Elections Archives

Press Release

Strengthening Florida’s Elections Today

February 20, 2015

Today, in Tallahassee, elections officials and experts from Florida and across the country are discussing ways to make Florida elections more efficient and fair.

The forum, “Conducting Florida Elections,” is sponsored by the Democracy Fund, and hosted by the University of Florida Department of Political Science and the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections. Panels, which are being live streamed here, will cover online voter registration, cross-state voter list matching and mail balloting. (Follow #CFEF to join the conversation.)

“We’ll be talking about improving the voting process, both from the supervisors of elections’ perspective as well as from the voters’ perspective,” according to UF associate professor of political science Michael P. McDonald, who organized the forum. “Our ultimate goal is to assist voting officials while making the experience better for voters.”

Speakers will include Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, former Florida Elections Director Donald Palmer, Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley and Pinellas Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark. John Lindback, executive director of the Electronic Registration Information Center, and election scholars from the University of Florida, the University of Wisconsin, and Reed College in Portland, Ore., also will be featured. Panel moderators are David Becker, director of elections initiatives for the Pew Charitable Trusts and Adam Ambrogi, Democracy Fund.

The agenda is available here.

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How Will Technology Reshape the Way We Think about Elections and Campaign Finance?

Joe Goldman

February 19, 2015

Tomorrow, leading technologists from Silicon Valley, political consultants, commissioners from the FEC, and academics will come together at a conference sponsored by the Democracy Fund to discuss how emerging technology will impact campaign communication, mobilization, and fundraising in the future.

“The Campaign of the Future” has been organized by Stanford Professor Nate Persily and Ben Ginsberg, the former National Counsel to the Romney campaign. It will take place on February 20, from 9 AM to 4 PM, at the Bechtel Conference Center at Stanford.

The full conference agenda may be found here and will include discussions about such questions as:

How dominant will TV advertising, and other traditional media, be in the coming campaign and when, if ever, should we expect their relative demise?
How have big data innovations transformed the relevant players (both insiders and outsiders) in political campaigns?
How will technological advances alter the methods of campaign financing?
How do new technologies affect the nature and tone of campaign fundraising appeals?
Do new campaign technologies present different policy challenges than their predecessors?
Does the anonymous nature of internet communication present unique obstacles for disclosure?
How must a policy paradigm developed in the 1970s be altered to account for the nature of a Twenty-First Century campaign?

The conference will be audio streamed at the following link.

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“We’re going to fix that.”

Adam Ambrogi

November 4, 2014

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama brought national attention to ongoing problems in election administration and most notably long lines at polling places on Election Day with the quote above. What came next was the creation of the temporary Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA).

A year later, the PCEA released a report that recommended policies addressing some of the bigger problems in election administration. Since the release of the report, members of the PCEA have traveled the country speaking to audiences of election officials, lawmakers, and the public, hoping that its recommendations would catch on and find willing agents for implementing its changes.

In states and localities where election officials took the lead on implementing some of the recommendations, today’s midterm elections will be the first time voters experience new policies. The election community will be watching closely as the effects of three big recommendations—new online voter registration (OVR) systems, interstate exchanges of voter information, and mandated adoption of PCEA’s resource allocation tools for use at the local level—are tested.

The PCEA made it clear that the value of OVR cannot be overstated. At the time of the report, states with OVR experienced a reduction in voter information errors, which led to an increase in the accuracy of voter rolls and reduced wait times for voters. States also experienced a decrease in the number of provisional ballots issued, which can indicate problems with voter rolls. And now, with the addition of Illinois, Delaware, and Georgia, 20 states have OVR. Will these states see the same improvements, what else will they encounter?

Beyond the OVR benefits for voters who traditionally show up to vote, there are broad higher-level questions of how OVR affects voter confidence and turnout overall. Does the experience of registering to vote online translate to showing up to vote on Election Day, voting early, or casting an absentee ballot? Do online registration services such as provided by TurboVote or Rock the Vote employ other mechanisms for informing and engaging voters? These and other questions will be answered over the months and years to come.

The PCEA also recommended states participate in an interstate exchange of voter registration information. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) allows member states to check voter rolls against lists from other member states, in addition to state DMV records, the National Change of Address list, and the Social Security Administration. ERIC’s data matching program helps state election officials more confidently determine which voters should be removed due to a move out of the state, or death. All voters benefit from accurate rolls, and the goal of ERIC is to ensure that no voters are removed improperly.

