Ideas Archive

Brief

Voter Sentiments On The U.S. Election System

Natalie Adona and Paul Gronke

December 2, 2016

The 2016 election was one of the most hard fought and divisive in recent memory. The Democracy Fund continues to be troubled by some of the rhetoric regarding the “hacking” and “rigging” of the American election system, two topics that animated so much discussion from across the ideological spectrum this cycle. We believe the long-term impact of these messages undermines the legitimacy of the election system and further erodes public trust in our political system.

Our new infographic is based on a national survey of voters after the 2016 election that was designed to provide the Democracy Fund a snapshot of public opinion about our election system and the possible effect of the rhetoric around election fraud. This data demonstrates that while most voters had a pleasant voting experience, deep concerns exist about the integrity of American elections.

Most Americans had a pleasant voting experience and expressed confidence in the outcome.

Let’s start with the good news: most Americans had a pleasant voting experience. When asked, 85.3 percent of voters said the best description of their voting experience was that it was “pleasant.” This is consistent with other surveys that capture voter opinions about election administration. For example, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) has found the majority of in person voters report having “excellent” or “good” interactions with poll workers and are generally confident that their own ballots were counted as intended. Results from the CCES also indicate that a majority people think that election officials are fair most of the time. (1)

Because public opinion about elections can be influenced by one’s political associations and candidate preferences, we broke down these results by party identification. It turned out that party differences were minimal. The percentage of Republicans who reported a pleasant experience (89) was higher than among Independents (83.6) and Democrats (82.5). Still, 4 out of 5 voters who cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton reported a pleasant voting experience.

Overall, these results show that election officials ensured not only that voters can participate in the political process, but also that voters can feel good about participating. To anyone who has ever worked in an election office, this is very encouraging. A positive voter experience is never guaranteed—it has to be earned. A significant portion of the report from the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) focused on the positive benefits that would accrue from a “customer service” orientation. A great level of detail and care is required to successfully administer an election and we want to take a moment to recognize and appreciate the hard work of election officials.

Many are concerned about voter fraud in national elections.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves – just because most voters walked away feeling good doesn’t mean that there isn’t more work to be done. Hearing claims that the election could be “rigged” or that other countries might “hack” the American election system may have heightened concerns about voter fraud. Even though there is virtually no evidence that voter fraud occurs at a scale large enough to sway electoral outcomes, confidence in vote counts decreases significantly the further removed the vote total is from the local jurisdiction. Survey data has consistently shown that respondents are less confident in state- and national-level ballot counts than in local counts. (2)

Lower confidence in national-level outcomes may make the public vulnerable to claims that the election system is “rigged” or that results could be “hacked.” As shown in the infographic, 39 percent of voters were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that an electronic security breach or hack impacted national vote counts. A slightly lower but significant percentage of voters (38) had similar concerns around parties and candidates changing election results to create false or inaccurate totals. Of that group, 35 percent of Trump voters and 40 percent of Clinton voters answered that they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that the parties or candidates changed election results.

Minority communities and younger voters were more likely to report problems and distrust with voting.

Other concerns emerged from our survey. Twenty-three percent of African Americans and 18 percent of Hispanics said that they felt fearful or intimidated voting, or had problems voting, compared to 12 percent of white voters. More than half of Hispanic respondents and 58 percent of African Americans expressed answered they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that an electronic security breach or hack impacted vote counts, compared to 32 percent of white voters. Hispanics and African Americans were also more likely than whites to answer that they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that a candidate or party changed the election results to create false or inaccurate vote counts.

The data revealed that age may also shape opinions about fraud. Twice as many younger respondents were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that a candidate or party changed the election results (49 percent compared to 24 percent of respondents 55 and over). It turns out that this pattern is nearly linear across smaller age cohorts, across all items, something we hope to explore in the future.

