Democracy Fund mourns the loss of Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn. Her role as a staunch democracy defender over the past four decades and her commitment to achieving an American democracy that is inclusive and equitable for all made her a key partner to Democracy Fund since its inception.
While her absence will be painful to bear, Karen will continue to inspire us daily in our work. In our country’s toughest moments, she was not deterred from her vision and wholeheartedly supported her colleagues and partners in the pro-democracy field each step of the way.
We are grateful for Karen’s years of leadership and work at Common Cause and will miss her friendship and wisdom. We are here for our friends and colleagues at Common Cause as we all grieve and celebrate Karen’s impactful life together.
We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. – Freedom’s Journal, 1827
In April 2022, Democracy Fund announced our new organizational strategy with a commitment to investing in the power and leadership of communities of color to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy movement and undermine those who threaten the ideals of our inclusive, multiracial democracy. It’s a bold, ambitious plan that will steadily guide us as we navigate both known and unforeseen challenges affecting our democracy.
The digital media platforms and systems that now comprise so much of today’s civic engagement and community life have become essential for staying informed and connected. But many of the platforms that people turn to have also been weaponized by hate groups, authoritarians, and other bad actors to suppress and depress voter turnout, harass women and people of color, spread divisive disinformation, and violate civil rights laws. The power to control conversations and filter information lies with just a handful of private companies.
With this in mind, our Public Square program has revised its Digital Democracy strategies in line with our new organizational strategy to better meet the moment we are in. We envision a society where Black, Indigenous, and people of color fully and equitably create, access, and enjoy media and technology that represents their needs, concerns, and dreams. As a result, America’s public square becomes more inclusive and contributes to a thriving pro-democracy movement.
Our new five-year strategies are the result of many thoughtful conversations with our grantees and lessons from the field. We cannot overstate how much we appreciate the expertise, passion, and creativity of these organizations, whose staff are working on the frontlines of these issues. Our grantees are always one step ahead, and their pivots have often preceded the challenges other researchers and analysts have eventually spotted. We look forward to continuing our collaborative approach with our grantees, as we aim for transformative impact together.
The strategies below are focused on our Digital Democracy work, which makes up half of our Public Square team’s grantmaking. In addition to the Digital Democracy strategy updates, you can find updates about our Equitable Journalism work here. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on what elements excite you, and we know we have a tremendous responsibility to help make these ideas a reality.
Building power for an inclusive, multiracial democracy through the digital public square
Our Digital Democracy strategy is working toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy in the United States where civil and human rights online are respected and grounded in an equitable civic infrastructure that is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy. To get there, we believe we need a more comprehensive policy analysis and movement-building agenda for how we will support the media and digital systems we need beyond traditional commercial markets. At every step, the movement will be led by Black, Indigenous, and people of color, who have experienced disproportionately low levels of digital ownership and creation opportunities and disproportionately high levels of harm on digital platforms.
In support of this future, our Public Square program will be funding digital democracy efforts through two areas of focus:
Our Equitable Civic Infrastructure initiative will fund organizations that build public pressure to change media and telecommunication policy at the state and federal levels. This work will create the equitable access to the news and information Americans need to thrive.
Our Civil & Human Rights Online initiative will fund organizations that are reigning in the systems and structures that make online spaces so toxic and dangerous. By applying principles like antidiscrimination, public accommodations, and equal protection under the law, they are transforming how we experience the internet.
These areas of focus build on our learnings from the last five years, especially informed by our conversations with our grantees about how philanthropy needs to meet this moment in our democracy, the longtime harms media has perpetuated that got us here, and the role of philanthropy in exacerbating these challenges. We have collected some of that learning in a recent evaluation ORS Impact produced. We were also guided by an advisory group including Alicia Bell of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, Courtney Lewis of the Institute for Nonprofit News, Jessica Gonzáles of Free Press, Lizzy Hazeltine of the NC Local News Lab Fund, and Chenjerai Kumanyika of New York University.
Some changes you will see in our digital democracy funding
In the next five years, we are focusing our support on the leaders and organizations that can combat the inequitable systems that have limited internet access, stymied local journalism, and led to widespread discrimination online. To advance our goals, we need race-conscious equitable government intervention into our tech and media systems, and we must invest in state and local base building. And at every step, establishing civil and human rights online is imperative to support the communities facing harms caused by these platforms, while working to address the underlying causes. This intentional shift from reactionary pivots to a long-term vision will allow for hopeful, future-focused movement-building led by BIPOC voices.
A few of the key shifts include:
Our new strategy includes a focus on platforms but expands beyond that to the full suite of infrastructure that constitutes our digital public square; and our tactics have homed in on the role of enforceable rules through the courts and government agencies.
We now recognize the important role of organizing, both to impact outcomes at the local level where early legislative wins can scale up, and to better connect national issues with the last-mile impact on communities. There can be no lasting change without a movement of people supporting it.
We understand that civil and human rights laws are the best opportunity to enforce the equitable treatment people need in online spaces to fully participate in our digital public square, and we will invest accordingly in enforcing these laws.
As we begin implementing our new strategies, we’re motivated by the opportunities for learning and growth, and we will be transparent, accessible, and accountable along the way. We are excited to invest in organizations that demonstrate excellence in building and executing programs aligned with our strategic priorities; exhibit a solid racial justice analysis; employ BIPOC in senior leadership roles; and work in concert with aligned efforts to build the power of marginalized communities.
Moving into the next five years
There is no doubt that the threats we face online are affecting civic participation, not to mention people’s physical and mental health. But there is a swell of support building to shift our relationship with digital media, with a particular emphasis on holding tech companies accountable. All across the United States, we see people recognizing the power they have over tech companies and imagining what a more transparent and less polarized future could look like in this digital age. As a philanthropic organization, we have a responsibility to help build a healthier digital media ecosystem, where people’s rights are protected and the civic information people receive is accurate and dependable. A key part of our new strategies will also be continuing to partner with other funders to meet this moment.
There are still many decisions left about who and how we will fund to make this vision a reality. We’ll be sharing more information, updating our website, and considering new grantees in 2023 and we welcome your partnership and accountability along this journey. If you have questions about our new strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out. We are grateful for your partnership and energized for our collective future.