ERIC also identifies potentially eligible individuals who have not yet registered to vote. ERIC member states are required to mail registration information to these individuals. The question to be answered: how many will register as a result and show up for this midterm? Pew’s initial responses show great promise for the ERIC system, but the impact and effectiveness will grow as the number of participants grow.

Long lines on Election Day 2013 were a major catalyst for the PCEA, but now there are several practical tools that local election officials can use to give voters a better, faster experience and do so with limited resources. A new toolkit includes a series of calculators that help estimate the appropriate ratios of volunteers, check-in stations, voting booths, and machines so that voters do not experience long waits.

In 2014, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office issued a directive requiring local Boards of Elections to create a plan for election administration. As part of this plan, administrators are strongly encouraged use the Election Toolkit to make resource allocation calculations.

Many in the election community are especially interested in the data and experience this will generate in Ohio because of the potential broad use of the tools. Will the tools effectively account for all of the variables of voter behavior and the environment of all varieties of polling places? Will other variables outside of an administrators control (length of the ballot, voter confusion, etc.) still cause long lines on Election Day? The answers will be here soon enough.

Finally, perhaps the greatest experiment occurring this Election Day in thousands of jurisdictions may answer the question that so many have been afraid to ask: will aging election equipment function properly through yet another election? Some jurisdictions are using Diebold Equipment even though Diebold is well out of the business of manufacturing voting systems. When will the threat of an election technology meltdown prompt a better way of voting?

If there was one warning that the PCEA issued, it is that election equipment purchased in the early 2000s is now nearing the end of its life cycle and yet, jurisdictions are still relying on it to meet high voter demands. It’s unclear how much longer these systems can be maintained by local election offices. It’s clear that there are innovative start-ups and that leading jurisdictions (LA County, CA and Travis County, TX) are working with their voters to imagine next-generation voting equipment. Where will elections look like in 2016? 2020?

In many ways, these questions are not going to be answered today, but will be determined by state & local election officials, advocates, voters and politicians who all share the goal of quality elections. We hope to work in collaboration with those who want to improve the process of making elections something worthy of our country’s history, encourages a process the gives every eligible voter a chance to cast that vote, and have that vote counted correctly.

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Guest Post: First State-Wide Partnership Brings Voter Registration Services to 850,000 Students

Seth Flaxman

August 1, 2014

Back in January of 2012, TurboVote had one partner school, our first grant had only just come in, and I was struggling with how to run payroll for the first time. That month I hired a dynamic young organizer, Sam Novey, on one condition: fly to Miami for two weeks with no travel budget and get three colleges that are a little bit interested in TurboVote signed on as partners. Over a dozen trips to Florida later, we’ve come a long way.

Last month, Senator Bob Graham announced in front of a packed audience of student affairs professionals from across the country that Florida was now “leading the charge” with 38 colleges and universities from across the state institutionalizing voter engagement with the help of TurboVote. He was sharing some breaking news. The Florida College System (FCS) had just announced a new partnership with TurboVote to bring our tool to 27 state and community colleges—making this is the first system-wide project of the FCS Civic Literacy Initiative, which aims to make civic engagement part of the experience of all 850,000 students enrolled in the system.

Bringing this partnership to life required some serious teamwork. Our first few Florida colleges were all introduced to us through the Knight Foundation. Funding from Knight and the Democracy Fund helped us keep a team of talented organizers focused on this opportunity for over a year, and funding from the Institute for Strategic Policy Solutions at St. Petersburg College is what made the whole FCS expansion ultimately possible.

This is a big deal. FCS is how most Floridians access higher education – 65 percent of the state’s high school graduates begin their postsecondary education at one of the system’s colleges. And our partnerships are serious long-term love fests, not fly-by-night flings. When TurboVote partners with a school we provide them with a co-branded website and work with administrators on how to institutionalize TurboVote into their student services by integrating our site with class registration, freshman orientation, or other school-wide student experiences.

When students sign up, TurboVote helps them become active voters for the rest of their life. First, we’ll help them register to vote by emailing and mailing a completed registration form along with a pre-addressed, stamped envelope, then send text message reminders about deadlines. After that, we start tracking all their elections—local, state and national, and if students wish to request absentee ballots, we’ll send them all the forms and information they need along with pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelopes. Finally, for every election, TurboVote repeats the process, sending text message and email reminders with important election information, dates and deadlines, to ensure that they never miss another.

