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North Carolina organizations building a bold future for news and information together

Teresa Gorman
/
August 1, 2018

How can we help local news survive, transform, and thrive? This question will not be answered by one person, one organization, or one innovation. Instead, it will be answered by local ecosystems that have many players, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, coming together to be greater than the sum of their parts. It will look different everywhere around the country, but without this systemic approach, local news cannot survive.

This theory is at the core of the work of the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, which is announcing $500,000 in grants today. NCLNL’s goal is to support people and organizations working to build a healthier local news and information ecosystem in North Carolina. It is a collaborative fund at the North Carolina Community Foundation, established by a group of local and national funders who believe in the power of local journalism, local stories, and local people to strengthen our democracy.

The grants were selected by an advisory board with representatives from the following foundations: A.J. Fletcher Foundation, Democracy Fund, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Prentice Foundation, and Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, as well as subject matter experts from North Carolina Central University and NC Congress of Latino Organizations.

The fund’s first grants go to organizations working to expand access to critical news and information for all North Carolina communities. This cohort represents the fund’s commitment to supporting a diverse set of organizations pursuing meaningful projects to better serve local communities and strengthen the news and information ecosystem overall. Each of these grantees also represent vital networks of people, communities, and organizations that will engage and collaborate with their work.

It is, as Fiona Morgan wrote in “Learning from North Carolina,” a manifestation of how “North Carolina’s news ecosystem will likely succeed best as a network of networks, with distinct areas where people join forces, share resources or collaborate.”

These grantees are working to build new infrastructure for independent media, recognizing that we have to work together to meet the full needs of our communities. Across these efforts we saw a deep commitment to community and collaboration and a generosity and determination to openly share and jointly build a bold future for North Carolina.

Individually these are all great projects and organizations, and taken together they begin to connect people and communities across North Carolina in new ways. We are thrilled by the work these organizations will do, but this is just the beginning. We had more than 70 ideas submitted to the NCLNL through the application process, many of them addressing important needs and opportunities that we want to work on in the future.

Word on the Street/La Voz de los Jóvenes trainees learn how to tell stories in Asheville. Photo by Sekou Coleman.

The grantees are:

  • Asheville Writers: Word on the Street/La Voz de los Jóvenes – Asheville Writers in the Schools and Community provides creative writing and arts programs for young people in local schools and community programs. Word on the Street/La Voz de los Jóvenes is an online magazine with a program that mentors and trains youth of color to gather and publish news that engages their communities and builds racial equity.
  • Carolina Public Press: North Carolina Investigative Journalism Collaborative – Carolina Public Press is an independent nonprofit news organization established in 2011 with a focus on in-depth and investigative news in Western North Carolina. In 2018, it expanded to cover the entire state. CPP will lead the North Carolina Investigative Journalism Collaborative, which will launch collaborations between state and local media outlets, organize listening sessions between residents and members of the media statewide, and experiment with new ways to generate its own self-sustaining revenue.
  • Colectivo de Comunicación Participativa de Carolina del Norte (CCPNC): Enlace Latino NC – Enlace Latino NC is a Spanish-language website that offers local, state, and national immigration and policy news during a critical time of need in the Latinx community in North Carolina. With this grant, Enlace Latino NC will focus on building their capacity, adding more resources, and reporting on key issues.
  • Duke University Reporters Lab: North Carolina Fact-Checking Project– The North Carolina Fact-Checking Project is a collaborative effort focused on the 2018 state elections and 2019 state legislative session, providing rigorous fact-checked content for publications and broadcast programs statewide. The project aims to increase fact-checking coverage of public officials and candidates. It brings together partners with deep experience in substantive fact-checking with an innovative edge, including the Duke Reporters Lab, the News & Observer, and the Reese News Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  • NC Health News: General Operating Support – North Carolina Health News is a leading news source on information about health care for residents, policymakers, lobbyists, and healthcare workers across North Carolina. With this grant, the NC Health News staff will continue and strengthen the organization’s work.
  • NC Press Association: Training Program – The North Carolina Press Association (NCPA) supports newspapers statewide, offers a legal hotline, and hosts an annual convention. The NCPA is focused on a defending “the public’s right to know” by advocating for open government and championing First Amendment freedoms.
  • UNC Center for Public TV: Public Media NC and HBCU Radio Together – Radio stations at historically black colleges and universities in North Carolina are a valuable resource for local, relevant, and timely news for the communities they serve. This collaboration between HBCU radio stations and UNC-TV will give all involved an opportunity to learn from each other and collaborate across mediums.
  • UNC School of Media and Journalism: Trail Blazer – The Trail Blazer project will help sustain long-term coverage of stories by simplifying the research process for journalists in North Carolina. Through a mobile-friendly website, it will provide a comprehensive, updated, simple-to-navigate repository for journalists, including limited-scope facts, timelines, annotated documents, and links to existing articles. The core concepts of the Trail Blazer project were developed by veteran journalist Vaughn Hagerty, who broke a story about the presence of the chemical GenX in Cape Fear River.
  • WNCU: Advancement of Emerging Young, Diverse News Journalists – WNCU is a public radio station that serves partly as a hub to train young journalists at North Carolina Central University. The Advancement of Emerging Young, Diverse News Journalists project will train a diverse, inclusive, and underrepresented group of student reporters via the WNCU radio station and the student newspaper, The Campus Echo.
  • Working Narratives: Wilmington Ecology Project – Working Narrativesfocuses on reporting on pressing social challenges such as media justice, mass incarceration, and health equity. Founded in 2011, the organization works at the local and regional level to “tell great stories that inspire, activate and enliven our democracy.” The Wilmington Ecology Project will train citizens to produce and report their own stories through performance, radio, video, and other forms.