To inform Democracy Fund’s Public Square team strategy planning in 2022, we commissioned an evaluation of our program from 2016-2021. Our evaluation and learning partner, Impact Architects, developed an in-depth report that has deeply informed our new strategies.
We are sharing here an executive summary that will provide an overview of our learnings across three strategies:
Ecosystem News
Equitable Journalism
Press Freedom
This summary also shares what we have learned about grantmaking more generally — in particular, the critical importance of trusted relationships and the ongoing need for more general operating support.
Democracy Fund’s Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI) and its grantees have been radically reimagining platform accountability and media policy through strategies at the intersection of advocacy, public will building, and litigation.
To support this work, the team’s evaluation and learning partner, ORS Impact, conducted learning conversations with DDI grantees in July and August 2022 to understand:
How advocacy grantees are planning for and adapting their strategies to shifts in Congressional leadership and/or agency nominations e.g., FTC, FCC)
What research grantees are learning about effectively integrating research into advocacy/organizing work
This report summarizes findings across the learning conversations and highlights feedback for Democracy Fund and philanthropy more broadly.
In a nation of over 258.3 million eligible voters, election officials’ myriad duties differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction—small to large, rural to urban—and from voter to voter. Despite these many differences, there are common themes and predictable challenges faced by every official. And of course, every official has experienced unforeseen events and unexpected circumstances that force them to assess, reform, and adapt. As any official will tell you, there is always another election on the horizon.
The Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials provides a window into the attitudes, actions, and needs of the public servants who manage US elections. Surveys during the last three election cycles have illustrated the stable features of the system and the way that the challenges of the moment impact the people administering the democratic process.
Local Election Officials
More than half of election officials are elected – 57 percent overall, but in small jurisdictions with fewer than 5,000 registered voters that increases to 67 percent – while 27 percent are appointed, and 15 percent are hired to fill a position. Just over half of these races are partisan and the other half are non-partisan, and the vast majority of elected officials (81 percent) ran uncontested in the general election. The need to attract candidates and talent will only continue to grow as veteran officials leave the field in growing numbers.
In the 2018 survey, officials’ recent experiences with foreign interference in election cybersecurity impacted the complexity of their work. In 2020, the pandemic and extraordinary polarization of the candidates and the electorate created stress and rapid change in methods of voting that election officials had to manage. The 2022 survey illustrates more emergent challenges as election officials report coping with the combinations of mis- and disinformation about elections, violence against election officials, and extreme partisan disparities in the public’s confidence in election results.
All of this is happening in an environment where the biggest disparity in the election system continues to be geographic. Elections are managed by local jurisdictions and there are tremendous differences between election offices that serve the largest and smallest populations. Seventy-five percent of all offices serve only 8 percent of voters, and 8 percent of our election offices serve 75 percent of voters. This disparity is driven by the fact that the largest 2 percent of offices serve half of the nation’s voters.
The impact of an increased election-related workload is disproportionally higher on smaller jurisdictions than their counterparts in medium and large jurisdictions. This should not be surprising since one third of all election offices do not have even one full-time employee. In small jurisdictions that serve less than 5,000 voters that number increases to 53 percent. The increased workload for many may have been the result of concerted campaigns to flood election offices with Freedom of Information Act requests around the 2020 election based on conspiracy and conjecture.
Each election cycle, the Democracy Fund/Reed College Local Election Official (LEO) Survey has asked local officials about key aspects of their work including preparedness for the upcoming election, job satisfaction, and training needs for the election officials and members of their staffs.
LEOs retain a commitment to meeting the demands of their jobs and the challenges of finding adequate polling locations and poll workers – especially sufficient bilingual workers and accessible facilities – persist with varying degrees across jurisdiction sizes.
Overall job satisfaction among LEOs remains high, but there are cracks in the veneer. The percentage of LEOs who do not think they can maintain a work/life balance has increased and the percentage who say their workload is reasonable has dropped since 2018.
Among the 2022 survey participants, close to one third of the election officials are eligible to retire before the 2024 election—and 39 percent of those eligible plan to do so. Of these respondents, retirement eligibility is the highest reason for leaving the field (51 percent) but “I do not like the changes in my work environment that occurred during and after the November 2020 election” (42 percent) and “I do not enjoy the political environment” (37 percent) followed close behind. For those who are not near retirement age their number one reason for leaving the field was cited as “changes in how elections are administered make the work unsatisfying” (48 percent) and an alarming 28 percent citing that they plan to leave the field based on “concerns about my health or personal safety, aside from COVID concerns.”
Disruption in the Field
One in four respondents have experienced threats of violence. Officials across all jurisdiction sizes and political affiliations experienced these threats, but the threat environment is much more severe in larger jurisdictions compared to smaller jurisdictions. For example, while 14 percent of LEOs serving jurisdictions with less than 5,000 registered voters told us that they had experienced abuse, harassment, or threats, the percentage increases to two-thirds of LEOs serving in the largest jurisdictions. Similarly, 20 percent of LEOs who told us they were Republicans said they experienced threats, compared to 30 percent of Independents and 34 percent of Democrats. These differences should not disguise the overall result: threats against LEOs are far too real, far too regular, and far too common.
The preponderance of threats targeting election officials are politically based threats. Our 2022 survey showed that 63 percent of threats received were politically motivated. The narrative driving these threats—that the 2020 election was illegitimate and that LEOs were complicit in allowing the election to be stolen–-has manifested in threats to election professionals and their families, and changes to state election laws. More than half (55 percent) of the survey respondents said that they have had legislation passed that impacts how they conduct the election—with 35 percent saying those changes improved election administration and 46 percent saying the new laws did not improve election administration.
The majority – 66 percent – of election officials surveyed this year expressed concern about threats and harassment. When asked how seriously various organizations take the threats to election officials, 43 percent said that their state’s chief election official (in most states, the secretary of state) takes the threats “very seriously.” However, LEOs felt that others took the threats far less seriously: only 27 percent for local law enforcement, 25 percent for federal law enforcement, 17 percent for the state legislature and for the national media, 14 percent for the local media, and 12 percent for the U.S. Congress.
