Action Center, 2004–2005

Published by the National Ballot Integrity Project in March 2005.

The campaign is inactive and no call to action here is current. The organisation stopped operating around 2006. Its former contact details, sign-up material and campaign instructions are obsolete.

In 2005, the coalition coordinated volunteers through a working-group selector, a list of linked organisations and rolling digests of forum activity, including the names members posted under.

The three coordinating layers

The campaign ran on three overlapping structures, none of which had authority over the others.

Working groups organised the subject matter. Sixteen of them covered everything from legal strategy to disability access, each with a stated remit, and a volunteer chose one on arrival. Their function was to prevent sixteen people in different states from independently researching the same question. The full list is on the working groups page.

State teams organised geography. Because the decisions the campaign cared about were made by state legislatures and county election offices, a national argument had to be translated into a state one; the state organising team was the unit that did that translation. The model is described on the state teams page.

The discussion forums connected the two. They carried per-state boards, per-working-group boards and a general board for reports of election problems, and functioned as the campaign's shared memory: what had been tried, what an official had said, what a local newspaper had printed. Their role and reliability concerns are covered in the forum overview.

What the campaign asked volunteers to do in 2004

In autumn 2004, the campaign asked volunteers to contact congressional and county officials, write to local newspapers, distribute printed material, collect signatures and report through the forums. Those requests are obsolete and are discussed on the campaign materials page.

Two things are notable about that list from a distance. First, every item required physical or telephone effort — printing, posting, calling, standing somewhere with a clipboard. The only online action was posting on a message board. Second, the requests were all directed at individual officials rather than at a public audience. This was a campaign designed to reach roughly five hundred and thirty-five federal offices and a few thousand county election offices, not to reach a mass public. That is a coherent theory of change for a procedural demand, and it is also why the campaign left so little trace in the general record.

Why the model did not last

The coalition’s public activity ended after 2006 for structural rather than mysterious reasons. A coalition with no membership, no formal authority and no revenue depends entirely on sustained volunteer attention, and volunteer attention concentrated around a specific election reverts afterwards. The measure was tied to a single election date, and the coalition appears never to have resolved the resulting need for a second purpose.

The technical basis also aged out quickly. A campaign built on per-state message boards was, within a few years, competing with general-purpose social platforms that did the same coordination work with no administration at all. The forum software the project ran was already dated when it was installed.

For readers looking for current information

For current voting information, use official sources. For registration, deadlines, voting procedure and the rules in a particular state, use the federal government's voting and election information and your own state or county election office. For information about voting equipment, certification, audits and election administration generally, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission is the federal clearinghouse. This 2004–2005 material should not be used as current information about voting anywhere.