Election Integrity Posting Guidelines

1. *EI *posts must be addressed to the group and only to the group. No cc's!
2. State the topic of your comments concisely and clearly in the subject line
3. Let people know who you are
4. Elucidate so that others can follow
5. Keep messages brief and legible
6. Provide links rather than attachments
7. Use ei only for messages likely to be of general interest to the entire list
8. Be kind!

Details follow. Other suggestions for good group functioning are welcome. Otherwise, please continue to engage in the conversation and also invite others to join.... For any other administrative issues, write to me or the other group managers: Diana Finch (New York), Melissa Gonzales (Texas), Ted Soares (Vermont), Jon Simon or Jim Soper (California).

Thank you,
Steve Freeman,
Director of Election Integrity
Philadelphia, PA

EI Posts and Readers

Election Integrity posts are sent by email to 365 group members, available on the web for viewing by the general public, accessible by search engines, and fed through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to anyone who monitors public discussion of a topic.

To ensure quality and manageability of messages for group members, posts are moderated. If you are unable to internalize all our guidelines that follow, remember just one: Write with your Reader in Mind.

Your readers are a broadly educated group of people who care about election integrity and want to understand what is happening – to use one of our important concepts – behind the curtains. This list has been an active google group since September 2006, and has been an informal discussion group since 2004. It includes many people influential in the election integrity movement, and many people with influence in other spheres. It also includes people new to these issues.

The primary purpose of the group is to promote and discuss research and investigation on election fraud and election integrity. The group also serves as a repository of information, observations, events, and questions and answers pertaining to the integrity of election results and election processes.

Think of EI as a high-quality blog. Everything you post should be intended to be read by the group as a whole, and by anyone who is interested in the subject and wishes to review the archives. Make each post a model of clarity and simplicity. To aid in this, please apply the following guidelines to your posts:

1. *EI *posts must be addressed to the group and only to the group. No cc's!

EI posts must be addressed to the group and only to the group. This is necessary to avoid overwhelming the forum. Otherwise, we see comings and goings mid-conversation; lengthy back-and-forth between individuals that would be of limited interest to the group even if it were possible to follow; extended chain-letter conversations with single lines of comment and ever-increasing pages-and-pages of past comments; and multiple cross-postings of these same beleaguering conversations.

No cc’s either because the duplication is just confusing clutter. It is particularly confusing to moderators because it looks the same as though another moderator has posted it already to the group, and so we don’t realize it’s not yet actually posted.

(Of course if you are answering a comment someone else has raised, that can be clear in the text of your post. If you want to be sure that X gets your post, i.e., does not ignore an EI message, you can send the message or a link to X as a separate email.)

2. State the topic of your comments concisely and clearly in the subject line.

This allows members to respond more appropriately to your posting, makes it easier to search the archives by subject, and makes it easier for members who are *not* interested in the topic to delete it without wasting time. If you are responding to a message, but the subject has changed, do not keep the same subject header. Either edit the subject header or enter your message as a new topic.

If you are unsure what the subject *is*, rethink your post and make sure you *are* sure.

3. Let people know who you are.

Establish a profile and/or include a signature tag on all messages. Include your name, affiliation, location, and e-mail address.

4. Elucidate so that others can follow.

Posts that involve tables, statistical analyses or other quantitative results should contain clear explanatory narrative. Despite the persistent beliefs of some group members, numbers do not “speak for themselves.” If background information might be helpful for some readers, include links.

5. Keep messages brief and legible:

   a. Stay on point. Do not go off on tangents that have little bearing on the discussion at hand.

   b. Use coherent paragraph structuring.

   c. Proofread and check grammar. The moderators do not have a line edit feature, so our only option is to post the error or reject the post.

   d. Include only the relevant portions of the original message in your reply. Delete any header information, and put your response before the original posting.

   e. Do not use acronyms or esoteric abbreviations unless they have already been identified in the discussion thread or you are sure that anybody with passing interest knows them: OK: USA; not OK: FEC -- rather, write out "Federal Election Commission."

6. Provide links rather than attach files.

You may attach a small file to a post, but unless there are exceptional circumstances, posts larger than 100 KB will be rejected. Consider uploading documents to the group’s file page. 

7. Use ei only for messages likely to be of general interest to the entire list.

   a. Do not send administrative messages, such as remove me from the list. Instead, go to http://groups.google.com/group/ElectionIntegrity/subscribe to change your settings or to remove yourself from a list. If you are changing e-mail addresses, you do not need to remove yourself from the list and rejoin under your new e-mail address. Simply change your settings.

   b. Do not send personal messages. Send messages such as "thanks for the information" or "me, too" to individuals--not to the entire list. Do this by using your e-mail application's forwarding option and typing in or cutting and pasting in the e-mail address of the individual to whom you want to respond.

8. Be kind!

Write with your reader in mind not only to be understood, but also to be understanding. That is, to recognize that within this forum you’re speaking to real live individuals with whom you share not only some basic convictions, but basic humanity.

   a. If one of us is broadcasting to the world a claim or argument then yes, by all means, rip it apart and dissect it.

   b. If, however, a poster just shares thoughts, however naive, take what you find useful and leave the rest be.