The advisory board of the Fund — Brett Chambers (North Carolina Central University), Elena Conley (Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation), Damon Circosta (A.J. Fletcher Foundation) Teresa Gorman (Democracy Fund) Bobbi Hapgood (Prentice Foundation), Ivan Kohar Parra (NC Congress of Latino Organizations), Sorien Schmidt (Z Smith Reynolds Foundation) and Josh Stearns (Democracy Fund) — were inspired and challenged by the scope and creativity of the proposals we received. It was incredibly difficult to pick just a few grantees in this round.
In partnership with the advisory board, funder partners, and others, including Democracy Fund Senior Consultant Melanie Sill, the NCLNL will continue to explore ways to support and strengthen North Carolina’s local news ecosystem. This will include future grantmaking and convenings. It will not be done in a vacuum. We will strive to live the NCLNL’s stated values of learning, diversity, equity, inclusion, innovation, and transparency, and continue to share updates from our grantees and others here on the Local News Lab.

As we continue this work, please share your comments, feedback, and ideas to localnewslab@democracyfund.org.

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A Special Project to Defend America’s Fourth Estate

Josh Stearns
/
April 24, 2018

Journalism plays many roles in our democracy. At its best, it informs people about critical issues in ways that builds agency; it reflects the diverse lives of our nation back to us in ways that strengthen communities; it provides a public square where ideas can be debated; and it interrogates systems and institutions in ways that hold power to account.

Since Democracy Fund was founded, we have been investing in people and organizations who are working to strengthen journalism and local news to ensure a brighter future for our democracy. We are helping rebuild local news business models, fostering bold new collaborations, and reimagining the social contract between newsrooms and communities.

That long-haul work continues, but one year ago Democracy Fund announced a new effort focused specifically on bolstering and defending journalism’s ability to serve as a robust fourth estate. Alarmed by the escalating political attacks against journalists and concerned about what those threats meant for the public’s access to information, we made the largest grants in our organization’s history.

Defending America’s Fourth Estate

In March 2017, along with our colleagues at First Look Media, we committed $10 million over two-years to the Center for Investigative Reporting, Center for Public Integrity, the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and ProPublica. Recognizing the essential role of local and state investigative journalism we also contributed $1 million to NewsMatch, which helped 109 nonprofit newsrooms raise nearly $5 million in the last few months of 2017 (read more about the results of NewsMatch here). Together these grants make up our special project on investigative reporting, which seeks to ensure nonprofit newsrooms are prepared to face new and mounting challenges.