About the Survey and Interviews
The 2022 survey of local election officials was a self-administered web and hardcopy survey conducted from June 21 to September 22, 2022. This study used a LEO sample collected by the team, with a sampling frame based in part on national lists of local election officials and the sizes of their jurisdictions. From this frame, the team drew a sample of 3,118 LEOs, sampling jurisdictions in proportion to the number of registered voters they serve and targeting the chief election official in each jurisdiction to complete the survey. A total of 912 LEOs completed the survey, including 652 surveys completed via web (71 percent) and 260 (29 percent) completed via hardcopy with an overall response rate of 30 percent.
Survey findings are often presented by jurisdiction size to understand differences in experiences.
Fifty-seven percent of local election officials serve in jurisdictions of 5,000 or fewer voters.
Twenty-seven percent serve in jurisdictions of 5,001 to 25,000 voters.
Ten percent serve in jurisdictions of 25,001 to 75,000 voters.
Six percent serve in jurisdictions of more than 75,000 voters.
While most officials serve in small jurisdictions, the vast majority of voters live in large jurisdictions — over 70 percent of voters live in jurisdictions with more than 75,000 voters and are served by only 500 officials. It’s important to consider the possible differences in scale, responsibility, and resources between different jurisdiction sizes when interpreting results from any survey of this population. Where overall results are presented, they are weighted to ensure that means can be generalized to local election officials nationwide. Further information about the sampling and weighting process is available at the Reed College Elections & Voting Information Center’s project website.
Explore additional 2022 content and learn more about the Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials through Reed College’s Elections & Voting Information Center. Prior publications from the survey series are also available below.
In April 2022, Democracy Fund announced a new organizational strategy with a commitment to investing in the power and leadership of communities of color to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy movement, and undermine those who threaten the ideal of our inclusive, multi-racial democracy.
The U.S. voting system was not designed for an inclusive, multi-racial democracy and has always de-valued certain communities, including communities of color, people with disabilities, low-income citizens, and those with intersecting marginalized identities. As a result, people of color face a voting system that continues to be rigged against their participation and power. This flawed design is accompanied by an election administration system long underfunded and weakened by disinformation peddled by an authoritarian movement. False allegations of voter fraud have increased mistrust of election processes and outcomes, led to violent threats against local election officials, and provided a pretext for state legislators to try to seize control of election outcomes.
With these challenges in mind, the Elections & Voting program took a step back to review the past six years of investments and design a new five-year strategy that meets the moment. We seek an election system that consistently produces trusted results, fairly represents the will of the majority of voters, and reflects equitable participation—especially among communities of color. This new strategy builds on the invaluable expertise, accountability, and advice of the many grantees, partners, and leaders we have worked with over the years, all of whom helped inform the direction of this new strategy and to whom we are deeply grateful.
Supporting free, fair, and equitable elections
Our refreshed Elections & Voting program envisions a democracy where people of color hold equal power to influence election outcomes and build a fully representative and participatory democracy. The current election infrastructure needs to function effectively and impartially. As we work towards these goals, we must also reimagine the system to center the voters that have been historically marginalized and oppressed.
To support this vision, we are investing in two areas of work:
Resilient Elections to strengthen the election infrastructure so it is less vulnerable to election sabotage and election-related violence; and
Voting Power to focus on equitable participation, voice, and power for people for color.
These two initiatives are built on several assumptions about how Democracy Fund can contribute to the elections and voting field, and where our investments can complement work that is happening on the ground and through other funding partners:
We believe that robust election administration and election administrators are the last line of defense against authoritarianism. Over the past seven years, we have supported trainings, tools, convenings, and research to professionalize the field of election administration. We will now shift our focus to combatting the politicization of the profession through stable funding and staffing for election administration. When election administrators are well-funded and well-trained, they can expand access to voting and prevent attempts at election sabotage.
Communities must have the power they need to elect leaders who represent their interests and influence government to be responsive to their needs. Organizers working in communities of color often lack year-round funding to build organizational capacity and conduct essential organizing that would enable sustained political power. Grassroots organizing that centers communities of color needs year-round support that allows them to build sustained momentum for participation in civic life, issue advocacy, and elections.
More transformative changes are necessary to equalize voters’ power and address the fairness and legitimacy of the election system. Even when people successfully vote, anti-majoritarian structures can reduce their voting power based on where they live. Until we unrig the election system, it is impossible to describe our political system as representing the will of the majority. While we pursue these structural changes, we must ensure voting rights continue to expand.
Some changes you will see in our elections funding
After six years of investments and experimentation, we have taken a close look at our strategy and adjusted to meet both the moment and the needs of the field. Many grantees and partners contributed to our learning by participating in evaluations of the Voter Centric Election Administration and Election Security portfolios, and in our strategy planning process. A few shifts emerged from those reflections, including:
We will deepen our support for state and local organizing groups that are building power in their communities, particularly communities of color, to engage and connect individuals in their communities, empowering them to impact policy when they participate in civic life.
We will recenter our support for voting rights work at the national level to better complement grassroots organizing and state election policy and advocacy.
We will invest less in tools and trainings for election officials while supporting election administration in new ways, with an emphasis on how to properly fund and staff election infrastructure, infuse a racial justice lens into election administration, and disincentivize leaders from undermining election results.
In partnership with our Governance Program, we will move away from incremental changes and toward long-term structural changes in our democracy that support representative and equitable majority rule.
Looking ahead to the next five years
We are incredibly proud of and grateful for the important work our grantees and partners have led over the past six years. We will continue to champion the field and are committed to a responsible shift as we build toward an inclusive, multi-racial democracy.
As we prepare for the strategy launch in 2023, we will continue to learn, adapt, and grapple with several outstanding questions. We will partner with other funders to strengthen elections and ensure equitable voter participation. We will share more information and updates on our website about our work, and we welcome your feedback.
You can expect to see similar updates from our other programs as other organizational strategy decisions are finalized.
In April 2022, Democracy Fund announced our new organizational strategy with a commitment to investing in the power and leadership of communities of color to strengthen and expand the pro-democracy movement and undermine those who threaten the ideals of our inclusive, multi-racial democracy.
