Ideas Archive

Blog

Following the Path of History in Alabama

Betsy Wright Hawkings

March 8, 2015

Congress members on the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Friday.

Yesterday, at the foot of the Pettus Bridge, thousands of people marked the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday. President Obama opened his speech by placing that day among the most crucial in American history saying, “There are places, and moments in America where this nation’s destiny has been decided. Many are sites of war — Concord and Lexington, Appomattox and Gettysburg. Others are sites that symbolize the daring of America’s character — Independence Hall and Seneca Falls, Kitty Hawk and Cape Canaveral. Selma is such a place.”

That fact was born out by the unprecedented congressional delegation of nearly 100 members that joined Congressman John Lewis and the Faith & Politics Institute, a Democracy Fund grantee, on this weekend’s pilgrimage to Alabama. The delegation, which I was fortunate enough to join, followed the path of history, retracing the route of the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. As helicopters, patrol cars, and motorcycles of the Alabama State Police provided an honor escort to Congressman Lewis along the route, I could not help but be so very grateful for how different this ride was from 50 years ago and for how far we have come since the March on Washington, which took place the week I was born.

We then joined Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush; congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy; Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions; Alabama Representatives Terri Sewell, Martha Roby, Bradley Byrne, and so many more at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We crossed it not only with Congressman Lewis but with David Goodman, whose brother Andrew joined the Freedom Summer and was murdered in Mississippi, along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, for daring to work to protect the “imperative of citizenship” about which President Obama spoke so eloquently yesterday.

Traveling this path and living this history offers new meaning and insight into the enormity of the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in securing the right to vote for so many Americans. Remaining vigilant in protecting our democratic freedoms requires honoring the memory of dark events like Bloody Sunday.

This historic Pilgrimage is one way the common faith traditions of members of Congress can help move us to action as Americans. Coming together across the partisan divide to commemorate this seminal moment in our nation’s history offers the opportunity to think anew, act anew, and help forge new bonds outside of the context of party politics and gridlock.

While we no longer live in the era of Jim Crow, the march for freedom continues. Our democracy continues to face serious challenges in creating responsive elections, in ensuring voters have the information they need to make informed choices, in reducing government dysfunction, and in better securing voting rights for the future.

The participants on this trip came with a range of experiences – some were Civil Rights Leaders, some struggled in their own communities, and some are too young to remember this tumultuous period of American history. But each honors an era in American history that strove to bring the country together to address the deep oppression of racism. It reminds us of how far we’ve come and underscores how we still must work to strengthen our democracy.

As Senator Rob Portman wrote last week, “These challenges will not be easily overcome. Doing so will take all of us — from churches to community organizations, from living rooms to boardrooms, from the grassroots all the way to Capitol Hill — working together with the same unity of purpose that inspired a nation fifty years ago. We need that same faith, that same unwillingness to bow in the face of difficulty, no matter how long the road may seem.”

The path forward won’t be easy, but this pilgrimage is an opportunity for members of Congress—and all Americans—to reflect on the opportunity we share as Americans to move forward from this powerful experience together.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Restaffed EAC Advances Voting Systems in First Meeting

Adam Ambrogi

February 25, 2015

At its first meeting on Tuesday, the new quorum of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) took an important, much-awaited step toward making the work of election officials easier and improving the voter experience around the country. For four years, the lack of a quorum of Commissioners blocked the accreditation of new voting system test laboratories, which meant only two facilities in the country were able to review the quality and accessibility of voting systems. Yesterday’s accreditation of a third test laboratory promises to help alleviate the looming risk of major voting machine problems that have worried many smart observers.

Federally accredited labs commonly test products we use everyday, from toasters to children’s toys, to ensure they are safe. Similarly, to protect the legitimacy of our elections, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires the EAC to put voting machines through rigorous testing and certification. The law puts the EAC in charge of creating voting systems standards and overseeing the certification process to ensure machines (and any upgrades or patches) are reliable, accessible, and secure. As the EAC relies on neutral test facilities to review the systems, how the Commission accredits test labs is very important. For example, labs must be entirely independent from the vendors developing the machines so that there is no gamesmanship or undue influence on the rating of a particular system.

One result of the lack of a quorum of EAC commissioners had been that no new labs have been accredited. Until yesterday, only SLI Global Solutions and NTS Huntsville were certified by the EAC. No matter how many machines and modifications were waiting in line to be tested, only those two labs could test the systems. The resulting waiting periods have created a few significant problems.First, the wait time discourages vendors from introducing new and innovative voting machines to market, and second, states that can only purchase only federally-certified systems may be forced into buying out-of-date systems or into continuing to use old-generation existing machines that received certification a while ago.