In one respect, it is encouraging that older voters, who presumably have more experience with voting, are more confident. But this also implies that younger and less experienced voters may be especially susceptible to claims about election fraud, and this could dissuade them from voting. To take just one example, we discovered that 17 percent of respondents under 55 reported that they felt fearful or intimidated, or had problems voting, compared to just 11 percent of respondents 55 years and older.

Distrust in the election system is unhealthy, and it’s notable that younger and minority voters overall were more likely to report fear and intimidation while voting and were more likely to express concern about election integrity. Given the sometimes brutal tone of the campaigns this election cycle, we felt it was important to highlight these data points as worthy of further examination.

Building Trust in Elections

Despite fears around voter fraud, polling place security, and calls for an increased number of poll watchers from the campaigns, local election officials successfully served the voting public. As we look through our data, we are very encouraged by evidence that voters are more likely to think the outcome was fair when educated about key security features. Our survey data confirm that independence, transparency, integrity, competence, and fairness translate into higher levels of public approval of the elections system.

Election officials, advocates, and others should think about how they talk about election security with voters and look for opportunities to foster trust in the system. Our data shows a need for increased voter education in three important ways:

First, the fact that certain minorities were more likely to report some kind of problem with voting should raise concerns about election conduct and hopefully will lead to meaningful ways for election officials and others to address problems in particular communities.
Second, because younger voters were also more likely to express concerns about election security and are probably less experienced in voting, election officials and advocates should focus their educational efforts on younger voters as well.
Third, voters from both sides of the political aisle have concerns about election fraud and are receptive to the information and rhetoric that they hear about election processes, which opens up an opportunity for election officials to show voters how their offices address these concerns.

We will continue to explore our data and are looking forward to sharing our findings as they emerge. One of our takeaways from this survey is that, even with all the good work that’s been done, voters need our help to understand election security and integrity and will listen when they’re given correct information. We hope that these survey results will trigger productive conversations between voters, election officials, advocates, and others about the processes currently in place that keep elections secure.

About the Authors

Natalie Adona is a Research Associate for the Elections Program at the Democracy Fund. Paul Gronke is a professor of political science at Reed College and serves as an academic consultant to the Democracy Fund’s Elections Program. He is also the Director of the Early Voting Information Center in Portland, Oregon.

Endnotes

(1) The Cooperative Congressional Election Study has been administered in each federal election since 2006. The data are available at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cces/home.

(2) Michael W. Sances and Charles Stewart III. “Partisanship and Confidence in the Vote Count: Evidence from U.S. National Elections since 2000.” Electoral Studies 40 (December 2015): 176–88. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2015.08.004.

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6 Things To Know On #GivingTuesday

Emma Thomson

November 29, 2016

As Americans head back to work with full hearts after Thanksgiving, we have an annual opportunity to support nonprofit organizations in the work they do year round. While there are plenty of reasons to give, here are six tips to keep in mind:

1. Think about today’s priorities

There’s no shortage of needs from which to choose – from education and advocacy to meeting basic needs, there are plenty of great options! We’re partial to democracy issues.

2. Check the charity rating on a resource like Charity Navigator

Before you give, confirm that the organization is a certified 501(c)3 nonprofit and in good standing.

3. Donate directly through the charity

Eliminate the middle man! By contributing directly to the charity via its website or another way, you’re making sure the beneficiary gets the whole donation.

4. Earmark your contribution for a specific program or need

Passionate about a certain program or area in which a nonprofit works? You’ll be more invested in your donation if you know that it’s going to something you care about.

5. Take advantage of your workplace’s matching gifts benefit

Do your employee benefits include an opportunity for matching gifts? If so, make sure to report your giving to qualifying charities to double the impact.

6. Generosity is good!

In addition to benefits like better mental health and stress management, giving makes you feel good and is a great way to pay your good fortune forward.