Our political system and our media have been designed from the start to exclude and marginalize people of color, who have nonetheless often been on the frontlines reinventing journalism and strengthening democracy. The authoritarian movement has leveraged the flaws in our media to spread hate, manipulate public discourse, and build news ecosystems to amplify its vision for America. With this in mind, our Public Square program has revised its strategies to better meet the moment we are in. We want to ensure that all people have access to news and information that advances justice, confronts racism and inequality, and equips people to make change and thrive.
Our new five-year strategies are rooted in and build on the wisdom, experience, and vision of many of our grantees: we are deeply grateful to them for blazing the trails. We also want to recognize the many other leaders who have pioneered the work of media justice, community reporting, and movement journalism. Their efforts have often centered solidarity with communities and understood the urgent need for journalism that stands boldly for equity and democracy. Their work didn’t always find a home in our earlier strategies, and we are working to change that as we move forward and learn from the past.
The strategies below are focused on our Equitable Journalism work, which makes up half of our team’s grantmaking. We will provide updates on our Digital Democracy strategy when decisions are finalized (and you can expect to see similar updates from other Democracy Fund programs). We are excited to share the strategy and ideas that shape our journalism and media funding, but we recognize that these are just words on a page until we live into them.
Journalism must build power for an inclusive multi-racial democracy
Our Equitable Journalism strategy envisions people all across America exercising their power — making decisions for their families, mobilizing their neighbors and friends, and organizing in their communities — fueled by local reporting that equips people for civic action and serves them as partners. To get there, we believe we need to foster a reimagined local news and information landscape and an explicitly anti-racist public square, led by people who have historically been marginalized in our media and our democracy.
Throughout American history it has been leaders of color, especially those who are women or queer, who have pushed democracy and media forward, pioneering critical new community solutions and pushing for our country and our newsrooms to live up to their highest ideals. Our strategy process was informed by that history, and by the imagination and vision of bold leaders working today.
In support of this vision, our Public Square program will be funding journalism and media through two areas of focus within our Equitable Journalism work:
Our News and Information Ecosystems initiative will continue to support the evolution of local news in America by building more vibrant ecosystems and equitable networks across the nation that reimagine news and information as civic infrastructure.
Our Journalism and Power Building initiative will expand support for leaders of color, and the coalitions and organizations they lead, who are changing journalism and using media to build power and catalyze movements for equity, justice, and democracy.
These areas of focus build on lessons we have learned over the last six years. We have listened deeply to what grantees were saying about how journalism needs to show up in this moment of democratic crisis, the longtime harms media has perpetuated that got us here, and the role of philanthropy in exacerbating these challenges. We have collected some of that learning in an evaluation Impact Architects produced, which covers the last six years of our work. We were also guided by an advisory group including Alicia Bell of the Racial Equity in Journalism Fund, Courtney Lewis of the Institute for Nonprofit News, Jessica Gonzáles of Free Press, Lizzy Hazeltine of the NC Local News Lab Fund, and Chenjerai Kumanyika of New York University.
Some changes you will see in our journalism funding
In the next five years, we are focusing our support on those leaders and organizations we believe can help create a more anti-racist, community-centered media and advance transformative change in our public square. Key to that work will be shifting from a focus on incremental change in journalism institutions to transformative change. This transformative change must be rooted in movements, trailblazers, and coalitions inside and outside journalism that are building a new vision for what journalism can be and do in our democracy, who it works for, and with.
A few of the key shifts include:
Our new strategy will more explicitly elevate equity and racial justice as defining values across our entire portfolio by centering the work of leaders of color and those who have long been marginalized from journalism and democracy. We will invest more in those leaders and will focus on moving others in philanthropy in that direction.
We’ve long talked about informed communities as key to our democracy, but our new strategy is much clearer that information is power. We want to support news and information that equips people to build power for an inclusive multi-racial democracy.
We will invest less in large institutions and more in coalitions, networks and campaigns that help organize innovators in journalism to change the industry.
We no longer have a separate stand-alone press freedom strategy. Over the last five years, we’ve come to understand press freedom as a key part of sustainability and so we’ll still be funding some press freedom work as part of the infrastructure necessary to grow and sustain a truly independent media sector. We’ll also be leaning into efforts to confront harassment and abuse meant to silence journalists, especially people from marginalized communities.
As we move into our new strategies, we’re excited to continue learning and growing, and will be transparent, accessible and accountable along the way.
Moving into the next five years
While the struggles facing our public square are profound, there is real momentum growing around civic media and local news right now. All across the country we see incredible examples of people reimagining, rebuilding, and renewing journalism and the role it plays in our democracy. Those of us in philanthropy have a critical role to play in catalyzing this movement to ensure that the next era of independent media in America is just, equitable and thriving. A key part of our new strategies will also be continuing to partner with other funders to ensure we can meet this moment.
There are still many decisions left about who and how we will fund to make this vision a reality. We’ll be sharing more information, updating our website, and considering new grantees in 2023 and we welcome your partnership and accountability as we go down this path. If you have questions about our new strategy, please reach out to me — my door is always open. Again, my deepest thanks for your ongoing partnership.
At Democracy Fund, we see every day how local news strengthens democracy. People rely on local news to figure out who to vote for, how to speak up at school board meetings, how to run for local office, where to find vaccines, when to organize for change, and more. From daily reporting that equips people to act, to huge investigations that reveal corruption, the health of local news is bound up with the health of our democracy.
Unfortunately, communities across the United States are steadily losing access to this kind of civic information. According to data released in June 2022, at least one fifth of the U.S. — 70 million people — live in a community without a newspaper or a community at risk of losing theirs.
Since 2018, we’ve been tracking academic studies that show in stark terms the impact journalism has on our democracy. This research review has become a critical guide for funders, policymakers, communities, and journalists who care about creating a healthier democracy. In 2022, we overhauled this resource, including adding a section that more clearly names the harms journalism has caused in our communities, especially communities of color.
These studies and articles provide an enormous set of rigorous data that help quantify what happens when local communities have strong local news — and what happens when they lose it. Understanding the impact of quality local news on our democracy in these sorts of specific, data driven, nuanced ways is critical as we think about how to build a more equitable and sustainable future of local news that truly serves all communities at a moment of threat and uncertainty in democracy.
