State Teams

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

The state teams page explained how the National Ballot Integrity Project intended to operate below the national level. It is one of the more interesting pages in the archive as a piece of organisational history, and one of the most heavily edited in this restoration, for a reason set out plainly below.

What is not reproduced here

The original page carried a large table headed "Voting Integrity State Teams", with 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 in 2004.

Neither the individual names nor the organisation list is reproduced in this archive. The individuals were private citizens who volunteered for a local coordinating role two decades ago and who never agreed to have their names republished on a restored website. The organisations are a separate problem: several of the groups listed still exist, hold a range of positions, and should not be presented on this site as though the 2004 table were a current directory or an endorsement. What is preserved is the structure — which is the part with genuine historical value.

The state task force model, as published in 2004

The page described a State Task Force Organizing Team in each participating state. 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 on the project's forum system, used for strategy discussion and for circulating local news. Those boards are described, but not reproduced, in the forum archive note.

The core team in each state was small by design — the page describes a handful of activists as the starting point — and the national body supplied a suggested template rather than instructions. The result was that the state teams varied widely in size and activity, which the page did not attempt to conceal.

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 consequence the 2004 page understood is that a national argument has to be won state by state. Another consequence, which matters for anyone using this archive as a research starting point, is that 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; nothing on this page is.

How local groups related to the national project

The relationship described on the original page 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 own About page was explicit that the arrangement had "no formal lines of authority".

That looseness explains something about the archive as a whole. It is why the state pages contain very little state-specific policy content, why the substantive documents are all national, and why the project could disappear without the groups listed on it disappearing. It also explains why this page is best read as a snapshot 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.