Ideas Archive

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Welcome to the Family — Electionline.org becomes a Democracy Fund Project

Stacey Scholl

January 3, 2018

Tammy Patrick co-authored this piece with Stacey Scholl.

At Democracy Fund, we believe that Americans deserve modern, voter-centric elections as a part of a responsive political system. As a grantmaker, this means investing in other organizations, projects, and platforms that support the spread of good information and foster dialogue. At times, it can also mean developing and creating our own internal efforts. In that spirit, we are excited to welcome electionline.org as a Democracy Fund project and to continue working with Mindy Moretti as the site editor.

Electionline.org is the nation’s only nonpartisan, non-advocacy clearinghouse for election administration news and information. Over the last 17 years, former editor Doug Chapin and current editor Mindy Moretti have provided a unique place where election administrators can find news relevant to their work — apart from political horse races and partisan campaign rhetoric. Daily and weekly content illustrates the routine business of our American elections and features stories ranging from serious issues with ballots to lighthearted moments with poll workers.

Democracy Fund has been a long-time supporter of electionline.org, providing significant financial support since 2014. As the partnership grew, we had the space to consider what the future could look like for both organizations — and an agreement was made to bring the project within Democracy Fund. Over the next year, Democracy Fund will work with Mindy to manage and grow the site. It will continue to operate through a strictly nonpartisan lens and with a commitment to transparency about the role our organization plays. Our goal is to ensure the site remains a trusted source of the latest news, tools, and best practices for accessible and secure elections.

Over the years, several organizations who care about the quality of American elections have contributed to building and sustaining the electionline.org website, including The Pew Charitable Trusts and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. We value their contributions and they cannot go unthanked for their vision for the site. We also remain so grateful to Doug and Mindy for their pioneering work. Doug explained that the site grew bigger and better than he ever expected. He’d originally hoped that the site would prompt national and local media outlets to take on election administration as a routine beat after a few years, making the site unnecessary over time. That hasn’t happened, but electionline.org has outlasted his initial prediction as a result, becoming a truly one-of-a-kind place for the elections community.

Part of Mindy’s passion for the site is that “there is a story behind every vote cast. There is a story behind every new innovation or piece of equipment purchased.” And while electionline.org might have started as Doug’s baby, it has been Mindy’s unruly teenager and she’s glad that the site now has a home and “co-parent” with Democracy Fund.

While we’re working on what the future holds, not much is going to change immediately. Regular electionline.org readers will see Democracy Fund’s commitment to disclose when weekly articles cover our grantees or other work in the field. As always, the site will have a curation of daily news and a weekly feature about the election world. And Mindy will work with Democracy Fund’s Elections team to grow the network of readers and enhance the types of information available on the site.

For those new to electionline.org, we hope you will check out these posts and research:

Read the latest in the daily news updates and browse archived stories from 2007 to present.
Take a deeper dive by scrolling through the comprehensive library of reports, including subjects from as early as 2001.

As a systems change organization, Democracy Fund is committed to learning, iteration, and partnering in ways that strengthen both our work and the field at large. We understand that addressing challenges in our elections system will take patience, persistence, and a deep partnership with administrators, officials, and advocates across the United States. For this reason, we anticipate that changes and updates to electionline.org will be a collaborative process. We plan to relaunch a new design for electionline.org after evaluating how it can be even more useful to the election administration community. Please email us at elections@democracyfund.org with your thoughts and feedback.

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Celebrating Civility in 2017

Betsy Wright Hawkings

December 19, 2017

At a time when some are uncertain about the strength of our democracy, organizations supported by Democracy Fund give me reason to feel grateful, and hopeful.

Along with the Hewlett Foundation’s Madison Initiative, Democracy Fund’s Governance Program is not only seeing increasingly robust programming by our grantees, but also more of them working together to coordinate and maximize the impact of their efforts to support congressional function.

Before Thanksgiving, the National Institute for Civil Discourse – a model for collaboration – developed a “Setting the Table for Civility” initiative as part of their Revive Civility campaign. In the wake of the bipartisan response to the shooting of Majority Whip Steve Scalise and other members of Congress during practice for the Annual Congressional Baseball game, NICD and the Faith and Politics Institute developed a series of videos by Members of Congress noting their ability to work together; a highlight is Republican Whip Steve Scalise and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer discussing ways they find to “disagree without being disagreeable.”

The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, working with the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, has developed the Staff Up Congress initiative to strengthen and diversify the pipeline of senior staff working in the House and Senate. If it is true that Congress will be more responsive to the American people when it better reflects the perspectives and backgrounds of ALL Americans, then this initiative can help ensure a Congress that not only better serves our country, but in doing so also helps make our discourse more civil and respectful of others’ differences.