Do you have additional research to add, or are interested in how you can be part of the solution? Email us at LocalNewsLab [@] democracyfund.org.
(Ed. Note: This post was originally published June 26, 2018. It was last revised on September 15, 2022. We will continue to update the date in this note for future additions. Andrea Lorenz, PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media, contributed research and guidance for the update of this post in summer 2022.)
Strong local journalism = more people turning out to vote.
The amount of local political coverage correlates with increased voter turnout. Researchers in Denmark found that “local news media coverage has a positive effect on voter turnout, but only if the news media provide politically relevant information to the voters and only at local elections.”
Voters have been more likely to vote in down-ballot races in places with more local newspapers per capita. By comparing data on legislative ballot completion with news circulation data, researchers from St. Olaf College found that even the existence of local newspapers contributes to the likelihood that voters will fill out more of their ballots.
Local media coverage can increase voter engagement in state Supreme Court elections. David Hughes studied how these races can often be considered “low information elections” because of how little information voters can find about the candidates and stakes of the contest, but media attention can generate and distribute as much information about a race as a well-funded campaign.
People who consume local news are more likely to vote locally. The authors of a study from Pennsylvania State University examined the habits of people who consume local and national media, on both traditional and digital platforms, and found both types of news consumption are positive predictors of voting at both levels.
The act of reading a newspaper can mobilize as many as 13 percent of non-voters to vote, Matthew Gentzkow testified to the Federal Trade Commission in 2009. The statistic comes from a study which found that “newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation” noting in particular that one additional newspaper in a region can boost voter turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points.
Consuming local journalism is associated with consistent voting in local elections and a strong connection to community. Pew Research Center analysts found in 2016 that more than a quarter of U.S. adults say they always vote in local elections, and they also have “strikingly stronger” local news habits than people who don’t vote locally on a regular basis.
Reading local newspapers’ political coverage helps people understand how important local elections are and affects how much they participate in them. Researchers surveyed people in three small Midwest communities to learn more about their media use, political knowledge, and participation in local elections and found newspaper political news exposure strongly predicted political participation, people’s perceived importance of local municipal elections, and how much they voted.
Local news can boost voting by young people, and help them feel better prepared to go to the polls. Research by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement found that local news was a critical tool that young voters, especially people of color, turned to ahead of the 2020 election. The researchers say even more could be done by newsrooms to serve this population, and “local news media holds immense potential as a stakeholder in youth civic and political engagement.”
Weak local journalism = fewer people vote.
Voters in districts with less campaign coverage had a harder time evaluating candidates and reported they were less likely to vote. Jennifer L. Lawless and Danny Hayes used congressional districts as a lens through which to study political coverage (across 6,000 articles!) and civic engagement (through a survey of nearly 50,000 people) in the month leading up to the 2010 election. Then, the same researchers used longitudinal data to analyze how a decline in local political news coverage reduces citizen engagement. As political news about congressional elections in local newspapers declined over four years, so did citizens’ knowledge about those offices and voting.
When a major journalistic source of information declines or disappears, there are massive effects on local political engagement. This has happened in hundreds of communities where there have been large declines in local news. Danny Hayes and Jennifer L. Lawless also found that the “hollowing out” of American newspapers over 30 years — including a dramatic reduction in the amount of local news produced by newspapers of all sizes, with the most severe cuts in local government and school coverage — had massive effects on local political engagement, including decreased political knowledge, and less interest in political participation.
Places that lost a local newspaper experienced a “significant” drop in civic engagement compared to cities that didn’t lose one. Lee Shaker studied what happened to civic engagement in Denver and Seattle the year the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed. “The data from the [U.S. Census Bureau] indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009 — a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper,” Shaker writes.
When a newspaper shutters, fewer candidates run and incumbents are more likely to win. When the Cincinnati Post, which served both Ohio and northern Kentucky, shut down Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido observed that “fewer candidates ran for municipal office […] incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell.”
Less local media can mean less election turnout. Jackie Filla and Martin Johnson used data on voting and weekly and daily newspaper access in the Los Angeles area to investigate how access to local government information affects turnout in municipal elections. “We find that absent local news, voters are less likely to turnout,” they write.
Cities and towns with shrinking newsrooms had “significantly reduced political competition in mayoral races” and lower voter turnout. Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings used a data set including 11 local newspapers in California matched up with the municipalities they cover to study the impact of declines in newsroom staffing over 20 years. As Josh Benton notes in his overview of the research, the study is notable because most similar research focuses on newspaper closings, not just shrinking staff. In a follow-up paper, Meghan E. Rubado and Jay T. Jennings interviewed working journalists to understand the impact of newspaper employment cuts on the communities they cover. Journalists they talked to described “corruption, mismanagement, lower turnout, and incumbency advantages” as outcomes of reduced government coverage. (We also recommend Nieman Lab’s excellent summary of the paper.)
Thorough local journalism helps people be less biased when considering candidates.
Giving voters even the slightest bit of additional information on a candidate (like occupation) in addition to having just the race or gender, eliminated or mitigated gender and racial/ethnic biases. Researchers experimented with ballots mimicking different real-life ballot designs that have varying levels of information about each candidate while using names that signal different genders, races, and/or ethnicities. Online respondents pretended to vote using those ballots. The researchers found that “When respondents have the least information, candidates of color—particularly Black candidates—are disadvantaged, among respondents across party, ideological, and racial attitude lines.”
Local news coverage helps voters assess down-ballot candidates. Looking at people who receive information about their local elected officials compared to people who receive information about officials in neighboring states, Daniel J. Moskowitz notes that local political news coverage provides voters with “Information that allows them to assess down-ballot candidates separately from their national, partisan assessment.”
Quality local journalism can counter divisive national narratives that aim to stoke polarization.
One local newspaper’s experiment of publishing only local editorials slowed polarization among readers compared to a neighboring town’s newspaper readers. Joshua P. Darr, Louisiana State University, Matthew P. Hitt, Colorado State University, Johanna L. Dunaway, Texas A & M University out the reasoning like this: As Americans consume increasingly nationalized news, they become more partisan. By consuming more local information, people are more likely to be concerned with issues that affect them locally and elect leaders using these criteria rather than relying on national partisan rhetoric or cues to choose leaders. This can create a better democratic system.