The Democracy Fund is grateful to our grantees who are making a difference for the American people. We support them because we believe in their commitment to making Americans’ voices come first in our democracy. To learn more about their work, please visit our Impact page. This #GivingTuesday, we can all make a difference!

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Press Release

Public Opinion Reinforces the Exemplary Work of Local Election Officials on November 8

Democracy Fund

November 21, 2016

WASHINGTON D.C. – November 21, 2016 – According to a new national survey conducted by the Democracy Fund in the days following the election, 85 percent of voters say they had a pleasant experience on November 8th, including overwhelming majorities of voters who supported either President-elect Donald Trump or Secretary Hillary Clinton.

“Despite rhetoric about potential widespread election rigging or hacking, local election officials successfully ensured that ballots were securely cast and accurately counted. Their efforts are clearly reflected in a positive voter experience and the fact that no significant improprieties have yet come to light in canvasses or audits,” said Adam Ambrogi, Elections Program Director, Democracy Fund. “Even if your candidate did not win, Americans can take pride in our decentralized, transparent, and secure election system.”

The voter experience is critical because it fosters trust in electoral outcomes. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) put forward its recommendations in large part because inefficient or poor administration decreases trust in the outcome, and bad voting experiences might cause the public to disengage in future elections.

Data shows that large swaths of Democrats and Republicans express nervousness about key safeguards within the system, including the idea that fraud, rigging, or hacking may actually have impacted the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. In fact, there is even substantial concern among voters who believe that the 2016 election outcome was “very fairly” determined – meaning that even the voters who are most trustful of the system after the election still have considerable concerns about specific threats to the process.

“The Democracy Fund is committed to working with local election officials to help educate voters about the transparent and decentralized safeguards in place so that they can be confident in the outcome and trust the results,” said Natalie Adona, Elections Research Associate, Democracy Fund. The newly released survey also points to a need for continual efforts to guarantee that all Americans feel safe when they cast their ballots. Twenty-three percent of African American voters, and 18 percent of Hispanic voters, say they felt fearful, intimidated, or had problems voting, compared to 12 percent of white voters.

“In a heated election, passions and rhetoric can sometimes rise, but it is imperative for our democracy that all voters feel equally comfortable going to the polls,” Ambrogi said. “Some of these disparities in the voter experience are troubling, and should cause all of us to examine this issue before the next election.”

This online survey of 1,500 U.S. adults was conducted November 9–11 via VeraQuest, Inc. Panelists are required to double opt-in to ensure voluntary participation in the surveys they are invited to complete. Adult respondents were randomly selected to be generally proportional of the age, sex, region, race/ethnicity, income, and education strata of the U.S., based on Census proportions, and quotas were established for demographics to confirm sufficient diversity of the sample in proportions so that they would resemble that of the United States.

###

About the Democracy Fund

The Democracy Fund is a bipartisan foundation established by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar to help ensure that the American people come first in our democracy. Today, modern challenges—such as hyper partisanship, money in politics, and struggling media—threaten the health of American Democracy.

Read our report on the progress made towards more secure and smooth elections since the Presidential Commission on Election Administration’s recommendations were released in 2014: http://bit.ly/PCEAProgress.

Contacts:

Lauren Strayer, Director of Communications
Democracy Fund
(202) 420-7928
media@democracyfund.org

Jennifer Krug
Porter Novelli
(212) 601-8264
Jennifer.krug@porternovelli.com

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Starting With Community: From Civic Journalism to Community Engagement

Paul Waters

November 7, 2016

This week in Chicago journalists from around the country will gather for the People-Powered Publishing Conference. The conference brings together innovators and pioneers who are connecting newsrooms and communities in new ways.

The Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program will be on hand at the event and is releasing a new paper, “How to Best Serve Communities: Reflections on Civic Journalism,” on the history of how newsrooms have partnered with their communities — from civic journalism to today’s engaged journalism.