(L) Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Arturo Vargas, (R) Rep. Barbara Lee at Staff Up Congress event.

And who says campaign operatives cannot get along – or even agree? At the University of Chicago School of Public Service this fall, digital strategists working to elect both Democrats and Republicans came together to discuss how social media has changed democracy and came to a very civil agreement on best practices in social media campaigning.

Members of the Freshman class of 2017 committed to each other during the New Member orientation in Williamsburg in January that they would continue to reach across the aisle and work together on a bipartisan basis to get things done for the country despite their differences. They felt that this was the message of the 2016 election and that they needed to make a commitment to each other to not allow the forces of partisanship pull them apart once they were actively serving in Washington. They have maintained this commitment, through their “Summer of Civility” and most recently with their holiday “Civility Pledge.”

The R Street Institute, through its Legislative Capacity Working Group, along with Protect Democracy, StandUpRepublic, and others, is working to promote regular legislative order and amplify efforts to strengthen Congress as the institution established by Article One of our Constitution.On the same day TIME Magazine celebrated “Silence Breakers” as the Person of the Year, former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson was partnering with a bipartisan group of legislators to introduce bipartisan legislation to strengthen the congressional offices of Compliance and Employment Counsel.

Photo from the Congressional Accountability Hearing

The efforts of the working group, the Women’s Congressional Policy Institute and the bipartisan “Joint Session” women chiefs of staff group, and others, was evident in the wake of the sexual harassment revelations on Capitol Hill.The relationships developed through this and other bipartisan programming helped both members and chiefs reach across the aisle and work toward a responsible, bipartisan reaction to the exposure of outdated processes and lax outreach and disclosure by the Office of Compliance. Together, they are working with the House Administration Committee to support development of credible legislation to better support Hill offices and the institution of Congress as a whole.What do all of these organizations have in common? As we note in our systems map, a key component of increased congressional function is breaking down hyper-partisanship, intolerance, and anger so that the sharing of ideas and civil discourse can occur; this is the first step toward a more functional legislative process and, ultimately, a higher-performing Congress.

While the institution still faces many challenges and much much more work lies ahead, this commitment to working across partisan lines to support increased civility and helping the institution work better – not just for those who serve there but for all Americans – is a key focus of Democracy Fund’s Governance Program. As 2017 comes to a close and we look toward 2018, we see signs of hope, and are grateful for our partnership with the Hewlett Foundation Madison Initiative and others to support the good work of so many organizations promoting this essential quality of a more effective government of, by and for the people.

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Press Release

NEW REPORTS: Democrats Were Divided in 2016 and 13 Percent of Partisans Have Changed Parties

Democracy Fund

December 14, 2017

Working Class and Elite Democrats Were Divided on 2016 Priorities and 13 Percent of Partisans Have Changed Their Party in the Last Five Years

Democracy Fund Voter Study Group analyses suggest that Trump won swing voters who cared most about economic issues and that the majority of Obama-to-Trump voters now identify as Republicans

Washington, D.C. – December 14, 2017

The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a research collaboration of leading analysts and scholars from across the political spectrum, has released two new papers about the 2016 election and its ongoing impact on the parties: Both papers are based on the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group’s unique longitudinal data set, which began measuring voters’ opinions and affinities in 2011 and continued through, most recently, July 2017. In Party Hoppers: Understanding Voters Who Switched Partisan Affiliation, Robert Griffin, Associate Director of Research at PRRI, explored partisan switching — individuals leaving their party to become independents or join the opposite party. Griffin found that, while the overall numbers of Democrats and Republicans appear stable, a significant number (13 percent) of partisans have changed their affiliation in the last five years. Other key findings include:

“While party identification is typically seen as pretty stable, a significant number of partisans have switched their affiliation in the last five years,” said Griffin, Associate Director of Research at PRRI, “These changes reflect shifts we observed in 2016 and suggest that the election will have a long-term impact on the electorate.”

Party Hoppers: Understanding Voters Who Switched Partisan Affiliation by Robert Griffin, a member of the Voter Study Group and Associate Director of Research at PRRI
Placing Priority: How Issues Mattered More than Demographics in the 2016 Election by David Winston, a member of the Voter Study Group and President of The Winston Group

Democratic non-college whites and Republican people of color were likeliest to leave their party. People of color and those under 45 were among the likeliest to switch from the Republican Party, while Democrats have lost non-college white voters and those over 45.
A majority of Obama-to-Trump voters now identify as Republicans. While most Obama-Trump voters once identified as Democrats, a majority now identify as Republicans. Since 2011, there has been a 28 percent decline in Democratic identification and a 43 percent increase in Republican identification among these voters.
Obama-to-third-party voters are likely to identify as Independents. Among those who voted for Obama in 2012 and then a third-party candidate in 2016, Democratic identification has dropped 35 percent while independent identification has risen 37 percent.
Immigration attitudes, ideological self-identification, and economic views were the most influential issues in party-switching. Switching from the Republican Party was most strongly associated with positive attitudes about immigration, self-identification as more ideologically liberal, and more liberal economic views. Leaving the Democratic Party was most strongly associated with negative attitudes about immigration, unfavorable attitudes towards Muslims, self-identification as more ideologically conservative, more conservative economic views, and lower levels of economic anxiety.

