that date was to find a second reason to exist — which the surviving material suggests it never resolved.

The technical basis also aged out quickly. A campaign built on per-state message boards was, within a few years, competing with general-purpose social platforms that did the same coordination work with no administration at all. The forum software the project ran was already dated when it was installed.

For readers looking for current information

Because this page was originally an action centre, it is worth being explicit about where to go instead. For registration, deadlines, voting procedure and the rules in a particular state, use the federal government's voting and election information and your own state or county election office. For information about voting equipment, certification, audits and election administration generally, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is the federal clearinghouse. Nothing on this archived site should be used as current information about voting anywhere.