The last year has been a profound reminder of the critical role of a bold, trustworthy, and free press. Our grantees have produced hard hitting public interest reporting on the financial conflicts of interest in the current administration, social media’s impact on democracy, the rise of hate crimes, as well as on the upheavals and changes shaping education, environmental issues, and immigration.

  • Every single one of our grantees had at least one story that revealed conflicts of interest or wrongdoing that resulted in meaningful policy change, divestments and resignations.
  • ProPublica’s reporting on social media platforms and algorithms sparked Facebook to change its advertising policy and spurred NYC to pass the country’s first bill to address algorithmic discrimination in city government.
  • The Center for Investigative Reporting and Center for Public Integrity launched a “Citizen Sleuths” program to engage thousands of people in digging into the financial disclosure records for more than 400 appointees.
  • The Center for Public Integrity compiled state disclosure reports into a searchable library, revealing how state lawmakers use their position to enrich themselves.

These are just a few of the headlines from the past year. Our grantees also produced life-saving reporting on maternal health, revelations about housing discrimination, and an Oscar nominated film on the opioid crisis that was picked up by Netflix.

Accountability Reporting and Being Accountable Ourselves

All of these investments were general operating grants, which means there were no strings attached to how the grants had to be used. Grantees had total freedom to use the funds as they saw fit for the unique needs of their organizations, communities, and beats. In addition, Democracy Fund has an editorial policy written into our grant agreements that mandates we cannot speak to our grantees about content decisions. We believe this kind of independence is critical, especially with grants of this size.

In the end, the freedom these grants provided didn’t just produce more journalism, but also created opportunities to rethink and reimagine how that journalism was done. In an era of dwindling trust for journalism, integrity has to be at the heart of newsrooms and foundations. Each of these newsrooms have opened up their process to their readers, engaging people in the reporting process, and bringing profound transparency to their process.

The Center for Investigative Reporting held community forums and opened up a text message line to answer questions from communities across the country about their investigation into modern day redlining. ProPublica built a crowdsourcing app called the Facebook Political Ad Collector which collects ads on Facebook to enable ProPublica to better monitor political ads on social platforms. The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University paired journalism students with NPR and Frontline journalists to investigate the housing crisis.

These are not just clever innovations, but critical interventions that put the public at the heart of investigative journalism. The ability of the press to serve as a check and balance on power is rooted in the legitimacy and trust bestowed upon it by the public. As such, to hold our leaders accountable, we need to hold our communities close and be accountable ourselves.

We look forward to continuing to share, and to be accountable, as this special project continues.

Grantees of the Investigative Journalism Project include the following:

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Press Release

Democracy Fund & First Look Media Announce $12M+ in New Grants to Support Free Press

Democracy Fund
/
March 25, 2017

Washington, D.C. – Today First Look Media and Democracy Fund announced more than $12 million in new grants to support an independent, robust free press. Three leading nonprofit news organizations – the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, and ProPublica – will each receive $3 million at a moment when the role of journalism in our democracy is facing unprecedented challenges.

These three grants, which are a collaboration between First Look Media and Democracy Fund, will help ensure journalists have the resources they need to meet the reporting challenges of today’s political landscape. The two organizations are also granting $500,000 to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University to expand accountability reporting collaborations between university students and professional journalists, and $275,000 for an innovative collaboration between Professor Jay Rosen at New York University and De Correspondent to test new models of community support for investigative reporting.

“A healthy democracy cannot exist without a vibrant public square in which hard-hitting, independent media inform the public and hold power accountable,” said Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman. “Investigative journalists play a crucial role in our political system. We hope this support extends the reach and depth of a remarkable set of nonprofit newsrooms at a pivotal moment in American history.”