However, what’s most exciting about this news was that the move to institutionalize voter engagement was a notably bipartisan effort. Republican Congressman Lou Frey, who founded the Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Central Florida, is also a supporter of the TurboVote effort.

In the words of Congressman Frey, “the adoption of TurboVote by the Florida College System will provide a pathway to a lifetime of participation by the state’s youngest citizens.” Frey knows what he’s talking about. He helped sponsor the legislation leading to the adoption of the 26th Amendment in the 1970s that first gave 18 year-olds right to vote. And now he’s challenging “every student in the state to use TurboVote’s easy website to register and help shape the future of America by voting in every election.”

As schools across Florida come together to bring TurboVote to their campuses, they are doing more than introducing the next generation to our democracy; they are serving as a model for the rest of the country. TurboVote is now at over 140 campuses and signing on more partners every day.

Seth Flaxman is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Democracy Works, a nonprofit dedicated to the idea that voting should fit the way we live.

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Guest Post: The Role of Ranked Choice Voting in 2013

Rob Richie

December 19, 2013

(This post was co-authored by Drew Spencer, Staff Attorney for FairVote)

If you followed the local elections that took place in 2013, you probably heard stories about ranked choice voting. There were excellent new examples of how it works in practice and a wave of positive national press, including a Governing magazine news story on the impact of ranked choice voting on civility in elections and a Governing commentary by former Oregon Secretary of State Phil Kesling explaining its value for electing winner with higher voter turnout.

The most prominent stories came from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where voters had an unusually wide breadth of election choices for the open mayor’s seat. Current law requires candidates to pay a filing fee of only $20, which led to 35 candidates appearing on the ballot. Had voters been restricted to voting by indicating only a single favorite candidate in a single round of voting, Minneapolis’s mayor almost certainly would have won with a low plurality of the vote. In this year’s mayoral race in Boston, for example, the first place finisher in the preliminary election received only 18% of the vote. While a November runoff election did produce a majority winner, it came at the price of knocking out all candidates of color before the higher turnout general election.

Instead of a choose-only-one election system, however, Minneapolis uses ranked choice voting. Voters were able to express not only which candidate was their favorite, but also which second-choice and third-choice candidates they preferred over the remaining candidates. Those rankings were used to conduct a series of instant runoff elections, with the last-place finisher eliminated and their ballots added to the totals of the candidate ranked next until two candidates remained.

Ranked choice voting led to Minneapolis’ mayoral candidates competing seriously but also positively. Voters ultimately elected Betsy Hodges, a candidate who earned broad consensus support. Heavily outspent, Hodges skipped spending money on television ads in favor of grassroots campaigning. She broke from the field by earning more than a third of first-choice rankings and was the first, second or third choice of more than 60% of the voters—and was a landslide winner in the final instant runoff with her better financed rival.

Minneapolis voters overwhelmingly understood and preferred ranked choice voting, according to an exit poll by Edison Research and analysis of the election by FairVote Minnesota. Minneapolis school board member Kim Ellison was among many expressing excitement and pride in the outcome even when their first-choice candidate did not win. In Minneapolis, commentators noted that the political climate had changed from traditional “machine politics” to coalition politics, in which candidates talk to voters more about issues and policy. A local professor called the 2013 mayoral election a “game changer.” In video interviews, voters shed light on how positively ranked choice voting was viewed.

Among those elected to the city council’s 13 seats by ranked choice voting are the city council’s first Latino, Somali and Hmong Cambodian members. Ranked choice voting was also used for eight additional offices, including five seats elected by the fair representation, multi-seat form of ranked choice voting.

Similarly encouraging stories have come out of the other cities using ranked choice voting this year. In St. Paul (MN), incumbent mayor Chris Coleman easily defeated three challengers, with ranked choice voting allowing that election to take place in one round instead of two. As highly competitive special election led to the election of the first Hmong American to its city council. Instructively, two Hmong Americans were able to run without concern of splitting the vote—and the campaign was civil enough that the winner ultimately hired an African American candidate who finished a close second to work on his council staff.

FairVote’s Andrew Douglas wrote of the positive effects that the fair representation multi-seat ranked choice voting method had in this year’s city elections in Cambridge, Massachusetts for nine city council seats and six school committee seats. The Cambridge election resulted in four first-time winners including the council’s first Latino member and a 29-year-old Arab American. Despite comprising less than 20% of the city’s population, African American candidates have had continuous representation on the council since the 1950’s, and won two of six school committee seats. More than 95% of voters typically rank at least one winning candidate as one of their top three choices and like-minded voters can elect a candidate with 10% of the vote.

