Resources and Further Reading

Published by the National Ballot Integrity Project in October 2004.

In 2004, the National Ballot Integrity Project published an annotated reading list. Most of the linked files no longer exist, and several links were malformed even at the time. The 2004 reading list can be compared with checked, current sources.

The 2004 reading list

The list was short and had a recognisable shape. It began with the project's own white paper on electronic voting, described as an account of critical issues and critical risks. It pointed to a report by the Congressional Research Service on electronic voting, which was the standard neutral reference of the period for anyone wanting a description of the technology and the policy questions without an advocacy frame.

It linked to testimony given by a computer scientist before a subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Science in June 2004. The individual is omitted for privacy; the testimony is part of the congressional record of the period and can be located through official sources.

It linked to two pages maintained by the group VotersUnite! — one cataloguing which types of voting equipment were used in which states, the other a running news compilation. And it closed by pointing back to the campaign's own materials, described on the campaign materials page.

What that list tells you about 2004

Two absences are more revealing than the contents. There is no link to a federal agency publishing technical standards for voting systems, because the standards regime that exists today was only beginning to be built. And there is no link to a body of peer-reviewed empirical research on election administration, because that field was in its infancy; the large-scale datasets that researchers now treat as routine were not being collected.

The reading list is therefore a fair picture of what a serious lay reader could actually consult in 2004: a congressional research summary, some academic testimony, and compilations maintained by volunteers. That scarcity is a substantial part of the explanation for why citizen groups of this period did so much of their own primary research — a pattern visible across the working group list — and why the quality of that research varied so much.

Verified current sources

The following are current, in-service sources on election administration and voting technology. They supersede the dead 2004 list without implying endorsement of the project.

Standards and certification

The Voluntary Voting System Guidelines are the published federal requirements against which voting systems are tested, covering functionality, security, auditability and accessibility. The technical research underpinning them is conducted through the NIST voting technology programme. The Election Assistance Commission publishes the certification process, the register of certified systems and the associated test reports.

Law and practice by state

The National Conference of State Legislatures publishes nonpartisan comparative summaries of state law on voting system standards, testing, certification and post-election auditing — the practical starting point for any question that begins "does my state require...".

Data and research

The MIT Election Data and Science Lab publishes datasets, methodological notes and peer-reviewed research on election administration and voting technology. The Election Assistance Commission's biennial survey of election administration is the largest systematic dataset on how American jurisdictions actually run elections.

Primary documents and process

For the constitutional and procedural framework surrounding federal elections, the National Archives electoral college resources hold the primary documents and a plain description of the process, including the certificates each state submits.

Using these materials as sources

A note for researchers, students and journalists: this collection is evidence about a defunct 2004 citizen coalition and its arguments. It is not a source for factual claims about voting systems, past elections or current practice. For those, use the sources above. Context sections summarise current practice in general terms and are not a substitute for the primary sources they cite.