In Placing Priority: How Issues Mattered More than Demographics in the 2016 Election, David Winston used a cluster analysis of 23 different issues to group voters into meaningful segments with clear priorities and belief systems that translate into party preference, ideological choice, and voting decisions. Key findings include:
“This research shows that issues can be used to cluster voters into meaningful segments with clear belief systems that translate into voting decisions,” said David Winston, President of The Winston Group. “In the future, both political parties need to recognize that the electorate has a clear set of priorities. Issues matter – and going forward, they may matter more than demographics.”

Democratic/Independent Liberal Elites and the Democrat-Leaning Working Class had different priorities. The “Democrat/Independent Liberal Elites” cluster prioritized issues popular in the media coverage of the election, including gender and racial injustice, but not issues that were “very important” to the other Democratic cluster and the country as a whole, such as the economy and jobs.
Donald Trump won more of the top ten prioritized issues, including the economy, jobs, crime, and terrorism, while Clinton won the majority of the 23 issues included in the survey. However, the issues she won were lower prioritized, and they included five of the bottom six issues.
Swing voters were not satisfied with the status quo when it came to the economy. The contrast of change versus status quo moved swing voters closer to Republicans, based on issue priorities centered around economic issues. This was particularly true in the Rust Belt, where the election was decided.

“Rob’s and David’s analyses help us better understand what ideas and information influenced and motivated voters’ choices when they went to the polls in 2016,” said Henry Olsen, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Project Director for the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. “Clear data about what moved voters in 2016 can help us better understand the dynamics shaping voter opinions in upcoming elections.”

In the coming months, the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group will be releasing a number of in-depth reports and data sets exploring public opinion on trade, immigration, democracy, and millennials, among other topics. Most recently, the group of experts commissioned the July 2017 VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey) of 5,000 adults who had participated in similar surveys in 2016, 2011, and 2012. The Voter Study Group will put a third survey into the field in early 2018.

Please sign up for email alerts here. The 2016 and 2017 VOTER Surveys and reports were made possible by a grant from Democracy Fund to the Ethics and Public Policy Center to conduct new research about changing trends among the American electorate.

VOTER Survey Methodology Summary

In partnership with the survey firm YouGov, the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group commissioned the 2016 VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey) of 8,000 adults who had participated in similar surveys in 2011 and 2012. The Voter Study Group then interviewed 5,000 of the same respondents between July 13-24, 2017 to explore how voters’ opinions may have changed—or how they did not change at all. A complete 2017 survey methodology is available here.

About the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC)

Founded in 1976 by Dr. Ernest W. Lefever, the Ethics and Public Policy Center is Washington, D.C.’s premier institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy. From the Cold War to the war on terrorism, from disputes over the role of religion in public life to battles over the nature of the family, EPPC and its scholars have consistently sought to defend and promote our nation’s founding principles—respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, individual freedom and responsibility, justice, the rule of law, and limited government.

About the Democracy Fund

The Democracy Fund is a bipartisan foundation created by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar to help ensure that our political system can withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people. Since 2011, Democracy Fund has invested more than $70 million in support of a healthy democracy, including modern elections, effective governance, and a vibrant public square.

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Brief

Learning From North Carolina

Fiona Morgan, In Consultation With Melanie Sill

December 5, 2017

Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program defines a local news ecosystem as the network of institutions, collaborations, and people that local communities rely on for news, information, and engagement. Healthy news ecosystems are diverse, interconnected, sustainable, and deeply engaged with their communities. When an ecosystem is healthy, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Looking at local news and information through this ecosystem lens raises new, compelling questions. For example, instead of asking how do we save traditional models of local news, we ask about ways of strengthening people’s access to information that is central to a healthy democracy. Instead of asking about the health of any one organization, we examine the robustness of the relationships between them. Instead of asking how we can get people to pay for news, we ask what might be a range of models to support news as a service to communities.