Takoma Park (MD),- where FairVote is headquartered, also elected its city offices with ranked choice voting, but races were lopsided. The bigger story was it becoming the first city in the nation to extend voting rights to residents after they turn 16, a practice already done in national elections in several countries, including Austria, and Brazil. Turnout of eligible voters who were 16 and 17 was nearly twice as high as the the turnout rate of residents 18 and older.

This fall there were two special elections for U.S. Congress in which ranked choice voting played a role. Louisiana held a special election to fill a vacancy in its fifth congressional district on November 16th. In Louisiana state and federal elections, all candidates run against each other in the first round; If no candidate earns a majority, there is a runoff election between the top two candidates a few weeks later – with this year’s runoff between two Republicans. However, the time between rounds of voting is too short for many military and overseas voters to be able to receive and return their runoff ballots. To allow those voters to fully participate, Louisiana instead allows them to complete a ranked choice ballot before the first round takes place. That way, their ballots can count in the runoff for whichever of their highest ranked candidates remains.

Alabama also held a special election for Congress this fall with ranked choice ballots for overseas and military voters. There, the partisan primary elections include a runoff election if no candidate receives a majority of votes. With a crowded field of competitors for the Republican nomination, a runoff election was expected – and again overseas voters would not have enough time to receive and return new ballots for the primary runoff. Because federal law requires that such voters not be disenfranchised, a federal court ordered that Alabama allow them to use a ranked choice ballot when voting in the Republican primary – a remedy Alabama itself proposed as a means to allow it to keep a tight schedule for its multiple rounds of elections.

FairVote has written about the use of ranked choice voting for overseas and military voters before. It’s a simple reform that helps make runoff elections work better while respecting the votes of absentee voters, and it’s very popular with both voters and election administrators. That’s why, when the Presidential Voting Commission began its hearings to discuss issues with access to the polls, we submitted testimony advocating for the widespread adoption of this increasingly common reform.

The expansion of uses of ranked choice voting is an especially notable development at a time when gridlock and dysfunction in Congress have made cynicism about the American democratic process increasingly pervasive. Strong commentaries this year focused on how ranked choice voting can increase opportunities for racial minorities and heal our partisan, ideological divide, with FairVote having a series of our its similar commentaries in recent weeks in the Washington Post, Newsday, San Jose Mercury News, Cleveland Plain Dealer and more than a dozen other publications.

Next year offers more important ranked choice voting elections, including those in four California cities that use ranked choice voting. More than 60 colleges and universities now use it for student elections, and the Oscars use the multiseat form to nominate nearly all categories and the one-winner form to choose best picture. More states and cities are starting to consider ranked choice voting with a growing awareness that voting equipment vendors are making the reform easier to implement it. If you have questions about bringing ranked choice voting to your community, be sure to contact our team at FairVote.

Rob Richie is executive director of FairVote.

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Guest Post: The State Open Campaign System: Technology for Cleaner, Fairer Campaigns

John Kaehny

October 25, 2013

New York has struggled to emerge from a long history of political scandals. In recent years, a number of the state’s most powerful elected officials have left office after indictments or convictions, as have numerous state legislators. The public’s unhappiness over the pervasive influence of money in state politics has led to a loud call for new legislation that would reform campaign finance and ethics laws. But the state legislature has resisted. Despite this inaction in Albany, we are optimistic that there are ways forward that do not require difficult legislation or political upheaval. For instance, New York — and other states — can use inexpensive technology to help make our campaign finance system cleaner, fairer and more transparent.

Our informal group of civic-minded technologists and transparency and campaign experts has created a blueprint for an affordable, state-of-the-art campaign finance reporting system called the State Open Campaign System. It’s like a super-charged TurboTax for campaign finance: a website based tool that would be made available by the Board of Election — for free — to every state political campaign to use for bookkeeping, reporting and donor tracking. All online, no paper. Our design builds on the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s web based CSMART, which moved all New York City campaign reporting online this year. Our team assembled earlier this year in the midst of a big push for a small donor matching program like New York City’s 6-1 public match, and lower caps on contributions. Experts on campaign finance agree that any public funded campaign matching program must be accompanied by rigorous reporting, oversight, and tough enforcement. They also agree that transparency and tough reporting are an integral part of any kind of clean campaign finance system.

