Campaign Materials, 2004

Published by the National Ballot Integrity Project in October 2004.

In the autumn of 2004 the National Ballot Integrity Project assembled fourteen downloadable materials for volunteers who wanted to argue for its proposal locally. The kit shows what a citizen advocacy campaign carried in its bag in 2004.

Why the campaign materials are inactive

Most of the kit was live activism surface: a telephone script with a switchboard number, two sample letters to members of Congress, a sample letter to newspaper editors, a printable petition with delivery instructions, and a suggested message for posting on discussion boards. Those documents were written to be acted on, they carry contact details that have been obsolete for two decades, at least one was written and signed by a named private individual, and the organisation that issued them no longer exists.

The coalition is defunct, and these materials are not current calls to action. Its former contact files are obsolete. The kit is a well-preserved specimen of how a volunteer campaign packaged an argument in the year before social media organising.

What the kit contained

The fourteen items fell into four groups.

Explanatory documents

Three items existed to explain the proposal itself: an implementation plan setting out how a county would actually run the measure, a general explanation of the proposal aimed at a lay reader, and a set of hand-counting guidelines describing counting procedure step by step. These were the substantive core and are covered in the plan page and in the optical-scan procedures.

Legislative documents

Two items were drafted for a legislative audience: the text of proposed federal legislation, covered on the draft bill page, and a question-and-answer document anticipating the objections a legislator or staffer was likely to raise, covered in the FAQ page. The FAQ is the more revealing of the two, because it shows the campaign rehearsing the strongest counter-arguments against itself.

Contact and persuasion materials

Five items were tools for contacting officials and press: a telephone script, two sample letters to Congress, a sample letter to the editor, and a suggested discussion-board post. Their contact instructions are obsolete. Templated contact material of this kind was standard practice for advocacy groups of every description in the period, and remains so.

Distribution materials

Four items were for physical distribution: a printable flyer built around a short quiz format, a petition sheet, a technical procedures document for jurisdictions using optical-scan equipment, and a compilation of supporting articles. The flyer and petition are obsolete campaign materials, not current calls to action. The technical procedures are explained on the accountability procedures page.

What the kit says about the period

Several features date the collection precisely. Everything was designed to be printed: the assumption throughout is that a volunteer downloads a file, prints copies at their own expense, and hands them to people or posts them. Telephone contact is treated as the primary channel for reaching an elected office. The single "online" item is a suggested post for a discussion board, which was where political conversation among strangers largely happened in 2004.

The kit also assumed a particular division of labour that has since largely dissolved: the national body wrote the documents, and the local volunteer supplied the effort of distribution. There was no expectation that the volunteer would produce anything, or that material would circulate without them. A campaign assembling the same kit today would produce almost none of these fourteen items in these forms.

In context: where authoritative voter information is published now

One function this kit performed was simply informational — explaining to people how ballots are counted where they live. That function now has reliable official sources that did not exist in comparable form in 2004. General information on registration, voting procedure and election law is published at the federal government's voting and election pages, and material for both voters and election administrators, including guidance documents and national survey data, is published by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Readers wanting current information about voting in their own jurisdiction should use those sources and their state or county election office, not these 2004 materials.

How the campaign coordinated the distribution of this kit across its state teams is described on the action centre history.