Local media establishes a trusted, shared public understanding of local issues, counteracting distrust of national media. Using focus groups, story diaries, and interviews with residents and local journalists in Kentucky, Andrea Wenzel examined how people navigate tricky conversations about politics and current events, locally and nationally, with neighbors. Wenzel found that recognizing place-based identities and media representations can help facilitate trust in journalism.
Local news availability keeps leaders accountable to constituents rather than the national party. Research by Marc Trussler shows that this accountability shows potential to mitigate the nationalization of politics.
Political polarization among voters increases after local newspapers close down. In research published in Journal of Communication, researchers compared data on split-ticket voting and ballot rolloffs in the context of local newspaper closures.They found that places where newspapers had closed saw more people voting for just one party up and down the ballot.. “It seems like it’s the very existence of a local option doing the work here,” Joshua Darr of Louisiana State University said in a writeup about the report. “Just staying open seems like a fairly important factor, regardless of the level of political reporting in the news.”
Every dollar spent on local news produces hundreds of dollars in public benefit by exposing corruption & keeping an eye on government spending.
Watchdog reporting has an outsized economic impact. In his book, Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, James Hamilton is able to quantify the economic impact of watchdog reporting. By looking at the political and social change that resulted from journalism, and the cost of those stories, Hamilton was able to show that “each dollar spent on stories can generate hundreds of dollars in benefits to society.”
Local newspapers hold companies accountable for company misconduct. After a local newspaper closure, researchers found that local facilities increase violations by 1.1% and penalties by 15.2%, indicating that the closures reduce monitoring by the press. They used a data set tracking a wide range of federal violations and the resulting penalties issued by 44 agencies between 2000 and 2017, for a total of 26,450 violations at 10,647 facilities.
When elected leaders are under investigation, more media coverage can increase the chance that they’ll resign from office. Marcel Garz and Jil Sörenson studied examples in Germany and found “resignations are more common when the media covers the case intensely.”
Citizens are more likely to vote out elected officials when media outlets highlight the incumbents’ ties to corruption. These findings, from Harvard and Columbia researchers using examples in Mexico, demonstrate support for the media’s role in holding people accountable in a democracy.
Without watchdog reporters, cities faced higher long-term borrowing costs — that translate to immediate costs for citizens. Municipal bond data in the years after a newspaper closure showed that “cities where newspapers closed up shop saw increases in government costs as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals.” The study used data from 1996 to 2015 and tracked English-language newspapers in more than 1,200 counties in the U.S. “Without investigative daily reporters around to call bullshit on city hall, three years after a newspaper closes, that city or county’s municipal bond offering yields increased on average by 5.5 basis points, while bond yields in the secondary market increased by 6.4 basis points—statistically significant effects,” Kriston Capps wrote in explaining the study for CityLab.
“Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies,” researchers from MIT and Stockholm University documented in a study by evaluating their voting records, participation in hearings and more. They also found that federal spending was lower in areas where there was less press coverage of the local members of congress.
Where there is unreliable internet access, there is likely limited government transparency and eroding local news capacity. “In areas where declines in local newsrooms and resources inhibit political reporting and scrutiny of government actions,” researchers behind this study of Australian communities write, “there is little impetus for governments to develop interactive digital practices (or to consider and respond to civic input) given that restricting such spaces is arguably an advantage in the maintenance of political power.” Taken together, these forces create “a ruinous triumvirate – ill-informed citizenries, illegitimate local decision making and minimally accountable local governments.”
A free press helps tamp down bureaucratic corruption, in many countries. “Of the probable controls on bureaucratic corruption a free press is likely to be among the most effective ones,” authors of this study examining corruption in various nations wrote. They found “a significant relationship between more press freedom and less corruption in a large cross-section of countries.”
Watchdog coverage is more effective when it includes possible solutions to encourage civic actions. Reporting on its own doesn’t always hold power accountable. To do it most effectively, watchdog coverage should include possible solutions to encourage civic action. This finding comes from Nikki Usher’s interviews with business journalists at The New York Times, Marketplace public radio, and TheStreet to understand how journalists retrospectively considered their responsibilities following the 2007–2009 financial crisis.
People feel a stronger sense of community in places with strong local journalism.
Local news — with local owners — keeps people engaged with their physical location and local government. Meredith Metzler’s research on this involved surveying people living in two different rural communities about their information habits and assessing their media landscape in the context of where they live. Metzler found a relationship between engaging with local media, affinity to local community, and engagement with that community.
Local newspapers build a community’s sense of shared connection and place, and it’s not easy to replace them. Researchers came to this conclusion after organizing focus groups of community leaders in Baldwin City, Kansas and discussing the impact of the loss of their local paper on business, technology proficiency, and community attachment. “The overall consensus was that residents miss having a single community information platform,” they write.
Community members can experience increased loneliness, disconnection, and diminished local pride when a local paper closes. Through 19 interviews with community members of Caroline County, Virginia, following the Caroline Progress’ closure after 99 years, researcher Nick Mathews compiled examples of increasing loneliness, disconnection from community, and diminished local pride.
Communication within place is critical to producing community. Lewis Freidland focuses explicitly on the intersection of communication, community and democracy in his research, and has shown compellingly how communication within place, especially the kind made possible through local media, is critical to producing community.
Newspaper reading correlates with respondents’ sense of social cohesion. Masahiro Yamamoto has shown that community newspapers are important to community engagement. (Interestingly, Pew found an alternative correlation to also be true. Those who feel “highly attached to their communities demonstrate much stronger ties to local news” than those without a strong local sense of place.)
It’s not just news outlets — storytelling in general is key. Connection to local storytelling was key to “neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participation,” Yong-Chan Kim and Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach found as they examined people’s relationship to community media.
Even when online news is not as tied to geography, it can build a sense of place. In two separate pieces of research Carrie Buchanan (2009) and Kristy Hess (2012) document various ways local news builds sense of place and connection in geographic communities even when online news becomes somewhat more unmoored from location
Local news keeps communities informed during times of upheaval, like disasters, protests, and pandemics — when people need critical information to engage their communities and leaders.