This past August, our senior fellow Geneva Overholser wrote a blog post on the connections between civic journalism and engaged journalism. Geneva has expanded on this topic with a fuller reflection on the civic journalism movement in the ‘90s. In the paper she describes what civic journalism hoped to do and the lasting impact of ideas around engagement. We found this work to be very useful as we are in the beginning stages of developing a strategy to support engaged journalism.

In Geneva’s concluding thoughts she reflects that:

“Today’s engaged journalism, civic journalism’s replacement in this digital age, enjoys an utterly different environment from the one that confronted civic journalists — one in which disruption prevails, change is the new constant, and innovation is seen, almost universally, as essential. The contemporary movement is landing on far more fertile terrain.”

Engaged journalism repositions news and information as a service rooted in deep dialogue with the public rather than a product for them to consume. This kind of journalism understands that outlets can create better stories, stronger newsrooms, and more healthy communities by bringing people into the journalism process. Engagement generates feedback loops between audiences and outlets to improve relationships, representation, responsiveness, trust, and impact.

The Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program supports the practice of engaged journalism through research, relationships, convenings, and grants. Throughout this process, we will collect, share, and update learnings with the broader field to support a network of practitioners across the country. While this is a national trend, we’re especially interested to understand how it works on the local level.

Our belief is that this reorientation of local journalism towards engaged journalism is critical to fostering a thriving journalism landscape and a more engaged democracy. The people attending this week’s People-Powered Publishing Conference are on the front lines of this work and we look forward to learning from and with them. We hope that Geneva’s paper on civic journalism can provide the historical insight and direction to move forward in the context of financial collapse and technological disruption of traditional print and broadcast news.

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Brief

How To Best Serve Communities: Reflections on Civic Journalism

Geneva Overholser

November 5, 2016

At the Democracy Fund, we believe that creating a stronger future for local news requires us to focus on transforming the relationship between news consumers and news producers. As we develop a new program to support and expand “Engaged Journalism,” we have sought to ensure that our new efforts are informed by the successes and struggles of the past — especially the civic journalism movement of the 1990s. This paper was commissioned for the purposes of understanding that history and what has changed since, so that we will be more likely to succeed today.

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Progress Report Shows Promising Gains for Voting Access & Efficiency

Stacey Scholl

October 20, 2016

In 2014, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) highlighted best practices in election administration to improve the voting experience for all Americans. The bipartisan group, lead by chief attorneys for President Obama and Governor Romney’s campaigns, released a comprehensive—and unanimous—set of recommendations to make voting easier and more efficient.

In advance of the 2016 presidential election, we wanted to know: what recommendations were adopted and where? Answers to these questions became the Democracy Fund Progress Report on the PCEA. In it dozens of election officials and stakeholders reveal areas of improvement, notably:

Modernizing voter registration systems;
Expanding early voting and access to voting;
Reducing lines and improving polling place management; and
Modernizing voting technology.

Modernizing Voter Registration

A major recommendation was expanding Online Voter Registration (OVR), which is valued for its usefulness to both voters and election administrators. Since the release of the Commission’s report, the number of states with OVR has doubled to 39, including the District of Columbia.

Other recommendations continue to impact voter registration in major ways. Due in part to the Commission, two networks that facilitate voter registration information sharing between states, for the purpose of improving the accuracy of voter rolls, have grown. Voter Registration Crosscheck now has at least 29 states participating and 20 states and the District of Columbia have joined the Electronic Registration Information Center.

Expanding Early Voting and Access to Voting

The PCEA report also spurred five states to adopt forms of early voting or expand its role in comprehensive election plans. There is a drastic change in Massachusetts, where prior to 2016, most voters had one alternative to voting on Election Day: have a legally accepted excuse and vote an in-person absentee ballot. Under the new law, there will be 11 days of in-person early voting at multiple sites across the Commonwealth.