More than three years ago, EAC staff invited Pro V & V, a team of specialized voting technology experts. to apply to become a federal test lab — and there Pro V & V figuratively sat, waiting. The head of Pro V & V, Jack Cobb of Huntsville Alabama, drew attention to his company’s predicament, indicating he had potential employees he wanted to hire and that his company could provide extra capacity to put machines through testing. He repeatedly asked the Senate to move on appointing EAC Commissioners, but it wasn’t until last December when the Senate acted that Mr. Cobb could see the end to the long wait in sight.

Shortly after the Senate’s confirmation of the three new Commissioners, the EAC held their first meeting in February 2015 and unanimously voted to accredit Pro V & V as a test lab. This means that more voting machines – some important existing modifications and next generation innovations – can now be tested, reducing the amount of time vendors and election officials wait in line for voting machine certification. While there are other problems with the testing and certification, this is a decisive first step, demonstrating that the EAC wants to move quickly to support election officials, vendors, and voters. After a long break in this type of EAC activity, their swiftness should be applauded.

Back to Ideas

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.

Back to Ideas

Blog

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.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Funder Collaboration Launches $3 Million Competition to Better Inform and Engage Voters

Tom Glaisyer

February 12, 2015

UPDATE: The NewsChallenge is open until 5 pm eastern on March 19th. Apply now!

Today, the Democracy Fund joined with the Knight Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Rita Allen Foundation to launch a $3-million challenge to identify how can we better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during, and after elections.

The Knight Foundation’s blog elaborates on this unique Knight News Challenge on elections: “We are looking for innovative ideas ranging from new ways that news media and others can inform voters, to making access to essential registration and polling information available, to making voting easy, efficient and fair, to converting election participation into longer-term civic engagement, on the local, state or national level.”

For the Democracy Fund, this partnership represents a unique opportunity to work with leading peer funders to support new and promising ideas from people across the media, technology, and election administration fields. We hope to see ideas and collaborations from civic technologists, state and local election officials, academics, students, startups, nonprofits, governments, and individuals.

The Democracy Fund has committed up to $250,000 to the competition, and we’re looking forward to working with our partners to inspire creativity, reach out to a wide array of potential applicants, and help ensure the success of the winning entrants.

The News Challenge will open on February 25, 2015. More information is available on the News Challenge’s web site.

Back to Ideas

Press Release

Welcome to Betsy Wright Hawkings

Joe Goldman

January 6, 2015

The Democracy Fund is delighted to welcome Betsy Wright Hawkings as the new Program Director for our Governance Initiative, which seeks to foster dialogue across the ideological spectrum and support reforms that reduce incentives for hyper-partisanship and gridlock.

The Democracy Fund – a nonprofit foundation created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar – has committed more than $25 million in grants to organizations working to strengthen our nation’s political system over the past three years. Current grantees of the Democracy Fund’s Governance Program include the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Aspen Institute’s Congressional Program, and the Faith & Politics Institute.

With more than 25 years of experience on Capitol Hill, where she served as Chief of Staff to several members of the House of Representatives, Betsy will lead the Democracy Fund’s grant making to organizations working to build bridges across the ideological divide and seek out ways for our government to solve problems in the face of increased polarization. Recently awarded the Cresswell Congressional Staff Leadership Award from the Stennis Center for Public Service, Betsy clearly gained the respect of colleagues on both sides of aisle during her career.

I speak for the entire Democracy Fund team when I say I can’t think of a better way to start 2015 than to have Betsy join our team. We are excited to have someone of Betsy’s experience and energy lead the Governance Initiative. She is going to bring a deep and pragmatic understanding of the way Congress and the parties work – and of the challenges they face – to our efforts to support authentic, productive dialogue in our democracy.

Prior to joining the Democracy Fund, Betsy worked for two decades for her hometown congressman, Christopher Shays of Connecticut. Betsy took a leading role in helping Rep. Shays build bipartisan coalitions to balance the federal budget in 1995-96 and establish the 9-11 Commission and implement its recommendations. She also supported the enactment of the Congressional Accountability Act, a provision of the 104th Congress’ “Contract with America,” which applied labor, civil rights, and workplace safety laws to Congress.

From 1996-98, Betsy was also Deputy Director of the Congressional Management Foundation, a non-partisan organization that works directly with Members and staff to enhance their operations and interactions with constituents. Betsy oversaw day-to-day operations of the Foundation and developed numerous guides and resources that provide Members with critical information, from how to establish and run Washington and district offices to best practices for setting strategic priorities over the course of a term.

Following Shays’ departure from Congress in 2008, Betsy left the Hill briefly to work for Amnesty International, where she was Managing Director of Government Relations and then Deputy Executive Director for Advocacy, Policy, and Research. She returned to Congress to lead the staffs of Congressmen Mike Turner and later Bobby Schilling of Illinois before signing on as Congressman Andy Barr’s chief of staff in 2012.