To that end, we commissioned a series of reports from regions around the country to better understand the complex forces shaping local news ecosystems from North Carolina to New Mexico. In this report, the authors have sought to ask these questions, and map out the strengths and challenges facing North Carolina as the landscape of local news continues to shift due to economic and technological change. This report, researched and written by Fiona Morgan, with Melanie Sill contributing significant insights and feedback, seeks to map out key contours of the news ecosystem in North Carolina. Although the report’s initial purpose was to inform our investments in local news, we are making its findings available to the public. We do so to help serve the field and welcome further feedback that will inevitably add new layers and richness to our understanding of the field.

The report is based on interviews with more than two dozen people from different sectors and geographic areas in North Carolina that took place in the spring of 2017. It also pulls from previous research by Morgan and by Democracy Fund Senior Fellow Geneva Overholser. Morgan discusses journalistic and financial challenges facing local news in North Carolina and identifies bright spots in the ecosystem — for example, audience engagement initiatives, promising business models, and emerging collaborations. Her report concludes with 10 suggestions for developing a more robust ecosystem in North Carolina, ranging from convening conversations to forming partnerships to tackling concrete problems by building practical solutions.

Democracy Fund is grateful for the thoughtful reporting and analysis by Morgan and Sill, who are well-connected journalists and students of media in the state. (see “About the Author”). The report has also profited from the insights of many people in and out of North Carolina, including Overholser, whose earlier interviews with North Carolina journalists and publishers provided a foundation, and Dr. Phil Napoli of Duke University, a grantee of Democracy Fund who is mapping the health of media ecosystems across the country. We are also grateful for the work of Penelope (Penny) Muse Abernathy who has been a stalwart advocate for local news and a chronicler of its challenges in North Carolina and across the United States.

This report presents an overview of North Carolina’s local news and information ecosystem but does not attempt to catalogue or cover every part of it. We welcome feedback, further information, and questions about North Carolina’s local news and information ecosystem, our ecosystem approach to supporting local news, and Democracy Fund’s Public Square program to localnewslab@democracyfund.org.

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Blog

News Match Grows as New Funders Step Up to Support Nonprofit News

Josh Stearns

November 20, 2017

News Match is already the largest grassroots fundraising campaign for nonprofit journalism ever. More than 100 newsrooms across the United States are working together to raise $6 million dollars—or more —by the end of 2017. NewsMatch.org, the home of the campaign, is an innovative new hub where people can search for trustworthy journalism outlets by geography or topic and then give to multiple newsrooms with one donation. The effort is designed to mobilize thousands of new people to donate to local news and investigative reporting.

But News Match is more than a fundraising campaign. It’s a call to action for all who are concerned about the news and information needs of our communities and the role of a strong fourth estate in our democracy—and it’s growing.

For those in philanthropy, News Match offers an opportunity to not just provide financial support to outstanding newsrooms, but to invest in the long-term sustainability of these organizations by equipping them with the in-depth training, technology, and capacity building they need to reach new readers and foster a community of donors.

News Match began with a small team at the Knight Foundation who had a big idea to ramp up donations to nonprofit newsrooms at the end of 2016. That year Knight matched $1.2 million in donations to 57 newsrooms. This year News Match has doubled the number of eligible newsrooms and nearly tripled the total dollars in the News Match fund.

News Match has become a unique platform for local and national funders to collaborate in the interest of fostering more sustainable and vibrant public interest media.

Today we are announcing four new foundation partners have joined News Match:

The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation is contributing $100,000 to the national News Match fund, while also matching donations to five local newsrooms as part of its ongoing grant making.
The Wyncote Foundation is providing an additional match of up to $10,000 each for Next City, Philadelphia Public School Notebook, and NJ Spotlight in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
The News Integrity Initiative is contributing $50,000 to match donations to a group of newsrooms that cultivate diversity and inclusion within their organizations and serve underrepresented communities.
The Gates Family Foundation is matching donations to Chalkbeat in support of their education reporting in Colorado devoting up to $10,000 during the Colorado Gives campaign that kicks off December 5.

Each of these new commitments is above and beyond the original $3 million donated by the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, who together launched News Match at the beginning of October.

In ten other states, individual donors and local foundations have stepped up with challenge grants to encourage people to give to nonprofit news, adding at least another $500,000 to support quality journalism this year. In total, more than 20 foundations, corporations, and individual donors are offering matching challenges, most of which were developed independently by local leadership at nonprofit news organizations.