We designed the State Open Campaign System — “SOCS” — after in-depth discussions with government regulators, campaign treasurers, experts from academia and watchdog groups, and major technology firms.* We had three goals for the web based system. First, we wanted to design a system that allows campaigns to comply with very tough reporting and auditing regimes as easily as possible. Second, we wanted to sharply reduce the cost to regulators of conducting audits and detecting abuse. Third, we sought to use modern data sharing techniques, like API’s, to open up campaign finance data to the public, and to watchdogs in and out of government, and to make it as useful as possible. SOCS incorporates best practices for campaign finance and ethics reporting: 1. A fully paperless system which uses a website for all records and transactions. 2. Smart web-forms, with automatic suggestions/corrections, producing fewer errors. 3. Instant address and donor ID validation procedures that use voter and data files. 4. Unique ID numbers for all donors. 5. Open data using widely available API’s and bulk downloads in open file formats.

To make SOCS as useful as possible, we went through every step of reporting and auditing campaign donations and expenditures. We designed a “work flow” that uses smart forms, and widely available business software, to help campaigns comply with complicated rules, in a way that is as simple and intuitive as possible. We strove to keep our system as inexpensive as possible by using modules of open source code. We estimate that completely implementing SOCS, and buying new database hardware and software would cost New York about eighteen cents a voter, or two million dollars. Since New York’s totally archaic campaign finance technology is on the verge of collapse, and has to be replaced in any event, the additional cost of building a system like SOCS is very low.

Our hope is that New York will build the State Open Campaign System as part of replacing its aged technology and reforming its campaign system. If it does, we would like to see SOCS offered as an open source tool for other states. We have a promising discussion underway with the NYC Campaign Finance Board about open sourcing its CSMART code sometime in early 2014, and we will continue to work with the Democracy Fund and our many other partners to get the Open Campaign System up and running. Please feel free to contact us at info@campaignworkinggroup.org John Kaehny is executive director of Reinvent Albany, and a co-founder of the Open Campaign Working Group.

*Summaries of some of these interviews are online at opencampaignsystem.org

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Of Post-Election Audits and Plaudits

Adam Ambrogi

June 21, 2013

Provisional ballots allow the parties a chance to continue the Election Day fight well into November and December—they’re ballots that can only be counted later in the election process, after the identity or qualifications of a voter have been confirmed. It’s clear that in many elections—especially local elections, the race can come down to provisional ballots—so they’re important. That said, their frequent use—or overuse—can slow down the process, result in longer lines, and result in incomplete preliminary count outcomes. A recent audit by Philadelphia City Controller’s office sheds some light on how provisional ballots are being used and where problems can arise from their improper use. The audit was prompted by the fact that provisional ballots cast in Philadelphia in 2012 more than doubled from the last similarly situated election in 2008. Little had changed with the City’s election procedures and population, so officials wanted to understand what was going on.

According to the audit report, there were multiple causes for the high number of provisional ballots issued:

Pollworker error. The Controller estimates that 4,899 voters cast provisional ballots due to pollworker error. These were voters who were registered in the right precinct and were properly listed in the poll books. According to the Report: “Poll workers should have located the names in the books, which would have permitted these voters to cast their ballots using a voting machine, rather than casting a provisional ballot. This error should be the easiest to fix—and to the extent that jurisdictions have the ability to move to electronic poll books, the enhanced search capability should mostly eliminate this problem. Better training or review protocols might also have made a difference.

Problems in printing the ‘supplemental poll books.’ About 4,827 voters were forced to cast provisional ballots because their names were not printed in the poll books or supplemental poll books. This is the perhaps the most challenging of the problem to fix on election day, since there’s no knowable proof at the polling place that the voter is properly registered.The key finding from the audit is that the flood of last minute registrations caused a number of legitimate voter registrations to be bumped from the PA Department of State’s approved poll book. These voters should have been included in supplemental poll books, but were not. Unfortunately, the audit could not determine who was to blame for these errors because the auditors could not recreate the problem. Apparently, the City and state did not save the parameters that were used for making the books. For the purposes of audits and identifying errors, maintaining the parameters used would seem to be a necessary step in election integrity. Since this particular problem may be more challenging to fix at the poll location, it’s important to provide accountability for the system by making the parameters available, and retain those parameters for a reasonable time after the election to attempt to determine flaws in the system.