There has been a reinforcement of ideas to help military and overseas voters. A working group formed by the DoD’s Federal Voting Assistance Program and the Council of State Governments built on the PCEA’s recommendations. Notably, they recommended that military and overseas voters should be sent absentee ballots for all elections during a two-year period and asked states with OVR to designate a section of their portals for these unique voters.

Reducing Lines and Improving Polling Place Management

Polling places are changing for the better with data-informed innovation. In 2015, the Voting Technology Project published an online Elections Management Toolkit to help officials allocate polling place resources, allowing them to model line lengths based on past data. Videos even walk election officials through using the tools.

States are also taking action to recruit public and private sector employees and students, to become poll workers. Rhode Island and Illinois started programs to recruit student workers as a catalyst for increased voter participation among young people. Additionally, the Bipartisan Policy Center and Democracy Works successfully recruited Spotify, Starbucks, Target, and several other large companies in a coordinated effort to generate greater civic participation among their employees.

Modernizing Voting Technology

With strong urging from the PCEA, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission approved new voting system certification guidelines and a manual for certification and testing. The hope is these actions encourage voting machine vendors to bring new systems to market.

The accounts of PCEA influence are revealing that our system is open to change. In fact, the bipartisan efforts to implement the recommendations of the Commission are a sign of possibilities when people work together. We acknowledge that problems will occur this November; any time 100 million plus people do anything, problems will occur. For those places where problems emerge, there are some solutions to be found in the guidance of the PCEA or the bipartisan spirit of their work. We are encouraged by this progress and look forward to continuing to work with our grantees, election officials, and advocates to improve the voting process for all Americans.

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Statement

Democracy Fund: This Election Is Not Rigged

Democracy Fund

October 20, 2016

In the last two weeks, fear mongering over potential election rigging has come to a fever pitch. In response, the Democracy Fund issued the following statement:

“The peaceful transfer of power is a cornerstone and tested principal of our democracy. Recent fear mongering over the Presidential election being ‘rigged’ does not reflect the security and checks built into our elections system. We’ve studied the election process and worked with administrators from both sides of the aisle — and our election process is secure and safe,” said Adam Ambrogi, Director of the Elections Program at the Democracy Fund.

“By design, our election system is highly decentralized and no one person ever has unlimited access to voting machines, making widespread hacking or rigging extremely difficult. Beyond technology, we have layers of physical security and protocols that prevent against bad actors. The system has checks and balances built in to ensure that before, during, and after our elections, we’ll know if something goes wrong — and we have steps to ensure Americans can have faith in the results of our elections, no matter who wins.”

See the Democracy Fund’s report on the progress made towards more secure and smooth elections since the Presidential Commission on Election Administration’s recommendations were released in 2014: http://bit.ly/PCEAProgress

###Democracy Fund experts on the topics of fear mongering around election rigging, voting, and election administration are available for interviews. To schedule, please contact Molly Haigh at molly@megaphonestrategies.com.

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Press Release

Report: Big Gains for Voting Access Result from Presidential Commission on Election Administration

Democracy Fund

October 4, 2016

Democracy Fund Finds PCEA Recommendations and State Leadership Have Helped Decrease Wait Times, Expand Early Voting, Expand Online Registration Access in Just Three Years

Washington, D.C.- A bipartisan effort to shorten voting lines and improve how elections are administered has yielded major progress in both red and blue states, according to a new report released today by the Democracy Fund. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) was established by Executive Order in 2013 to identify best practices in election administration and improve the voting experience. President Obama named his former White House Counsel Bob Bauer, and Ben Ginsberg, National Counsel to Mitt Romney’s Presidential Campaign, to identify problems and present potential solutions for future elections.

“The work being done around the country to implement the bipartisan recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration are a true sign of what is possible when people work together to solve problems,” said Adam Ambrogi, the Director of the Democracy Fund’s Elections Program. “We applaud the election administrators from both political parties who have adopted these recommendations to reduce lines at the polls, expand early voting, and make it easier to register to vote.”