Betsy is a graduate of Williams College, where she was named a Mead Scholar of American Studies, and is a founder of the Form of 1981 Memorial Fund at her alma mater, Groton School, to support student financial aid. She and her husband, David, live in Washington with their two sons.

Back to Ideas

Blog

How are We Doing? Lessons from our First Grantee Perception Survey

Joe Goldman

December 31, 2014

Measurement and evaluation play an important role in how we at Democracy Fund approach our work. We believe that we have a responsibility to be transparent about the progress we are making against our goals and that we must be open to new information that may point us in new directions. To this end, we use a variety of tools to measure our work and better understand whether and how we are making progress. We also often provide our grantees with evaluation resources to help them take a deeper look at how they can be more effective.

An important part of our approach to evaluation is the idea that accountability, by definition, requires feedback. Our board and advisors provide valuable feedback and direction throughout the year, but we also need to hear from our grantees and partners to gain a more complete picture of how we are doing. In order to ensure that this feedback is as honest and critical as possible, we recently hired the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) to survey our grantees and produce a Grantee Perception Report that assesses Democracy Fund across a wide range of factors. CEP was able to gather anonymous feedback from 25 grantees – 83% of our portfolio at the time.

CEP’s report compared Democracy Fund to 300 foundations as well as to a custom cohort of 16 peer funders. As a relatively young foundation, with a little over three years of grant making under our belts, we were eager to see these first results. There is a lot of data, which we will be exploring periodically here on the blog, but the following three themes stood out.

Expertise and Impact: Grantees rated Democracy Fund staff highly for understanding grantees’ strategies (77th percentile) and the fields in which we work (82nd percentile). At the same time, we were ranked in the 40th percentile for having an impact on the field. Anonymous comments suggest our expertise is a strong foundation for future success but it’s too early to judge the effects of our work.
Selection and Evaluation Processes: Grantees find our selection process to be more valuable than most (97th percentile in strengthening their organizations), and the Democracy Fund is in the 84th percentile for grant dollars awarded per hour of application work. Concurrently, grantees feel high pressure to change organizational priorities to receive funding (98th percentile).
Relationships with Grantees: Overall, Democracy Fund grantees said that we are fair and highly responsive. They also indicated that we provide our grantees with more non-monetary assistance – from strategic planning advice to assistance in securing other funding – than most organizations. Yet, grantees showed they feel low levels of comfort in approaching us with problems during the life of a grant, compared to how grantees feel in approaching other foundations (29th percentile).

While many of the results indicate that Democracy Fund is on the path to the kind of foundation we hope to be, we asked CEP to lead confidential focus groups at our October grantee meeting to explore areas of concern. The focus groups addressed two questions. First, why do our grantees feel less comfortable approaching us with problems, compared to the grantees of other foundations? Second, how can we reduce any burdens associated with our grant selection process? Both focus groups were meant to help us better understand what was going on and hear solutions from our grantees.

The Democracy Fund team left the meeting for these focus groups, so that the conversations could be candid and fruitful conversations. One of the more revealing pieces of information uncovered by the CEP facilitators was the connection between Democracy Fund’s focus on metrics and our grantees’ discomfort in approaching us with problems. It revealed a need for more communication and expectation setting around how we approach, develop, and use metrics in evaluating grants. I’ll explore these findings more in a follow up post, but we are already experimenting with some ways to address this need. For example, we’re piloting a new metrics and reporting template with a few grantees, and we’re thinking about new ways to demonstrate our commitment to smart risk-taking and experimentation. On another front, we’re also sending out our first user survey on our new grants management software.

In 2015, we will review our overall grant making process and while we don’t expect significant changes, it will be a moment to think further about our relationships with grantees and about how we can improve our partnerships while maintaining the practices and values that rank Democracy Fund so highly in other areas.

We would like to thank all our grantees that participated in the survey and offer our thanks to CEP for the thoughtful report. We’re looking forward to continuing the discussion about these results and to having a baseline for future surveys.

Back to Ideas

Blog

Our Growing Team

Joe Goldman

November 10, 2014

Four months ago, I shared the exciting news that the Democracy Fund had spun off from Omidyar Network to become an independent private foundation. Since that time, we have been hard at work building our new organization – setting up internal systems, approving new grants, refining our strategies, and so much more.

I’m incredibly proud of how much progress we have made in the short time since our launch and in particular would like to share that four incredible people have since joined our team. You can find their bios in the About Us section of our web site, but I wanted to share quick notes about each of them here.

