ELECTION INTEGRITY PARTNERSHIP

Institutional Archetype

THE TICKET QUEUE — The Election Integrity Partnership was a temporary swarm: four institutions that converged for the 2020 election season, built one shared piece of software, ran it again at smaller scale in 2022, and dispersed. The software is the archetype. The EIP ran a Jira ticketing system — the same category of project-management tool used to track bug reports — repurposed to track claims about an election. “External stakeholders,” federal agencies among them, submitted reports; analysts searched the platforms for matching content; the significant tickets went to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube “with specific recommendations.” No agency issued an order and no platform received a command. A ticket simply appeared in a queue, and a queue is not a censor — it sits, patiently, between the people who want speech gone and the people with the button. This profile scores that mechanism — the deniable seam between government-adjacent flaggers and platform enforcement — not the researchers who staffed it, who were themselves harassment and subpoena targets.

Mandate & Origin

The EIP was stood up in summer 2020, “100 days before Election Day,” by four organizations: the Stanford Internet Observatory (lead), the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab). Roughly 120 people worked across the four. Its stated mission was to “identify mis- and disinformation before it went viral and during viral outbreaks,” share “counter messaging,” and increase “understanding of the dynamics shaping the information space.” It was a consortium, not an institution — a load-bearing distinction: the charges here are the swarm’s conduct, not a fresh charge sheet against any member. The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public describes it as “a collaboration between four research organizations who would share resources and expertise” (UW CIP, 16 Mar 2023).

Funding & Backers

The EIP had no separate budget diagram of its own to publish; it was staffed and resourced by the four member institutions and their existing philanthropic and university funding, which is why the consortium-versus-member distinction matters. The relevant “backers,” in the mechanism sense, are the intake side of the queue: the “external stakeholders” permitted to feed tickets in — including federal agencies and government-funded organizations. The House Judiciary Committee characterizes the arrangement as one created “at the request” of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, working “directly with the Department of Homeland Security and the Global Engagement Center,” and providing “a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities.” That is the committee’s characterization, footnoted to an internal Atlantic Council email; the EIP disputes it directly (see below). The funding note that survives without dispute is structural: a pipeline that government could feed but did not have to be seen operating.

Institutional Voice & Intent

The Partnership wrote as a rapid-response desk: a mission statement, a weekly briefing, a ticket log, and a post-mortem long enough to carry a whole chapter of recommendations. Its 2022 page describes itself as “a non-partisan coalition established to empower the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, and others to defend our elections against online behavior harmful to the democratic process,” and says “Our aim is not to fact-check” (EIP, ‘The Election Integrity Partnership in 2022’).

Where the voice states a position, it is on four points:

• On the gap it was built to fill. The final report: “no government agency in the United States has the explicit mandate to monitor and correct election mis- and disinformation.” Its account of origin: “The initial idea for the Partnership came from four students that the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) funded to complete volunteer internships at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)” (EIP, The Long Fuse).
• On its tickets. “Government and civil society partners could create tickets or send notes to EIP analysts, and they used these procedures to flag incidents or emerging narratives to be assessed by EIP analysts” (The Long Fuse, section 1.4).
• On CISA and the platforms, in its 2023 statement. “EIP did not send any reports of false rumors or disinformation to social media companies on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” and “the vast majority (79%) of the incidents we investigated were first discovered by our own analysts” (EIP, statement).
• On what government should do next. Among the report’s recommendations to the executive branch: “Create clear standards for consistent disclosures of mis- and disinformation from foreign and domestic sources as a core function of facilitating free and fair elections, including via CISA’s Rumor Control and joint interagency statements” (The Long Fuse).

Stated intent: A non-partisan, tightly scoped effort to find and investigate false rumors about election procedures and attempts to delegitimize results, with platforms deciding what to do about what it reported (EIP, statement).

Observed intent: A ticket pipeline with a measured yield. The report counts 639 in-scope tickets, 72 percent of them about delegitimization of the election; says “Twitter, Google, Facebook, and TikTok all had a 75% or higher response rate (on the EIP Jira ticketing platform) to tickets they were tagged in”; and says “35% of the URLs we shared with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube were either labeled, removed, or soft blocked” (The Long Fuse). Its own report describes the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center as “a singular conduit for election officials to report false or misleading information to platforms,” with reports “also routed to the EIP ticketing system.”