The PCEA first released a report on best practices and recommendations to modernize the American electoral system over two years ago—including recommendations to increase access to online voter registration, expand early and absentee voting, modernize voting machines, and promote best practices for election administrators and states to follow. The Democracy Fund believes there is value in continuing to measure its progress and promote bipartisan reforms in the future.

After interviewing dozens of state and national election officials, the Democracy Fund uncovered the following progress on the PCEA’s recommendations. Officials say the PCEA has helped:

Double the number of states that have approved online voter registration to 38, plus the District of Columbia;
Expand the number of states that share information with each other and perform outreach to eligible but unregistered voters, such as the ERIC program, to 21 states, plus the District of Columbia.
Introduce or increase early voting in five states—including a new ten-day early vote program in Massachusetts and a new two-week early vote program in Rhode Island. There are still 13 states in which early voting is not available. As more information becomes available, early voting is likely to take root in these remaining states.
Spur recommendations for improving the voting process for military and Americans abroad that are now being considered by multiple states.
Reveal factors contributing to lengthy polling place wait times for voters in over a dozen jurisdictions.

Innovative state programs that have come out of the PCEA report include:

In Ohio, Secretary of State Jon Husted is tackling wait times to vote, and now requires that counties provide detailed plans for mitigating wait times in any polling place that did not meet the PCEA 30-minute wait time standard in the 2012 general election.
In Chicago, the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Chicago Board of Elections partnered to recruit and manage a corps of community and four-year college students from Cook County schools to work the polls on Election Day. The wildly successful program increased bilingual support for voters, reduced transmission times, and resulted in higher civic participation among students. Similar programs have now been adopted in Rhode Island and California.
Alabama passed a bill allowing officials to use ePollbooks in polling places, incorporating new technology to make the check-in process easy for voters and for poll workers. Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill expressed the usefulness of the PCEA report in informing legislators on the value of this type of technology in the polling place.
New Mexico appropriated $12 million for the purchase of new voting equipment for each of New Mexico’s 33 counties. Voters began casting ballots on the new equipment in the November 2014 election. The improvement was essential—before the switch, Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver reported a high failure rate for memory cards.

“At a time when the issue of cyber security is all over the news, it’s important to note that across the country election administrators are doing the work to make our voting easy, secure, and effective for eligible voters,” said Joe Goldman, President of the Democracy Fund. “Electronic voting machines aren’t run via the internet—they’re run by our hardworking election officials. So much of this fear mongering we’ve seen in recent weeks is more about headlines than reality.”

Both elections officials and advocates interviewed by the Democracy Fund report that the PCEA was very useful in defining policy agendas and advancing pro-voter initiatives. While we know that there will be hitches in the 2016 election process, the right question to ask in those places is: Did they take PCEA seriously? As the 2016 presidential election fast approaches, the Democracy Fund recommends further action as a result of this report—including a challenge to all jurisdictions to quickly adopt PCEA recommendations that have increased voting access in so many states.

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Transforming a Tradition: Rethinking Debates with Civic Hall

Tom Glaisyer

September 26, 2016

The 2016 election cycle has been described as unique or like no other. Clearly at the Presidential level this election has been unlike other recent cycles, but it is also remarkably different in another way: the public is getting much of their news beyond television broadcasts, and they are responding, sharing, and engaging with politics in ways they never have before.

It is this change in the nature of our communications that Civic Hall’s Rethinking Debates project seeks to explore. It does so, not blindly, nor in an “add technology and the world will be better” kind of way, but rather with the sense that given the opportunity to engage the public before, during, and after debates, we should use it to explore how people learn about candidates and their positions.

