About the National Ballot Integrity Project

Published by the National Ballot Integrity Project in October 2004.

In 2004, the project briefly described its organisation and intentions. The description covered what kind of body the National Ballot Integrity Project claimed to be, how it was organised and what it intended to do. The organisation no longer exists.

How the project described itself

The project defined itself as follows:

The National Ballot Integrity Project Task Force (NBIPTF) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization, consisting of a National Coordinating Committee as well as grassroots task forces in each state.

The National Coordinating Committee included representatives of organisations already working on election administration questions. Each state task force was to begin with a core team of volunteers and might then form working groups of its own. This was a loose arrangement rather than a hierarchy: the structure was, in its own words, "open, highly interactive and without formal lines of authority", and state groups could adapt a suggested template.

That is an unusual thing for an organisation to advertise, and it is worth noting as a matter of organisational history. The project was not attempting to become a membership body with officers and dues. It was attempting to be a coordinating layer over groups that already existed and intended to keep their own identities — which is also why it is largely invisible in later records. A coordinating layer leaves fewer traces than an institution.

The plan the project published in 2004

The project described a comprehensive plan. Its six strands, as published, were:

• A nationwide citizens' movement in support of hand-counted, voter-verified paper ballots.
• Media and public education intended to explain the mechanics of vote counting to a general audience.
• Coordinated public pressure exerted through the state teams at the same time rather than piecemeal.
• Investigation and data collection on how equipment was actually performing in individual jurisdictions.
• Coordinated legislative initiatives at both state and federal level.
• Legal initiatives pursuing a specific list of procedural outcomes.

The legal strand was the most concrete and sought six outcomes: paper ballots counted by hand; a voter-verified paper ballot for every vote cast on any electronic system; counting done in the polling place under public observation immediately after the close of polls; results posted at each polling place before ballots were transported anywhere; official results compiled from signed tally sheets; and no reliance on vendor-supplied central tabulation servers for aggregating results.

That list is the clearest single summary of what the project wanted in 2004, not a current request. The detailed version of the same argument is on the statement of purpose, and the operational form it took for the November 2004 election is on the plan page.

Non-partisan by declaration

The project described itself as non-partisan, and its published material is consistent with that description in one specific and checkable way: the proposals it circulated were procedural. They concerned when ballots were counted, who could watch, what was posted, and what record survived — not who should win. The joint proposal the project issued in 2004 stated in its own text that it was "not a statement for or against electronic voting", and that framing runs through the technical pages as well.

How consistently the coalition's volunteers met that standard cannot be determined, particularly from its discussion forums. The organisation nevertheless set out a standard for itself.

In context: what the structure was reaching for

The coordination problem the project identified was real and is a permanent feature of American elections. Elections in the United States are run by states and, in most places, by counties or townships, within a federal framework — a point set out plainly in the federal government's own summary of voting and election laws. A volunteer group with a national argument therefore has to make it thousands of times, which is exactly the difficulty the state-team model was designed around.

The institutional answer to the same problem developed on a different track. Rather than coordinating citizens, federal policy after 2002 coordinated standards: a published federal voting system certification process, administered by the Election Assistance Commission with testing performed by accredited laboratories, which states could adopt in whole or in part. Verification of results moved onto a parallel statutory track, with most states now requiring some form of post-election audit; the National Conference of State Legislatures maintains the current state-by-state summary of those laws.

In other words, several of those six outcomes — a durable paper record, published results, a check of machine totals against paper — became ordinary law in most states through legislatures rather than through litigation. The list dates to 2004 and should be read in that context.