Gap: The Partnership says 79 percent of incidents came from its own analysts and that CISA sent it no examples of potential misinformation; the committee says the arrangement existed “at the request” of CISA and quotes a CISA official forwarding an EIP ticket that “led to platform intervention.” The committee’s own quotation of that email says EIP “found this with their own monitoring.” What the record does not give is the share of the 639 tickets that arrived through the EI-ISAC lane from state and local officials, or the platform action per ticket; the report gives a 35 percent action rate across URLs and the committee holds data for almost 400 tickets.

• Social accounts and feeds. The EIP site links @EI_Partnership on X (as twitter.com/EI_Partnership). Feed: the blog RSS feed, HTTP 200 as application/rss+xml when read on 23 October 2026; its newest item is dated 14 November 2022, the week after the midterms.

Position in the Apparatus

• Four institutions, one lead. The report names the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; SIO supplied a team of seven staff researchers and five postdoctoral scholars and hired 38 undergraduate and graduate research assistants as analysts, and the whole analyst bench was 120 people (The Long Fuse). See Stanford Internet Observatory, Graphika, DFRLab and Kate Starbird.
• CISA was in the room before launch. The report’s timeline has “July 9 - Meeting with CISA to present EIP concept,” the formal start on 26 July 2020, “100 days before the November election,” and the website launch on 27 July. It names “the Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF), a subcomponent of CISA,” as having “aided in the reporting process” (The Long Fuse). See CISA.
• State and local officials fed it through one intermediary. The report says the EI-ISAC, “an independent organization run by the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS),” let election officials report to platforms through one interface while CIS and partners “reported content to the proper social media platforms.” The House committee describes CIS as “a non-profit funded in part by CISA” (The Long Fuse; House Judiciary Committee).
• Both parties were offered a ticket seat. The EIP says the Republican National Committee was contacted on 28 July 2020, did not respond and submitted no referrals, and the Democratic National Committee sent four reports (EIP, statement).
• Who paid. The report’s acknowledgements thank “Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation” as SIO’s operational funders, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Omidyar Network for the Center for an Informed Public, the Omidyar Network for Graphika, the Knight Foundation and Hewlett for the Center’s additional support, and note that the Digital Forensic Research Lab “is part of and funded by the Atlantic Council”; contributing researchers also receive partial support from the National Science Foundation and Microsoft (The Long Fuse). The National Science Foundation award 1749815 named there is a CAREER award to the University of Washington with Kate Starbird as principal investigator ($550,000, 1 July 2018 to 30 June 2024) (NSF award 1749815). Alex Stamos told the House Judiciary Committee, in his transcribed interview of 23 June 2023: “Neither the EIP 2020 or VP received any public funding. SIO’s sole source of government funds is a single National Science Foundation grant funded after the completion of both of those projects” (House Judiciary Committee, Stamos transcript). Separately, the Omidyar Network’s October 2022 announcement of support for the Journal of Online Trust and Safety calls the Observatory the journal’s publisher, and the journal is now published by Stanford’s Tech Impact and Policy Center with Omidyar support (JOTS, About). The University of Washington’s 2019 announcement of the Center for an Informed Public put the Hewlett award at $600,000, beside a $5 million Knight Foundation investment (UW Information School, 2019).