Registered voters at the wrong polling place. The third reason for provisional ballots being issued was that about nine thousand voters tried to vote at an incorrect polling location. These were properly registered voters who, due to misinformation, or other error, went to the wrong polling place. It is unclear whether Philadelphia properly notified those voters of their correct polling place.

There were some smaller problems identified by the audit that also pose unique election administration problems:

Teenage wasteland. Many groups, including Fair Vote have promoted pre-registration, which allows individuals under 18 to pre-register—who will automatically be qualified when they turn 18. It seems to be a useful policy development—so all potential voters can get registered in high school. However, that benefit was limited when the City failed to run a critical “Update Underage Voters Utility” program prior to printing its poll books.

It’s all in the family. In other cases, provisional ballot were voided improperly. For example, in one case, a pollworker voided a provisional ballot because he or she believed that the voter had already voted on a machine. On closer inspection, the auditors realized that the provisional ballot was actually cast by the daughter, and “personnel from the City Commissioners Office wrongly identified the voter’s signature in the poll book. Had they checked the dates of birth, they would have realized the signature was that of the voter’s mother, who had voted on a machine.” Obviously, it’s more than possible that a family would vote in the same polling place—this is an error that should be caught in the canvass period for provisional ballots.

In short, while a formal review of an election process can take a significant amount of time (and be a touch arduous), the results and recommendation for the reform are incredibly useful in planning future elections in the locality, and for reforming local pollworker training and requirements. There has been a push for serious post-election audits of voting systems in the last few years, and that seems to be a positive step. What this thoughtful, well-organized examination from the Philadelphia Controller’s office indicates is that officials should not stop at the voting systems themselves. Regular, independent reviews of the provisional ballot and the regular ballot systems can lead to positive lessons learned, and a chance to correct errors prior to the next election. It seems that the independence of this review is also important—no one loves an external critique, but governments and businesses of all sizes are subject to periodic, external audits—it’s time to consider that elections follow suit. It strikes me that using the Philadelphia model might be a good start.

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Guest Post: How to Reach a Large Scale with High-Quality Messages

Peter Levine

June 19, 2013

(This is the third in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations.) Since 2012, the Democracy Fund has invested in projects and experiments intended to inform and engage voters. Several of these efforts sought to change the way citizens respond to divisive and deceptive rhetoric. To succeed, an organization would have to (1) create an experience that altered people’s skills, attitudes, and/or habits, and (2) reach a mass audience. In this post we focus on the second issue: scale. Since adults cannot be compelled to undergo civic education, and about 241 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2012, engaging citizens in sufficient numbers to improve a national election is challenging. Democracy Fund grantees used at least four different strategies to reach mass audiences with nonpartisan education.

First, the Healthy Democracy Fund’s Citizens Initiative Reviews convened representative groups of citizens to deliberate about pending state ballot initiatives in Oregon. The citizens’ panels wrote summaries of these ballot initiatives that the state then mailed to all voters as part of the Oregon voter guide. Although only 48 people were directly involved in the deliberations, the results of their discussions reached hundreds of thousands of Oregon voters. Penn State Professor John Gastil found that nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the statements that these deliberators had written and that a significant portion of the voting public found the statements to be useful. In an experiment that Gastil conducted, citizens who read the statements shifted their views substantially and showed evidence of learning. So, in this case, a small-scale exercise in deliberative democracy led to mass public education. Second, Flackcheck.org produced videos ridiculing deceptive campaign ads. The videos were free, online, and meant to be funny. A major reason to use parody and humor was to increase the odds that viewers would voluntarily share the videos with their friends and relatives. We asked a representative sample of Americans what would generally encourage them to share a political video, and 39% said that they would be more likely to share it if it was funny. The only attribute that attracted more support was the importance of the topic. We also asked respondents to watch one of three Flackcheck parody videos, and 37% thought the one they saw was funny, although 20% did not. In the end, the Flackcheck parody videos attracted some 800,000 views. That is a relatively large number, although a small proportion of the electorate. On a subcontract from CIRCLE, Marc Smith is analyzing the dissemination network created by the sharing of Flackcheck videos online. Below are shown the people and organizations that follow Flackcheck’s Twitter account and their mutual connections. It is a substantial online community.

