Election Reform

And will our discussions appear in search engine results? They used to.

It's not surprising that there is going to be less exposure by design now: when this group was a forum, it was seen by DU management as conspiracy theorizing. This does not apply to all posts by all members, but management probably felt that election fraud was too difficult to prove with certainty. With current voting tech and election laws, I tend to agree. Even states with paper ballots don't count them by hand to any great extent; a number of different courts have said not to -- not just SCOTUS (Bush v. Gore).

I wouldn't try to censor discussion but given the difficulty of proving vote-counting fraud, some of the discussion can get a bit old. For example, there was no consensus that poll results proved vote switching occurred on a large scale, but this debate dragged on and on until someone got banned (not sure why that happened exactly, but it did have the effect of freeing up the forum for other discussions).

If we had a host, would this make a difference? Could a host appeal to management and ask for the group to become a forum, or otherwise become less obscure?

We face huge difficulties in achieving vote-count integrity given current technology. It may get worse before it gets WORSE if Internet voting takes off. But the bait and switch that paper ballots (counted mostly by computers) have become should also be exposed. There is a huge amount of misunderstanding about this, even among participants on the ER forum, when it was a forum.

I don't think a host is essential and if the forum is doomed to obscurity by design anyway -- host or no host -- it won't matter.

FWIW, I've seen you try to moderate discussions fairly in the past, Melissa G. So I'd have no problem with you hosting this group.