• Knight’s own figure for the Center. The report’s sentence is “Additional operational and research support for the CIP is provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation” (EIP, The Long Fuse). Knight’s own 22 July 2019 article lists $5 million to the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, one of five $5 million centers (with Carnegie Mellon’s IDeaS, George Washington’s Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics, NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and UNC’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life) (Knight Foundation, 22 Jul 2019). The gift is to the Center, a member institution of the consortium.
• It ended. The Partnership’s home page says it “was founded in 2020,” that its 2022 work was led by the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, and that “The EIP finished its work after the 2022 election and will not be working on the 2024 or future elections” (EIP). Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, which housed the Observatory, carries an archive notice: “From June 2019 to September 2025, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center advanced research at the intersection of technology and policy. This work now continues with a broader scope as the Tech Impact and Policy Center” (Stanford Cyber Policy Center). Whether the Observatory itself was dismantled is disputed; see Stanford Internet Observatory. What persists is the published report and the ticket data in the committee’s hands.
• The federal side withdrew. The DHS Inspector General’s September 2024 report says, “according to CISA personnel, the component discontinued its efforts to work directly with social media companies to counter disinformation after the 2022 election” (DHS OIG-24-52). On 16 April 2025 Secretary Rubio announced “the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC)” (State Department); see Global Engagement Center.
• The courts named it twice. The district court’s fifth prohibition in Missouri v. Biden barred officials from “collaborating, coordinating, partnering, switchboarding, and/or jointly working with the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, the Stanford Internet Observatory, or any like project or group”; the Fifth Circuit vacated it, saying “this provision cannot stand at this juncture” (Fifth Circuit, No. 23-30445). The suit in Actions & Leadership Choices is the second.

Actions & Leadership Choices

The mechanism, judged on the record. By the EIP’s own accounting in its 290-page final report, The Long Fuse, it processed 639 in-scope tickets, and of the links it shared with platforms, 35% were “labeled, removed, or soft-blocked.” An outcome rate high enough that the pipeline plainly moved the needle. In one internal note quoted by the committee, the EIP reported that after it flagged content, “Twitter took action almost immediately.” The House committee later obtained data for “almost 400 EIP Jira tickets” — and states it did so only after Stanford produced the records “under the threat of contempt of Congress.” The compulsion cuts two ways: to the committee, resistance to disclosure reads as consciousness of guilt; to the researchers, a contempt-backed subpoena is what it looks like when the state turns on people who studied speech. The record notes only that the data came out the hard way.

The defense, at full strength. The EIP’s position, in its own words: it had no power to remove anything — “social-media platforms, not EIP, decided which action to take” — and it denies acting as a government cutout. Both national party committees were invited to submit tickets; the DNC submitted four and the RNC submitted none. A Poynter review found left-leaning accounts (Occupy Democrats among them) were also flagged, and the EIP’s partnership with CISA “began under the Trump administration” and was “reviewed and approved by Trump Administration attorneys.” No court has adjudicated the EIP’s conduct unlawful. The one case to reach the Supreme Court, Murthy v. Missouri, was decided 6–3 on standing — the merits of the government-pressure question were never reached.

A critique of platform cooperation, cited in the report. The report’s chapter on policy cites Evelyn Douek’s “The Rise of Content Cartels” (note 24, page 221), a Knight First Amendment Institute essay of 11 February 2020 that criticizes cooperation between platforms; the essay predates the Partnership’s formation in July 2020 (Knight Institute, The Rise of Content Cartels; EIP, The Long Fuse, note 24, page 221).

The mechanism outlived the swarm. The EIP did not reconvene at 2020 scale, but the design propagated. Its COVID-era successor, the Virality Project, ran a Stanford-led consortium coordinating across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, TikTok, and Pinterest; per the Twitter Files (Part 19) and reporting in Reason, it recommended platforms flag material including true reports of vaccine side effects — a shift the reporting characterized as moving from judging truth to policing narrative. Abroad, the same trusted-flagger architecture is now written into the EU’s Digital Services Act. The related dashboard-and-attribution model appears again in Hamilton 68 and in the flagging work of Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory. The specimen dies; the burrow gets reused. The Virality Project’s final report lists seven institutions on its cover, among them the same Stanford Internet Observatory, UW Center for an Informed Public, Digital Forensic Research Lab and Graphika that made up the EIP, and its executive summary says the project “was formed from a collection of research institutions” (final report).

The suit, decided. America First Legal sued the EIP’s and Virality Project’s partners (Stanford, Alex Stamos, Renée DiResta, Kate Starbird, Graphika, Camille François, the Atlantic Council and Graham Brookie) in Hines v. Stamos (W.D. La. No. 3:23-cv-571, filed May 2, 2023). After jurisdictional discovery, Chief Judge Terry A. Doughty dismissed it without prejudice on July 1, 2026, agreeing that “discovery has confirmed the absence of any factual basis to conclude the EIP or VP, let alone any particular Defendant, coerced any social media platform to censor Plaintiffs’ posts or accounts”; the plaintiffs appealed (5th Cir. No. 26-30471) (ruling; judgment). The ruling also records that “Nineteen tickets from the EIP and the VP involved speech from Hoft’s website, The Gateway Pundit,” and that “Defendants admit that some Jira tickets linking Hoft’s The Gateway Pundit were sent to social media platforms” (Doc. 222).

