Organisations Linked From This Site in 2004

Published by the National Ballot Integrity Project in October 2004.

In 2004 the project published a list of organisations it linked to. The reasons for describing rather than repeating that list are worth stating plainly.

Privacy and currency of the 2004 list

In 2004, roughly seventeen named organisations were described as 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.

The defunct project did maintain an outbound list of about seventeen national organisations concerned with voting integrity. The 2004 list is not current and does not imply endorsement, partnership or any present relationship.

The character of the list

The roughly seventeen organisations spanned several quite different categories: 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 a view of who was writing about the subject in the autumn of 2004 — not a coalition membership roll.

The one documented partnership

One exception was explicitly documented rather than inferred. The 2004 proposal 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 come from the documents themselves and identify 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 historical organisation 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 should use that organisation’s current channels.

Where authoritative information is published today

Because the list functioned as a signpost, current verifiable sources are more useful than a dated roster. 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, cover the ground of the 2004 link list with the considerable advantage of being current. Further reading is collected on the resources page.