Third, AmericaSpeaks recruited individuals to deliberate online as part of Face the Facts USA. AmericaSpeaks is best known for large, face-to-face deliberative events called 21st Century Town meetings. Although they convene thousands of people, often in conference centers, their scale is small compared to the national population. The Face the Facts project provided an opportunity for AmericaSpeaks to recruit participants to low-cost and scalable Google Hangout discussions. That is a model that could be replicated as an alternative or a complement to more expensive, face-to-face discussions. Finally, several projects involved influencing professional journalists or media outlets as an indirect means of educating the public. These projects took advantage of the fact that millions of Americans still receive information and commentary from news media sources. The Democracy Fund grantees strove to improve the quality of their coverage and thereby reach a substantial portion of the voting public. The Columbia Journalism Review’s “Swing States Project” attempted to improve the quality of local media coverage by commissioning local media critics to critique the coverage . We interviewed political journalists in the targeted states. Among respondents who were aware of the project, 59% responded that it had influenced them. Thirty-six percent indicated that it had a moderate influence or influenced them “very much.” Although we cannot estimate how this influence on journalists affected voters’ understanding of the issues, the findings suggest that a fair number of journalists whose work is being read and watched by voters in swing states were taking steps to improve their coverage.

The Center for Public Integrity’s “Consider the Source” provided in-depth reporting on campaign finance issues that newspapers, broadcasters, and other news sources could use. CIRCLE interviewed 13 prominent experts who report on money and politics. Nearly half of these interviewees felt that CPI resources had influenced the conversation among media professionals, and that consequently the media now offers more comprehensive stories about money in politics. Although only 200,000 people read the CPI stories at the CPI website, the organization’s media tracking service estimated that the stories reached a potential circulation of 48 million people through pick up by other media organizations. Although CIRCLE’s evaluations did not yield recipes for changing mass behavior, the following conclusions are consistent with our findings:

Distributing recommendations from a credible public deliberation can have significant influence on the public, if the deliberation is reflected in an official vehicle, such as a state voter guide
Providing resources to the media can be an effective means of reaching scale, if the source is viewed as fair and providing them with relevant and valued content
It’s hard to get to scale by trying to become a destination site.

The previous entries in the series can be accessed below: 1 – Educating Voters in a time of Political Polarization 2 – Supporting a Beleaguered New Industry

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Reflections from a Stormy Election Day in Ohio

June 5, 2013

Election Day, Cleveland, Ohio 2004. I participated in an election observation trip for the newly established U.S. Election Assistance Commission, travelling around Cuyahoga County, Ohio, from dawn until dusk. The goal was to observe as many different kinds of polling places as possible—more than a dozen locations that spanned Cleveland’s diverse neighborhoods. One polling place in particular sticks out in my mind as emblematic of the difficulties that we faced, then and now, in improving election administration. It was in a location in the east side of Cleveland—one with a higher percentage of African-American voters. Rain had started to fall, and while the line was long when we arrived—just before the lunchtime rush—it grew, snaking around the block so that the entrance to the polling place was no longer visible at the end of the line. What was the problem? After observing the polling place and talking to some of the frustrated poll workers, the answer soon became clear.

More than half of the voting stations—where voters were allowed to complete their ballots—were not set up and sat abandoned at the corner of the room. The chief poll worker saw that there was a greater number of voting system plugs compared to the electrical outlets in the polling place, and believed they only had power to assemble half of the machines. Sadly, no-one recognized that: (a) the voting machines could be plugged, one into the other, ‘daisy chain’ style and (b) that because the system of voting was the last of the ‘punch card’ system—the purpose of the electricity was not to ‘power’ the machine, but to operate the light on the top of a movable, privacy-enhanced portable table. These problems were not intractable. The first element of the problem could’ve been solved by clear instructions, better pollworker training, or clearly labeled election equipment. The second element of the problem could’ve been solved by ensuring that the polling booths were more closely placed near the ample windows in the polling place, using backup, battery powered lights, or asking voters to cope with the existing light inside the facility. There was no apparent effort to suppress the vote at that polling place—there was just poor education, poorly designed election equipment, and limited ‘fail-safes’ built into the system to fix the problem once it had been identified. If it could be identified.