In Texas the John & Florence Newman Foundation is offering a $100,000 matching grant for San Antonio’s Rivard Report and The Kirk Mitchell Public Interest Investigative Journalism Fund is matching gifts to the Austin Bulldog.
In Michigan, Bridge Magazine has built strong relationships with local funders and three of them, the Herbert H. and Grace A. Dow Foundation, Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, and Glassen Memorial, have matches to support the newsroom.
In Vermont, corporate donors and local funders such as Vermont Coffee Company, Sustainable Future Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation, and the Fountain Fund are providing matching funds for VTDigger.
In Louisiana, The Reva and David Logan Foundation is matching donations to The Lens in New Orleans as part of their ongoing grant making.
In California, The Community Foundation for San Benito County is matching donations to BenitoLink and The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation is matching donations to FairWarning as a part of their ongoing grant making.
The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation is matching donations to the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, Pine Tree Watch, Connecticut Health I-Team, New Mexico In-Depth, and Rocky Mountain PBS.
Individual donors have also risen to the occasion, creating challenge funds at Wisconsin Watch, The War Horse, EcoRI, and InvestigateWest.

In the face of profound challenges facing journalists today there is enormous momentum gathering to support nonprofit news. However, because all of these are matching programs, newsrooms won’t be able to unlock those dollars unless people donate.

Quality journalism makes a difference every day. Without you, stories don’t just go unread — they go untold. As we head into the giving season, it is critical that we support the news we rely on.

Find a newsroom and donate today at www.newsmatch.org.

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Blog

Five Tips for Learning-Focused Meetings

Donata Secondo

November 15, 2017

Across philanthropy, organizations are putting greater emphasis on learning, recognizing the importance of rigorous inquiry to improve our impact. Growing from a commitment to evaluation, the trend has now extended beyond it. We now recognize that it takes a facilitative organizational culture, tools and processes – and not just data – to learn. The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s recent Foundation Evaluation Benchmarking Survey shows that foundations are increasingly dedicating attention to – and hiring staff for –these aspects of organizational learning.

A community of foundation learning officers, like myself, is emerging as a result. We work internally to foster a culture of adaptation and learning. We provide our busy colleagues with venues for learning, tools and practices for reflection, and we encourage their curiosity.

As the community of learning staff finds its footing together, we should be conscious and intentional about how much we have to learn from the colleagues we support. My Democracy Fund peers frequently remind me about the importance of asking not only what our organization should be learning, but to also ask how we can support the learning objectives of our grantees, partners and the wider field. By now, it is common wisdom that foundations learn through and with our grantees – but it is our program staff who live out this wisdom every day.

Recently, I shared with my colleagues a tip sheet for how to build a reflective practice into our staff check-ins. Though I’d envisioned this as an internal resource, my enthusiastic colleagues asked to share these lessons with their grantees. With their help, I am coming to see that my objective as Manager of Learning and Strategy should not simply be for Democracy Fund to actively learn, but to ensure that our grantees and partners have the resources and support to do so as well. Democracy Fund will learn best when we are part of a cohort of robust learning organizations.

Over time, our team hopes to help strengthen learning skills among our grantees, as well as our colleagues. We plan to deliver trainings in monitoring, evaluation, and learning, to provide resources that support these capacities, and to encourage Democracy Fund to be even more participatory and transparent in our monitoring, evaluation and learning activities.

In that spirit, I’m listening to my colleagues. Here, for your use as well as ours, are the five tips for making meetings more learning-oriented, mentioned above. I hope you find value in them – do reach out with your stories!

1. Make Dedicated Space for Learning

Often, there’s no need to create new venues for learning. Consider looking for opportunities to build learning into existing meetings and structures. Team check-ins are an ideal setting, since they are regular, informal, and action-oriented. Consider carving out 20 minutes of an existing check-in for this purpose, or extending a meeting to make time. If you find yourself adding meetings to the schedule for learning, make sure your objectives are specific and explicit. Consider how other agenda items might condition mindsets and participants’ degree of comfort for learning (see Bonus Tip!).

2. Put Learning First

When looking to build your financial savings, experts advise putting aside the first chunk of your paycheck, rather than whatever’s left over at the end of the month. The same applies to learning. The last agenda item often gets cut – so to make sure learning activities occur, put them first on your meeting agenda. Starting off with a learning activity might also help shift the tone of the rest of your meeting, making it more reflection-oriented.

3. Keep it Structured – AND Keep it ENGAGING

Simply asking “what are we learning?” rarely leads to a productive conversation. A light structure helps enhance the conversation and ensure everyone has a chance to be heard. Check out FSG’s guide to Facilitating Intentional Group Learning for ideas – including many activities that can be done in about 20 minutes!

Routine can help build our learning muscles, and over time can lead to reflection becoming part of the culture. Find a tool that works for your team and stick with it for a while. Still, make sure the tool doesn’t become stale – switching things up can keep it engaging.