Tiffany Griffin has joined us as our Manager of Learning and Impact from the U.S. Agency on International Development, where she was a Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist for the Feed the Future initiative. Tiffany has a PhD in social psychology and spent time working for Senator Bingaman as a Congressional Fellow.
Lauren Strayer has joined us as our Manager of Communications & Network. Lauren brings ten years of experience to the team in communications, media, and advocacy. Most recently, Lauren was an independent consultant specializing in communications and strategy for non-profit and philanthropic enterprises. Previously, she was Associate and Acting Director of Communications at Demos, a Democracy Fund grantee, and the executive director of the New Democracy Project.
Stacey Van Zuiden has joined us as a Program Associate for Responsive Politics from the Federal Voting Assistance Program at the U.S. Department of Defense. While attending law school she interned with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Elections Division and the Iowa Secretary of State’s Elections Division, and previously worked for the Nebraska Republican Party in a variety of positions, eventually serving as the party’s Communications Director.
Paul Waters has joined us as a Program Associate for Informed Participation from the Federal Communications Commission, where he served as a Legal Fellow in the Office of the Chairman and the Wireline Competition Bureau. Paul was a GW Presidential Merit Scholar and a Public Interest Scholar at the George Washington University Law School, where he earned his J.D. He also served as the president of the Gulf Recovery Network, a student group that provides pro bono legal work in New Orleans.

Stay tuned for more updates. We expect that several more inspiring leaders will be joining us over the course of the next six months.

Back to Ideas

Blog

“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.

Back to Ideas

Blog

2014 for 2016: Supporting Innovations in Voter Information

Tom Glaisyer

October 16, 2014

This post is by Tom Glaisyer, Kelly Born, and Jonathan Kartt. Tom Glaisyer is the Program Director of the Informed Participation Initiative at the Democracy Fund. Kelly Born is a Program Officer at the Hewlett Foundation, where she works on both Special Projects and the Madison Initiative, and Jonathan Kartt works in Programs & Evaluation for the Rita Allen Foundation.

Last week, we shared our early research on voter information platforms and the breadth of exciting new organizations that our research unearthed. The impetus: The Hewlett Foundation, the Rita Allen Foundation and the Democracy Fund all share an interest in better equipping voters with the information they need: to participate in elections, vote in ways that reflect their interests, understand candidate positions and ballot issues, and to keep track of their representatives.

We partnered to explore dozens of these platforms, and quickly realized that we weren’t sure how best to support the field, or which groups to partner with. So the Hewlett Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation crafted an RFP to solicit proposals from a handful of potential nonprofit partners, with the goal of funding them in a rapid-cycle innovation project. We were open to all kinds of ideas, and suggested a few possibilities:

Consulting Support: Because the ultimate success of any voter information platform depends on the quality of its design and resultant resonance with users, we suggested potential projects aimed at supporting design iteration and experimentation.
Implementation Support: These needed to be projects that were essentially shovel-ready, capable of being fielded before (and tested during) the 2014 election cycle.
Learning Support: There is much to be learned during this election cycle that might help inform later work in 2016. So we were open to jointly establishing a learning agenda for 2014 and then pairing nonprofit partners with researchers to test the effectiveness of different innovations.

Ultimately the proposals we received included some combination of all of these options.

Independently, the three foundations reviewed and assessed the pros and cons of all of the proposals, and between us we are now funding three public charities that responded to the RFP:

The Healthy Democracy Fund, to pilot its deliberative ballot decision-making approaches in Arizona and Colorado, and to conduct communications research around the efforts to understand what kind of messaging works with voters.
Maplight, to further develop its Voter’s Edge tool such that it can be more easily embedded in other platforms (e.g., news sites, civic organizations).
Seattle City Club’s Living Voters Guide, to further develop the site and to expand it to encompass not just ballot information but candidate data, including information from Voter’s Edge.

All of these projects include a research component to help understand what nonpartisan information resonates with voters, in hopes that we can learn and improve in future election cycles.

We are optimistic about the possibilities of these charitable projects, and about innovations in the sector more broadly – both for-profit and non-profit. These efforts offer hope that in future cycles citizens will have access to—and use—a wealth of information for even down-ticket races.

But we also have (lots of) questions:

When do people search for this information? How do they find it?
How do you expand the audience beyond political junkies to reach a broader population?
How useful do voters find this information? When and how does it actually influence decision-making?
What formats do voters prefer?
Do the platforms increase public trust in the political process or might some, particularly those that offer candidate matching, increase polarization?
How can the platforms be sustained?
Are the approaches scalable? What level of data standardization is desirable or feasible? For example, it is currently easy to get information on Congressional candidates, but much harder to digitally aggregate even the names of candidates for down-ballot races, let alone any meaningful information about them.

We are wrestling with these questions, supporting some research with these partners to test aspects of them, and exploring more broadly how we can aid the emerging community of practice that exists around this next generation of nonpartisan voter information tools. As always, we welcome your comments.