Organisations Linked From This Site in 2004

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

The 2004 site carried a page listing organisations it linked to. This restoration replaces it with an archival note, and the reasons are worth stating plainly, because the decision affects how the page should be read.

Why the list is not reproduced

The original heading described the roughly seventeen organisations it named as being committed to voting integrity. That is a characterisation of third parties, written by a coalition that has not existed for many years, and reproducing it now would assert something about organisations that are not here to agree or disagree with it. Several of the groups listed are still active, several have changed their focus or their names, at least one appeared in the list under a misspelled name, and they never held a common position in the first place.

An archival restoration can honestly record that a defunct 2004 website maintained an outbound link list. It cannot honestly republish that list as though it were current, as an endorsement, or as evidence of any relationship. So the documented fact is preserved and the roster is not: the page existed, it was headed as a list of national organisations concerned with voting integrity, and it linked outward to about seventeen bodies. None of those links is reproduced, no logos or wordmarks appear anywhere in this archive, and no claim of partnership is made on any organisation's behalf.

The character of the list

Described by category rather than by name, the 2004 roster spanned several quite different kinds of organisation: broad civic-participation and voter-mobilisation groups; organisations specialising in voting technology verification and research; digital rights and civil liberties bodies; a professional association of computing practitioners; faith-based and community coalitions; and several small single-issue groups formed around the paper ballot question itself, some of which lasted only a year or two. It was, in short, a snapshot of who was writing about the subject in the autumn of 2004 — not a coalition membership roll.

The one documented partnership

There is a single exception, and it is documented in the archive itself rather than inferred. The 2004 proposal preserved on the plan page was published as a joint invitation from VotersUnite! and the National Ballot Integrity Project, and the optical-scan accountability procedures carried an explicit credit to VotersUnite! as their source. Those attributions are preserved because they are attributions the original documents made about their own authorship, and removing them would misrepresent who wrote the material. No current relationship of any kind is implied; that organisation's present-day work is its own and is not described here.

A necessary clarification of identity

One point deserves emphasis because the names are so similar. The organisation archived on this site was the National Ballot Integrity Project, a national coalition that operated between roughly 2004 and 2006 and no longer exists. It is not connected to, a successor to, a chapter of, or in any way affiliated with any organisation using a comparable name today, including state-level bodies with similar titles that are currently active and independently registered. Anyone researching a currently operating organisation has reached the wrong archive.

Where authoritative information is published today

Because the original page functioned as a signpost, it is worth replacing that function with sources that can be verified now rather than leaving a gap. For official information on election administration in the United States, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is the federal clearinghouse: it publishes voting system guidelines and certification records, administers grant programmes and runs a biennial national survey of election administration. For how the law differs between states, the National Conference of State Legislatures maintains nonpartisan comparative summaries covering certification, auditing and related requirements.

For data and peer-reviewed research, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab publishes datasets and academic work on election administration and voting technology. Those three, together with the technical and security sources cited elsewhere in this archive, cover the ground the 2004 link list was reaching for, with the considerable advantage of being current. Further reading is collected on the resources page.