4. Make It Useful

Reflection for its own sake is worthwhile, but it becomes learning when we apply it to our work. In too many instances, valuable lessons are lost because they never become actionable. Every learning activity should keep an eye on how to the data collected or lessons learned will be useful in the future. Ask “when will we apply what we’ve learned?” and “How will we change our behavior in the future?” Make things concrete, and ensure someone is tasked with carrying the lesson forward into future work. Jot down notes, and circle back on do-outs at future meetings.

5. Model Curiosity

Learning is everyone’s job. All of us can model learning behavior that is hungry for evidence, encourages feedback, and welcomes a diversity of views, to foster a supportive learning environment. While it’s important to have someone structure and guide learning activities, participating in them is everyone’s responsibility – and a learning culture is most vibrant when everyone actively engages. Everyone can enter learning activities curious, and welcoming of the curiosity of others.

6. BONUS TIP — (ESPECIALLY FOR MANAGERS): Watch for Power Pitfalls

By being conscious of how power dynamics and other stressors can affect learning spaces, you can create opportunities for each team member to share their input. Consider implementing explicit norms on open communication, assigning agenda items to different team members, or creating activities in which each member of the team is explicitly invited to speak up.

Want to keep a reminder at your desk? Download our infographic of all of these tips here.

Many thanks to Anna Chukhno, Democracy Fund’s Strategy, Impact and Learning Intern, for her support on this project.

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Blog

Recruiting Poll Workers from Outside the Box

Terry Ao Minnis

November 6, 2017

Even during non-federal election years, officials across the country are running on all cylinders for their state and local elections. One of the key preparation activities is the recruitment and hiring of poll workers. Poll workers are critical to the success of an election, especially when it comes to voters’ confidence in their votes counting. Recent analysis conducted by the Democracy Fund, Reed College, and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study found that 63.7 percent of people who rated their poll workers as “excellent” (i.e. those who know the proper procedures) were “very confident” in the counting of their own votes.

For language minority voters, poll workers can make or break the success of their voting experience. Well-trained poll workers will know how to properly interact with language minority voters – providing proper customer service and care in assisting the voter experiencing language barriers to ensure they are able to cast a proper ballot. Poll workers who are less aware of the rights of language minority voters and/or who treat language minority voters with suspicion or in the worst case, hostility, can turn language minority voters away from voting.

Though they recognize the benefits of quality poll workers, elections officials face difficulties in recruiting enough of them and, as a result, have a limited pool of trusted, well-equipped poll workers each election. There has been a critical national shortage of poll workers, with up to a 500,000 worker deficit at any given time in the two last decades. When it comes to bilingual poll workers, the deficiencies can be even greater. In response to this problem, jurisdictions are looking outside the box to devise innovative methods for to recruitment, which can be replicated across the country.

Tapping high school students has been particularly helpful in onboarding bilingual poll workers, because younger generations often serve as translators for their parents and family members. Democracy Fund staff reached out to election officials in Minneapolis, Minnesota about the state’s student election judge program, which recruits kids from public schools, charter schools, and private schools, as well as home schooled students. Through this program, Minneapolis has doubled the number of student election judges providing language support between 2014 and 2016, growing from 89 to 159 participants. Even though they only comprised 12 percent of Minneapolis’s total judges, they made up 30 percent of those with secondary language skills.

Montgomery County, Maryland has gone beyond working with high schoolers to mobilize middle school students too, bringing students as young as sixth graders into the polls through a program called Future Vote. Future Vote aims to increase future voter knowledge, by strengthening ties to specific participation and emphasizing the importance of participatory democracy. Dr. Gilberto Zelaya, Outreach Coordinator with Montgomery County, shared that since 2004, the program has worked with approximately 38,500 students and 21,500 families. These students have uniquely bolstered the county’s language support overall. For the general election, a third of the students who served had language capacity in another something other than English, helping to cover 68 languages.

Jurisdictions can complement and expand the reach of traditional outreach methods such as engaging community-based organizations and ethnic media, by leveraging social media platforms. Harris County, Texas utilizes Twitter and Facebook to promote it’s #StepUpToServe campaign, which is geared toward recruiting Election Day poll workers, especially bilingual English, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese speakers. The effort, which targeted civic-minded professionals, and retirees, but namely high school students and their parents, has had over 100 students apply to help with this year’s election. Harris County officials, Hector DeLeon and Kristina Nichols, confirmed that meeting their language coverage was a top priority. “In particular it was hard to find people who speak both Vietnamese and English, but high school students are able to fill this role in a unique way, because they more readily available than college students and they’re excited to make a little money,” said Kristina Nichols. Incredibly, most of the students who applied spoke a language other than English. Harris County officials have been thrilled with the results and continue to rely on social media and visits to local high schools to spread the word for more recruits in 2018.