Epidemiologists depend on local newspapers to identify and forecast disease outbreaks. Helen Branswell wrote that “When towns lose their newspapers, disease detectives are left flying blind.” In other words, America’s journalism crisis is also a public health crisis.
Local media is often the first to reveal a crisis and draw sustained attention to it. The Pew Research Center studied how people looked for and found information about the Flint water crisis to help understand “how news spreads in our increasingly fractured information environment.” Their data shows that local media was reporting on the crisis long before national media was involved.
Media coverage can help reduce pollution. Newspaper coverage of polluters and emissions producers was correlated with a 29% reduction in the emissions compared to factories and plants that were not covered. “While coverage was generally lacking, [Stockholm University’s Pamela] Campa found that plants located in neighborhoods with more newspapers were more likely to receive negative coverage in the press. More significantly, she discovered that plants located in areas with more newspapers had lower emissions,” Sophie Yeo wrote for Pacific Standard about the study.
Hyperlocal reporting is vital to research efforts across an array of disciplines. When Gothamist and DNAInfo were shut down suddenly, Samuel Stein, a geographer at CUNY Graduate Center, spoke to a number of academics about how, for researchers, local news really is the first draft of history.
Local news isn’t inherently good for communities just because it’s local though, studies show.
Journalism clearly has positive outcomes for our democracy, but it is not in and of itself inherently good. Studies show how local journalism outlets have harmed many communities with their coverage. Shuttering local newspapers is not the only crisis in local news — we also have to work to reimagine and rebuild how newsrooms serve communities, who gets to lead those newsrooms, and how reporting reflects the diverse needs of our nation. It is not enough to simply replace what has been lost — the following studies remind us that we must build something even better as we move forward.
“Since the colonial era, media outlets have used their platforms to inflict harm on Black people through weaponized narratives that promote Black inferiority and portray Black people as threats to society,” Free Press staff wrote in their rigorous, seismic Media2070 essay. They documented instances such as the deadly overthrow of a local government in Wilmington, North Carolina where Black people held power and other situations that connects racist journalism to lynching, promoting segregation, and more.
Local reporting can fill information needs, but it can also replicate inequities. Local journalism, especially newspapers, provided critical information needed during the height of COVID regarding healthcare, emergency, and civic information. However, there were signs of information inequality, where people in wealthier, whiter counties had better quality and more local coverage than people in diverse, poorer counties.
Residents of a primarily Black community say they are not served by journalism that follows traditional practices of “objectivity.” In studying the development over 17 months of a journalism project intended to serve a majority Black community, Andrea Wenzel and Letrell Crittenden determined that “residents’ ideals for local journalism at times clash with dominant journalism norms and practices regarding objectivity.”
Paywalls limit access to information that operates as part of local media’s civic potential. While paywalls can become a helpful revenue stream for local media facing financial pressure, they also “challenge the civic function of the local news media,” researchers looking at Norwegian and Danish outlets assessed.
When purchased by corporate predators, local news becomes less frequent, relevant, and inherently local. The quantity and quality of local news decreases in correlation to these acquisitions by media conglomerates. Researchers came to this conclusion after studying more than 130,000 articles from the Denver Post, LA Weekly, the New York Daily News, and more.
Sensationalized coverage emphasizes short-term conflicts rather than social concerns. By studying the impact of a local newspaper in Australia reporting on a local climate change plan, researchers write “rather than providing an arena for public discussion and constructive debate, we find that the newspaper adopted a clear position rejecting the need for changes in planning for anticipated climate impacts.”
What’s on the horizon for journalism in our democracy?
These findings call us to take even more seriously the erosion of people’s access to news and information. The faltering of newspapers, the consolidation of TV and radio, and the rising power of social media platforms are not just commercial issues driven by the market; they are democratic issues with profound implications for our communities.
We have seen a lot of transformation and reasons for hope over the past few years since this post was originally published. News leaders are thinking about how to serve their communities, and reckoning with failures of the past. Journalism funders are coming together to fund projects to revitalize local news ecosystems. And funders who haven’t traditionally focused on journalism are joining in as well, realizing they will not achieve the change they seek in healthcare, education and more without information about their focuses. The research above makes the case for why we must continue working to expand support for quality local news that truly reflects and serves its communities. If you want to know more about how, or want to add additional research to this list, reach out to Josh Stearns at jstearns@democracyfund.org and Christine Schmidt at cschmidt@democracyfund.org.
In the fall of 2021, Democracy Fund commissioned an evaluation of our Election Security and Confidence portfolio – the major focus of the Elections & Voting Program’s Trust in Elections strategy – to summarize our investments, activities, and impact and help us make informed decisions about future investments. Here, we reflect on the history of our election security work and share key findings from the evaluation. For a deeper dive, we invite you to read the full report.
History of the Election Security & Confidence Portfolio
The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election was a turning point for election security following attempts by foreign actors, namely Russian, Chinese, and Iranian groups, to disrupt the election with cyber-attacks. After the election, as information surfaced about how foreign actors scanned – and in a few cases gained entry into – several state and local election networks, it became clear that election security was now a national security concern. In response to these events, the Democracy Fund Elections & Voting Program added a body of work in 2017 to focus on improving security and confidence in our elections. With an emphasis on election security, this portfolio aimed to fortify the election system to prevent further foreign interference and counter cybersecurity threats by investing in tools and training for election officials. As part of these efforts, we also launched the Election Validation Project, which focused on expanding the use of post-election audits, and Democracy Fund Voice supported coalitions that advocated for, and secured, federal funding for elections in three straight years – 2018, 2019, and 2020 – which was the first funding for elections since the passage of HAVA in 2000.
