Working Groups

Published by the National Ballot Integrity Project in October 2004.

In 2004, the National Ballot Integrity Project divided its work among sixteen groups, each with a one-line remit. Volunteers could indicate which group they wanted to help; that sign-up mechanism is no longer active.

The sixteen groups, as listed in 2004

• Legal Options and Strategies — surveying what could be sought through the courts, and on what basis, in different jurisdictions.
• Legislative Options and Strategies — tracking bills and drafting model provisions at state and federal level.
• Technology — the technical questions: how tabulation worked, where records were created, and what could be independently verified.
• Media and Public Relations — dealing with press enquiries and preparing material for publication.
• Education and Awareness Outreach — explaining vote counting to non-specialist audiences.
• Vendor Information — a research remit, gathering publicly available corporate information about the companies supplying election equipment.
• Political Contacts — maintaining a record of which officials had engaged with the subject.
• Paper Ballot and Hand Count — the practical mechanics of counting paper by hand, and the group behind most of the coalition’s substantive documents.
• Activists and Labor Outreach — contact with other organised groups.
• Rallies and Demonstrations — public events.
• Elections Research — collecting data on how equipment performed in particular jurisdictions.
• Voter List Integrity — questions of registration list accuracy and maintenance.
• Recount — recount law and procedure, which varies considerably between states.
• Disability Issues — accessibility of voting equipment and polling places.
• Polling Options and Strategies — survey and exit-poll methodology.
• Election Oversight — the rules governing who may observe an election process, and what observers may do.

A note on the vendor information remit

In 2004, the vendor information group planned to compile information on the owners, directors and key employees of election equipment companies. That plan is a historical fact, not an endorsement of such research. No company, official or executive is named, and no claim about them is endorsed. Corporate research of that kind can be legitimate and can also go wrong; no position is taken on what was collected.

What the list reveals

Read as a whole, the sixteen headings show a group whose interests were broader than the phrase "electronic voting" suggests. Four of them — disability access, voter list maintenance, recount procedure and election oversight — concern parts of election administration that have nothing to do with tabulation technology at all. Two are essentially communications functions. Only one is explicitly technical.

That breadth was also the coalition's structural weakness. Sixteen volunteer groups, in a body with "no formal lines of authority" and a state-team structure repeating the same split locally, is a large amount of organisational surface for a project that existed for roughly two years. The documents that survive with real substance come from a small number of these groups, principally the paper ballot and hand count group and the technology group; the optical-scan procedures and the 2004 proposal are their work.

In context: where these functions sit now

Most of the functions the sixteen groups were improvising have institutional homes today. Research and data collection on how election administration actually performs is published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission through its programme of studies and reports, including the biennial national survey of election administration, which did not exist in a comparable form in 2004. The commission also serves as a general clearinghouse for election administration information, guidance and grant management.

Security of election infrastructure — a subject the 2004 technology group approached as outsiders reading vendor documentation — is now a designated federal responsibility, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency publishing guidance and coordinating with state and local officials on election infrastructure security. Accessibility, list maintenance and recount procedure are each governed by substantial bodies of state and federal law.

None of that existed in the form described above in 2004. It is included because a reader arriving at a 2004 volunteer working-group list should know where the corresponding work is done now, and because the comparison is the most honest way to explain what a citizen coalition of that period was trying to substitute for.