The elections official’s own internal community – city and county government workers – is another ripe source for recruiting bilingual poll workers. For example, in Maricopa County, Arizona, officials created an online survey to solicit poll workers from county departments as well as from the staff of the municipalities and school districts in their borders. Maricopa County designated the time to work on Election Day as civic duty pay so employees do not have to use personal time off. The simple act of emphasizing civic duty within their own ranks provides support across departments and has leveraged the professionalism of their own employees, many of whom have bilingual skills. This has been a tremendous resource of individuals who already have a lot of the training needed for providing bilingual services to the community.

Finally, some jurisdictions have turned to the legislative process to expand the pool of potential bilingual poll workers. In California, community advocates worked to pass a bill, with key support from the California Secretary of State and the California Association of Election Officials, to have legal permanent residents (LPRs) become eligible to become poll workers. The bill was even expanded to include high school students who are LPRs. In 2013, Los Angeles County conducted a pilot project and they were able to recruit 200 bilingual poll workers that are legal permanent residents.

Poll workers play such an important role in our elections – they can inspire confidence in our election system, which is sorely needed today as apathy and lack of confidence abound in our elections. But they can only do so when properly educated, trained and prepared to address the needs of voters at the polls. This is particularly the case for voters experiencing language barriers, who may find the process and materials very confusing and daunting. To have a set of quality poll workers at your polling locations, jurisdictions must have a proactive recruitment plan in place and must look at innovative ways to encourage people to serve as poll workers. Many jurisdictions have already done some good thinking and work on this front and others should replicate these methods for future elections.

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Blog

Competent Poll Workers Bolstered Voters’ Confidence in 2016

Jack Santucci

November 1, 2017

What makes Americans trust the electoral process? How can Democracy Fund work to build trust? We spend a lot of time thinking about these issues, since trust in elections and institutions more broadly are essential to healthy democracy. In order to inform our work on trust and election administration, we partnered with Reed College and the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study.*

Our survey of 1,000 Americans turned up two important results in the ‘trust’ framework. First, confidence in vote-counting depends in part on who wins or loses. At the same time, competent poll workers may help bolster voters’ trust in elections.

One way to measure trust in elections is to ask respondents about “voter confidence” – a measure of whether people feel confident that their own ballots were (or will be) counted as intended. (You can read about other measures here.) In order to help us find correlates of change, we asked about voter confidence both pre- and post-election.

Winner’s and loser’s effects

The table below reveals clear evidence of what political scientists call the winner’s effect. As far as we know, this is a psychological boost from seeing a preferred candidate win. Going into the election, only 65.9 percent of Trump supporters were “very” or “somewhat confident” that their votes would be counted as intended. Post-election, that changed to 93.2 percent — an increase of 27 points.

Other studies point to a loser’s effect. We did not find much of one in 2016. 86.3 percent of Clinton voters reported being “very” or “somewhat confident” after the election, a decline of only four points.

Graph: Candidate Success May Influence Voter Confidence

The importance of competent poll workers

We also found that people who rated their poll workers highly tended to express higher confidence. For example, 62 percent of respondents rated their poll workers as “excellent,” and 63.4 percent of those people were “very confident” in the counting of their votes.

Going a step further, we used logistic regression to test the relationship between the polling-place experience and change in one’s voter confidence. This analysis also accounted for age, race, gender, education, income, and vote choice.

On average, respondents who said their poll workers did an “excellent job” were less likely to report lower confidence post-election than those who said “poor job” – 4.5 times less likely among Trump voters and 2.5 times less likely for Clinton voters.

What made people rate poll workers highly? One factor stood out in our data: a perception that poll workers “knew the proper procedures.” 60.7 percent of respondents who reported that perception also said they were “very confident” that their votes had been counted as intended. This relationship held in a logistic regression controlling for age, race, gender, education, income, vote choice, and a raft of other potential reasons for rating poll workers highly (e.g., politeness, tending to voters waiting in line, et cetera).

Given the prevalence in 2016 of rhetoric about “hacking” and “rigging” —as well as other, more specific worries across partisan and racial groups—we were pleased to find that competent poll workers likely boost trust.

Based on analysis captured in our Elections & Public Trust systems map, Democracy Fund supports several organizations working on ways to raise the quality of election administration and improve the voter experience at polling places. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, for example, offers a set of tools that election officials can use to reduce voter wait times and efficiently allocate polling-place resources. Other good examples come from the Center for Civic Design, which provides election officials with field guides that, among other things, include instructions on providing clear materials for poll worker training and making in-person voting a pleasant experience.