The Elections & Voting Program’s initial landscaping and research led to the development of four core areas for grantmaking to prevent election interference based on the threats posed by foreign actors and vulnerable security infrastructure. These core grantmaking areas included:
Fortifying the field with workable solutions and best practices
Empowering election officials to advocate for funding to strengthen election cybersecurity
Researching verification practices and resiliency efforts
Public messaging on the legitimate risks to election systems
Evaluating the Portfolio’s Impact
An evaluation of the portfolio’s impact, conducted by Fernandez Advisors, focused on identifying the impact, growth, and sustainability of our investments to improve both election security and confidence in election outcomes. The report found that our investments in election security resources and tools that increased the capacity of state and local election administrators to identify and manage security threats were among the most valuable. In particular, government agency partners noted the critical role that Democracy Fund played by acting quickly and early to take the financial risks necessary to develop and pilot new election security resources (e.g., trainings, tools, technical assistance, and playbooks), which were eventually adapted by local, state, and federal government agencies once the proof of concept had been established.
Our early investments in election cybersecurity contributed to the successful execution of the 2020 election. These investments in enhancing election cybersecurity through training and tools and the push for additional federal funding for elections helped create the conditions for what the U.S Department of Homeland Security called, “one of the most secure elections in history.”
Summary of Findings & Key Takeaways
Despite our work on election security and cybersecurity, public trust in the election system is dangerously low.When we started our work in election security, we believed that investing in election cybersecurity would protect the system from foreign interference, which would lead to increased public trust in elections. The first part of the hypothesis proved accurate—states and the federal government have adopted many of our grantees’ election cybersecurity training and tools, freeing election officials to turn their attention to other issues in the system. However, hyperpartisanship and threats of authoritarianism have further reduced public trust in elections and – in ways that were simultaneously unexpected and should have been anticipated – exposed new elections vulnerabilities including viral mis-and dis-information, the spread of unproven ballot review techniques, and attacks on election officials.
When we began investing in election security, it was still a young field with few philanthropic players. Democracy Fund played a role in catalyzing new approaches to improving election security, many of which are now embedded in the election system and the work of election officials. The 2016 election was a wake-up call that exposed the security vulnerabilities of our election system, and the system responded by shoring up the infrastructure. We are proud to have played a role in that initial response, and still believe that a resilient system is essential to ensuring free, fair, and equitable elections in this country.
From its inception, Democracy Fund has invested in organizations supporting election administration. We believe that well-functioning election operations are a core component of a healthy election system. At the end of 2021, we commissioned an independent evaluation of the Elections & Voting Program’s Voter Centric Election Administration portfolio to review how our theory of change was executed and how the election system has shifted. Here, we reflect on the findings from that evaluation and invite you to read the full report.
Voter Centric Election Administration Portfolio History
The landscape of election administration in 2014 is a far cry from what we experience today. At that time, the findings of the Bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration were widely praised and pointed the way toward evidence-based solutions to election challenges – such as long lines at the polls and errors on voter lists – that made use of developments in technology. Election administration has always been complicated, especially in the highly-decentralized U.S. system. However from 2014-2016, the field experienced clarity of purpose and a relatively-uncontentious bipartisan consensus on best practices to move the field forward.
In this context, Democracy Fund developed a theory of change that focused on two needs of the field:
Strong networks of election administrators for knowledge-sharing across and within states
Innovative practices and technology designed for election administrators to use.
To meet the first need, we identified the leaders of state election administrator associations and hosted convenings with them twice a year in a “train the trainer” model, whereby they would learn best-in-class practices to take back to their state associations of election officials. For the second need, we invested in a wide range of civic technology tools, research, and guides developed by civil society organizations that could be used by administrators to better serve voters. Our goal was to scale and spread practices that would improve the voting experience nationwide.
Evaluation of the Portfolio’s Impact
An evaluation of the portfolio’s impact, conducted by Fernandez Advisors, focused on the ways that election officials at the state and local level have engaged in Democracy Fund’s network convenings and used tools, training, and resources in which we have invested. The report found that investing in tools and resources for election administrators helped the field adapt to shifts in voter expectations for online services and new voting methods. Our grantees’ programs helped to improve the design of election websites and ballots, helped administrators adapt to early voting and mail voting policies, and helped voters learn where to find a polling place or ballot drop box easily and accurately. These are just a few examples of the ways our grantees supported administrators’ efforts to serve voters.
This portfolio was especially well-timed to meet the unusual needs of the 2020 election when many states rapidly adjusted their voting policies and practices to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many states offered voters more flexibility to vote early at home or at voter centers in order to avoid crowds at Election Day polling places. These states could not have rapidly adopted new voting methods without following the examples of states that had spent years innovating and experimenting with flexible voting practices. Democracy Fund grantees were instrumental in helping states learn quickly from these examples because they had documented implementation processes and offered technical assistance.
While network-building, tools, and research have been instrumental in improving election administration, the failure of local and state governments to adequately resource election offices remains a significant problem. Significant and ongoing technology changes (such as online voter registration and ballot tracking) present adoption challenges for many election administrators and their staff due to both the lack of funding for technology investments and maintenance and the difficulty covering the range of expertise needed with the very small staffs that manage elections in all but the largest jurisdictions. For example, election officials interviewed for the evaluation report that they do not have the capacity to counter growing mis- and disinformation targeted toward voters.
The job of managing elections has grown increasing complex as the field faces new challenges. Local election officials must be experts in many areas: human resources, information technology, direct mail processing, public relations, cybersecurity, and more. Most election officials are managing this load with little staff capacity. In the 2020 Democracy Fund/Reed College Survey of Local Election Officials, over half of respondents said they work in an office with just one or two staff members who may not even be full-time. Participants in Democracy Fund’s state association convenings praised the information and opportunity to share knowledge and resources with peers from other states and bring ideas back to their colleagues. However, limited staff capacity and urgent demands makes it difficult for many officials to spend time adopting new practices.
Summary of Findings & Key Takeaways
When Democracy Fund began investing in civil society organizations focused on election administration, it was still a young field, with limited philanthropic investments supporting the work. We used a systems and complexity approach to analyze the needs of the field and identify the gaps and leverage points that could improve the health of election administration. We played a role in catalyzing new nonprofit organizations that support election officials and in funding emerging election sciences research. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the 2020 primary elections and made evident the importance of well-resourced and well-functioning election administration. In response, the field of organizations supporting election administration scaled up as more donors began funding this work. Even as the context shifts over time and the field adapts, strong election administration is essential to the health of a just and equitable election system.
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