Some have asked: what’s the harm with long lines? Isn’t democracy worth waiting for? Sure, and we all should be willing to put up with some level of inconvenience in order to cast our votes. No-one should expect voting to be instantaneous, but it is also unreasonable to suggest that voters must undergo a ‘red badge of courage’ –extreme personal inconvenience while waiting in line—in order to prove their patriotism. Many working men and women do not have schedules that allow them to wait for hours to vote. Americans make sacrifices to vote every time they leave work early, skip a comfortable lunch at their desk, or pay for an extra hour of babysitting service. Those sacrifices can be financial, personal or reputational. That much was clear in the rainy polling place in Cleveland. I overheard many cell phone conversations between folks waiting in line and their bosses—pleading that ‘they knew their lunch hour was over, but they’re almost to the front of the line.’ Exasperated voters would try to get the attention of poll workers and let them know they’d been in line over two hours. Dismay was palpable on the faces of folks who were about to get in trouble at work and needed to pick up their children, and with a huff, abandoned the line. The breakdown of order at that polling place challenged the faith in democracy of many that day, and many voters (at that precinct alone) left the lines without casting a ballot. They just ran out of time.

I raise this example from Ohio in 2004 because it highlights the complications that can occur from one key error in administration: the failure to deploy available voting machines. These mistakes are by no means representative of most election officials, or poll workers, who put in long hours for limited to no pay in service to our democracy. However, as we are looking to ways to improve our electoral processes, it’s important for every actor with responsibility to fully examine the fault lines in elections. Election administration seems like every other public administration challenge—except it’s different. It’s almost entirely staffed by temporary employees; it is governed by a host of local, state and federal legal requirements; ‘Election Day’ proper happens only once (without the ability to have a ‘do-over’); there is limited ability to control when voters try to access the service; and there is significant pressure for officials to ‘report’ initial results the very same day.

There are few other government functions that are required to operate with that size and scope, and under as big a microscope as elections. That is why a sustained focus on efforts to innovate and improve the process is necessary. A nine year old example is still relevant today, as we continue to struggle with problems of long lines, inaccuracy in registration, and limited adoption of cutting-edge technology. In this first of regular blog posts for the Democracy Fund site, it is my goal to try to highlight problems, complexities and opportunities in the administration of elections and issues related to the undue influence of money in politics, as well as showcase the work and research of the Democracy Fund’s grantees. In all of these areas, it is clear there is no silver bullet, just a variety of options and strategies that will improve the election process over time, and allow a more engaged public to work to improve the process. The more that officials can focus on best practices and improved metrics to judge whether or not our political processes are working, the better off we’ll be.

Anything that can be done to improve the structure of election administration and the campaign finance system is merely ‘setting of the stage’ for participation to occur. It is the candidates, the parties, the advocacy groups, and ultimately the citizens that must engage in the political process; to contribute (or not), to register (or not), to vote (or not) based on their views and circumstances. I would like to think that we look for ways to reduce artificial barriers, to support the local and state officers who run elections, to look for ways to ensure average Americans can engage and have a meaningful impact into the electoral process. That is what those voters in line on that rainy day in Ohio were hoping for; the ability to cast their ballots without undue delay, and then continue their daily routine.

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Campaign Finance Research and Experiments

Joe Goldman

April 30, 2013

The Democracy Fund approved two new research grants earlier this year that will help us to better understand more about how certain campaign finance reforms work in practice, as well as the potential role of technology to improve the regulation of campaign financing. A $300,000 grant to researchers from Fordham University, Columbia University, and Binghamton University will support an innovative set of field experiments that aim to shed new light on the relationship between money and our political system, as well as how well reforms like increased disclosure and the use of public funds to match small donations work. The Democracy Fund chose to support this research because we believe that the data on many critical questions about money in politics remain unclear. The unique application of field experiments offer reformers, policy makers, and the courts with definitive answers to some of these questions that lie at the heart of current legislative and judicial debates. The two-year research project is led by Professors Don Green of Columbia University, Costas Panagopoulos of Fordham University, and Jonathan Krasno of Binghamton University. Green is a leading pioneer in the application of field experiments to the realm of elections, campaigns, and our democracy. A $50,000 grant to Reinvent Albany will support research into how regulators in New York State could use technology to modernize the reporting and compliance of campaign finance contributions under a proposed small-donor matching system that is being considered in Albany. Working with a team of local technologists and experts, the Reinvent Albany team will assess the needs of candidates, regulators, and the public as it develops recommendations for how technology may be able to streamline the process, encourage greater accountability, and foster a stronger campaign finance system The Democracy Fund chose to support this research project because we believe it will offer unique insight into the bipartisan application of technology to improve how our campaign finance system operates. In the coming months, we look forward to updating you on the progress of these two exciting new grants.