We hope these data and the good work being done by these and other grantees spark a larger conversation about the importance of recruiting and training poll workers. Americans rely on poll workers to understand and help voters navigate election processes. To further promote trust in elections, election officials and advocates can and should continue to support poll workers’ success.

This is the second in a series of blog posts that showcase our findings from the CCES, and we look forward to sharing more in the coming months. This post was first published in November 2017, and was updated in February 2018.

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* YouGov administers the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which includes Common Content and invites participation from up to 50 academic teams. The Reed/Democracy Fund pre-election survey was administered to 1,000 respondents, and our post-election data includes answers from 845 respondents. More information about the CCES and its methodology is available at the Harvard Dataverse, found at: https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/data .

Paul Gronke is the Principal Investigator of the Reed College/Democracy Fund team module. Natalie Adona is the Research Associate for the Democracy Fund’s Elections Program and manages the roll-out of these findings, with support from Jack Santucci, the Elections Research Fellow. Please direct any questions about these survey findings to nadona@democracyfund.org.

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Effective Place-Based Philanthropy

Prudence Brown

October 17, 2017

Democracy Fund believes that strong local news and a vibrant public square are critical to a healthy democracy. Today, local news is struggling in communities across America. Newsrooms, facing dwindling advertising revenue and diminishing trust, have been forced to shrink, or in many places, disappear altogether. While there are bold experiments to rebuild newsroom capacity in some regions, these experiments are unevenly distributed and precarious. The Democracy Fund local news strategy is focused on creating a more connected, collaborative, and sustainable future for public-interest journalism.

Because local news must be responsive to and reflective of the local communities it serves, we have designed our local news strategy around deep partnerships with local funders, journalists, and communities. We want Democracy Fund to be a catalyst for expanding local efforts to create robust news ecosystems. We recognize that in pursuing place-based philanthropy to strengthen local news, we are guests in other’s communities. We can’t do this work alone.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles and practices of national foundations undertaking place-based work. Democracy Fund commissioned Prudence Brown, a respected leader in place-based philanthropy, to provide her insights as we design a new program to support and strengthen local journalism and civic engagement.

Many of the themes and considerations in this paper are applicable to funders in other sectors. As such, we are sharing this work with the broader field. We think this is important both for the sake of transparency and accountability, and because we hope others can learn alongside us. This paper is just the start of our learning journey. We welcome any comments about lessons learned from other national-local partnerships.

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How Local-National Funding Partnerships Can Strengthen Local News

Josh Stearns

October 17, 2017

Democracy Fund believes that strong local news and a vibrant public square are critical to a healthy democracy. That is why our local news strategy is focused on creating a more connected, collaborative, and sustainable future for public-interest journalism. But we recognize that we can’t do it alone, and that partnerships with other foundations are critical to rebuilding a vibrant public square.

Today we are releasing a new paper that we commissioned to help us learn about how to build effective and equitable partnerships that put local stakeholders at the center of our work to support local news. The paper, “Effective Place-Based Philanthropy: The Role and Practices of a National Funder,” is relevant to funders and nonprofits working on a range of community development and engagement efforts.

We believe that the future of local news is local. That may sound like a bland truism, but it raises important questions for a national foundation who wants to genuinely and authentically support diverse local communities to strengthen their local news ecosystem. Solutions to the crisis in local news need to respond to local context and needs. We can and should learn from what is working elsewhere, but we should also recognize there is no silver bullet and that only through deep listening and partnership can we create meaningful and lasting change.

For this reason, we have designed our local news strategy around deep partnerships with local funders, journalists, and communities. We want Democracy Fund to be a catalyst for expanding locally driven and locally supported efforts to create robust news ecosystems. We recognize that in pursuing place-based philanthropy to strengthen local news, we are guests in other’s communities. We take that role seriously and humbly.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles and practices of national foundations undertaking place-based work and learn from past projects. Democracy Fund commissioned Prudence Brown, a respected leader in place-based philanthropy, to provide her insights as we developed our strategy.

Drawing significantly from recent literature and Brown’s own experience and observations, this paper is organized around key questions that national funders can consider as they develop new place-based partnerships. After each question, Brown provides a brief discussion and concrete suggestions for decision-making and action. While the audience for this paper is largely other foundations, we believe that the lessons here are also useful in empowering nonprofits and grantees.

Many of the themes and considerations in this paper are applicable to other sectors well beyond journalism and media. As such, we are sharing this work with the broader field. We think this is important both for transparency and accountability, and because we hope others can learn alongside us. This paper is just the start of our learning journey. We welcome any comments about lessons learned from other national-local partnerships to LocalNewsLab@democracyfund.org.