There is no question that the challenges for productive debates are significant. Political polarization in the United States is more pronounced. Americans now have shorter attention spans than a goldfish. The standard format of a televised debate has turned—despite the efforts of moderators no less experienced or skilled than in the past—into what one might describe as a three ring circus. The networks may be expecting massive viewership for the upcoming Presidential debates but its viewership that is partly driven by the sort of enthusiasm one has for a wrestling match rather than something Presidential. In a context where disillusionment within the electorate with politics and candidates is extensive it seems more likely that the debates will not inform, but incite, not engage, but aggravate, not clarify but confuse.

In spite of all that, debates continue to be a staple of the campaign season in many races. They are seen as a key test of a candidate, intellectually, temperamentally, even a candidates’ body language and wardrobe choices become the subject of countless post-debate news clips.

Several groups are working on this challenge. The Annenberg Public Policy Center formed a working group and issued a report advocating for multiple innovations in the debates. The Open Debate Coalition has also been advocating for specific reforms around the debate format. Democracy Fund’s grantee, the National Institute for Civil Discourse, also recently issued civility standards for candidate debates. Politifact will undoubtedly be fact-checking the claims made during the debate and the Internet Archive, also a grantee, is using its capacity to help journalists and the public see how TV covers debates.

The Democracy Fund’s Public Square Program focuses specifically on supporting efforts to help people understand and participate in the democratic process. We invested in Civic Hall’s work because, as their new report reminds us: “The debates are [the public’s] one opportunity in the campaign to see and hear the candidates speak directly to each other in a face-to-face encounter.”

In their extensive report, “Rethinking Debates: A Report On Increasing Engagement,” and at their recent mini-conference, Civic Hall brought together experts to explore technologies and platforms that have the potential to strengthen debates, increase their relevance, and ensure they continue to be central, but in different ways than in the past.

A few of the most promising ideas include:

CNN’s use of a technologically advanced auditorium and polling of an in-person audience to add nuance and immediate responses that could be fed back into the debate via the moderator seemed to successfully pair the strengths of a moderator and an advanced facility.
Google’s election hub, a platform developed in collaboration with Watchout a local organization in Taiwan. The platform allowed the public to generate questions for Presidential candidates. It elicited 6,500 questions that generated 220,000 votes and 5 questions were used in the debates.
At a state level: In New York, Silicon Harlem hosted a debate and utilized Microsoft’s Pulse tool and the above mentioned Open Debates Coalition had their question generation tool adopted for a debate in Florida. Both provided opportunities for the public in the United States to become more engaged in driving the questions used prior to and during the debate.

We hope that as this debate season gets underway we will see more examples both at the state and local and perhaps at the Presidential level that will be new models to follow if we’re to better serve the American public as they consider who they wish to vote for.

Click here to learn more about Civic Hall’s Rethinking Debates Project.

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Our Political System is Not a Game: Real Leaders Know When to Accept Defeat

Joe Goldman

September 21, 2016

With just weeks until the American public chooses our next president, it is troubling to see headlines filled with dubious suggestions that our elections might be “hacked” or “rigged” when the likelihood remains so remarkably small. Even more disturbing is the possibility that these kinds of stories could undermine the election results if things don’t work out after election day.

The wonder of American democracy is that we resolve our conflicts with votes and laws, not tanks and guns. This tradition is possible only because we treat the other party as opponents, not enemies, and we respect the integrity of our democratic institutions.

If the margin is very close, we rely on our election system and our judicial system to use predetermined rules to bring the election to a settlement. The alternative to relying on elections and rule of law is unthinkable and should be rejected in the strongest possible terms. When the votes have been cast and ballots counted, we expect that losing candidates will make a phone call to congratulate the winner and then publicly acknowledge the will of the electorate.

Refusing to accept election results wholeheartedly and without reservation is not just wrong, it is un-American. Gracefully accepting defeat is one of the truly powerful moments in our nation’s political life. Both of the major party candidates should commit to doing so this year.

Before it’s too late, we must call on political, media, and civic leaders to make clear that this is not a game. When candidates lose elections, we expect that they will accept defeat and call for the American people to come together as a nation. Period.