State Teams

Published by the National Ballot Integrity Project in October 2004.

The state teams material explains how the National Ballot Integrity Project intended to operate below the national level. The state teams offer useful organisational history and require careful handling for privacy and currency.

Privacy and currency

A large 2004 table headed "Voting Integrity State Teams" used three columns: the state, a local voting-integrity group, and a contact. Roughly forty rows named local organisations, and about a dozen named individual volunteers who had agreed to act as a point of contact.

Individual names are omitted for privacy, and the 2004 organisation list is not a current directory. The individuals were private citizens who volunteered for a local coordinating role two decades ago and did not agree to perpetual republication. Several organisations still exist and hold a range of positions; the 2004 table is not a current directory or endorsement. The structure is the part with genuine historical value.

The state task force model, as published in 2004

Each participating state had a State Task Force Organizing Team. Its stated responsibilities were:

• Setting state strategy — deciding which questions to pursue in that state, given its own election law, equipment and legislative calendar.
• Coordinating state working groups — the same thematic split used nationally, reproduced at state scale where there were enough volunteers to sustain it.
• Communicating outward — with teams in other states and with the National Coordinating Committee, so that a tactic tried in one state could be reported rather than reinvented.

Each state also had its own discussion board for strategy and local news. The role and reliability concerns of those boards are covered in the forum overview.

The core team in each state began with a handful of activists, and the national body supplied a suggested template rather than instructions. The state teams varied widely in size and activity.

Why the state was the unit

The choice of the state as the organising unit was not arbitrary, and it reflects a real feature of American elections. There is no single national election administration. Congress sets certain federal requirements, but the rules that determine what equipment is used, how ballots are counted, who may observe, what is posted at a polling place and how results are audited are made by states and carried out by counties, cities or townships. The federal government's own summary of who administers elections in the United States sets out that division of responsibility.

A national argument had to be won state by state. The equipment picture in 2004 was not uniform, and neither is it now. The current picture is documented publicly: Verified Voting maintains an equipment-by-jurisdiction database showing what is used in each county, and the National Conference of State Legislatures maintains a comparison of state certification requirements. Those are current sources; the state-team information dates from 2004.

How local groups related to the national project

The relationship described in 2004 was affiliation rather than membership. Groups appeared in the table because they worked on the subject in their state and were willing to be listed, not because they joined anything or accepted a common platform. The project’s organisational description was explicit that the arrangement had "no formal lines of authority".

That looseness characterized the coalition as a whole. The state material contains very little state-specific policy content, the substantive documents are national, and the project could disappear without the listed groups disappearing. It is best read as a view of a network at one moment in 2004 rather than as a record of an organisation with branches. The working groups page shows the same pattern applied to subject areas rather than geography.