CONDUCT verdict: PROXY-ROUTING — THE DENIABLE FLAG PIPELINE. The documented mechanism — a queue that government-adjacent stakeholders could feed, routing flags with recommended enforcement to five platforms at a self-reported 35% action rate — is settled, largely by the coalition’s own records. The characterization that this was “censorship by proxy, ordered by the state” is the House committee’s, disputed on specifics by the EIP, and never adjudicated. The hazard is the pipeline, not the researchers: a reproducible, deniable seam that no single actor need be seen operating, prototyped by academics and since propagated into a COVID successor and into law on two continents.

Alliance Map

These ran at once, for one election season and a second smaller one. Four institutions, two of them ratchet organizations and one a commercial firm, fed one ticket system; a federal agency heard the concept before launch and a federal-funded nonprofit carried election officials’ reports into the same queue; five platforms worked the tickets; and philanthropic funders paid the analysts. The final report prints the partners, the funders and the intake lane, and none of those ties is hidden. The overlap is the finding: the same system took reports from officials, civil society and its own analysts, and sent them to the same five platforms.

Reach Assessment

Institutional: The ticket channel reached five platforms; the briefings reached election officials and the press. Memetic: The report and the Jira data became the central exhibits in the dispute over whether flagging amounts to censorship, cited by both sides: the committee’s staff report is titled around “Jira Tickets,” and the EIP’s own statement answers it point by point.

Present state: The ticket channel is closed. The Partnership says it finished after the 2022 election, CISA told the DHS Inspector General it stopped working directly with platforms after the same election, and the injunction provision that named the Partnership was vacated on appeal. What remains in use is the record: the report, the ticket data and the litigation exhibits.

Counted: The report counts 639 in-scope tickets, 72 percent on delegitimization, with 120 analysts on deck in the last week. Its public briefings averaged 120 attendees in election week and peaked at 174 the day after the election, after a first briefing of about 12 journalists. The platform yield it reports is 35 percent of shared URLs labeled, removed or soft blocked; the committee holds data for almost 400 tickets after fifteen productions from SIO. The blog’s last item is dated 14 November 2022 (The Long Fuse; House Judiciary Committee; EIP blog).

Sources: House Judiciary Committee — EIP Jira-ticket staff report (Nov. 6, 2023); House Judiciary Committee — “The Weaponization of CISA” staff report (June 26, 2023); Murthy v. Missouri, No. 23-411 (U.S. 2024) — opinion (decided on standing); The Election Integrity Partnership — The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election (final report); The Election Integrity Partnership — “A Statement from the Election Integrity Partnership”; UW Center for an Informed Public — final-report announcement (Mar. 2, 2021); Atlantic Council — “The Long Fuse” report page; Poynter — “Election Integrity Partnership targeted election misinformation, not conservatives” (2022); The Seattle Times — “Attacked by conservatives, UW misinformation researcher gears up for 2024”; Reason — “Stanford Researchers Lobbied Twitter to Treat COVID-19 Facts as Misinformation” (Mar. 17, 2023); Twitter Files, Part 19 — the Virality Project (Substack).

Further sources: The Election Integrity Partnership — The Long Fuse: Misinformation and the 2020 Election, final report (Stanford Digital Repository PDF); EIP — The Election Integrity Partnership in 2022: Our Work Ahead; EIP — blog (RSS); EIP — home page; Stanford Cyber Policy Center — archive notice; DHS Office of Inspector General — OIG-24-52 (Sep 2024); U.S. Department of State — Protecting and Championing Free Speech at the State Department (16 Apr 2025); Missouri v. Biden, Fifth Circuit opinion, No. 23-30445 (8 Sep 2023); Hines v. Stamos, Memorandum Ruling, Doc. 222 — W.D. La.; Virality Project — final report; FARA registrant lists — efile.fara.gov.