Democracy Fund and First Look Media share a strong commitment to and belief in the critical role of the First Amendment; both organizations were created by philanthropist Pierre Omidyar.

“At First Look Media, we speak truth to power and tell the stories that matter — across our fearless journalism, films, TV, and digital,” said Michael Bloom, President of First Look Media. “We are thrilled to make these grants to others in our field who are also doing such important work during these critical times.”

First Look Media and Democracy Fund also independently announced additional grants today.

Democracy Fund announced an $800,000 grant to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to help ensure investigative journalists have the legal support and First Amendment protections necessary to pursue their work. Building on its ongoing commitment to transforming local news, Democracy Fund also announced the forthcoming establishment of a new fund for local and state investigative reporting, with an initial investment of $1 million. Democracy Fund is inviting other funders to join them in building a new resource to support state and local reporting; more information will be made available in the coming months. Democracy Fund also contributed $200,000 to the Knight Prototype Fund on trust in journalism.

“National and local nonprofit newsrooms are playing an increasingly important role and building new models for reporting through creativity, collaboration, and civic engagement,” said Tom Glaisyer, Public Square Program Director, Democracy Fund. “In so doing, they bring new people into journalism, highlight new voices, and tell fuller and deeply relevant stories.”

Since 2011, Democracy Fund has invested more than $18 million in support of a more vibrant public square, which includes efforts on local journalism, fact-checking, and newsroom diversity.

First Look Media is providing a grant of $550,000 over two years to support The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. This grant will support investigative reporting on Wall Street and on environmental issues for The Intercept. The Investigative Fund, an award-winning newsroom for independent journalists, incubates investigative reporting projects with the potential for social impact and publishes this work in editorial partnership with a wide variety of print, broadcast, and digital outlets.

“Reporters are facing unprecedented challenges in the current political environment, which demands bold, intensively researched journalism that simply is not possible in most newsrooms without outside support,” said Betsy Reed, Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept.

Democracy Fund and First Look Media will announce all the grants tonight at the Toner Prize Celebration honoring the work of the late Robin Toner, the first woman to be chief political correspondent for The New York Times. The event benefits the Toner Program in Political Reporting at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School.

Democracy Fund and First Look Media Joint Grants, Total $9,775,000

  • The Center for Investigative Reporting, $3 million over two years – This grant provides general operating support to CIR as they pioneer new models of investigative reporting rooted in collaboration, community engagement, and creativity.
  • The Center for Public Integrity, $3 million over two years – This grant provides general operating support to CPI to expand its watchdog reporting and strengthen its ability to hold institutions accountable to the American people.
  • ProPublica, $3 million over two years – This grant provides general operating support to ProPublica, whose groundbreaking work combines hard-hitting investigations and cutting edge data journalism in service to communities.
  • The Investigative Reporting Workshop, $500,000 over two years – This grant provides general operating support to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University to deepen its model of accountability reporting, which fosters collaboration between students, professional journalists, and longstanding newsrooms.
  • New York University, $275,000 over one year – This grant will establish a laboratory for community-supported investigative reporting through a unique partnership between New York University and De Correspondent. The project will focus on developing sustainable business models for U.S. newsrooms rooted in new membership structures and draw on the lessons from a world leader in community-driven accountability journalism.

Democracy Fund Grants, Total $2 million

  • Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, $800,000 over two years – This grant provides general operating support to the Reporters Committee to enhance its ability to provide legal resources and guidance for independent journalists and nonprofit news outlets, in addition to continuing its work with longtime partners in broadcast, print, and online news media.
  • State and Local Investigative Fund, $1 million initial investment – With this funding, Democracy Fund seeks to establish a new fund for state and local investigative journalism and invites other funders and donors to contribute and collaborate. The goal of the fund is to serve as a beacon for those who want to support local and state news, investigative beats, and nonprofit newsrooms.
  • Knight Prototype Fund on Misinformation, $200,000 over one years – Democracy Fund also contributed $200,000 to the Knight Prototype Fund’s $1 million open call for ideas on misinformation and trust in journalism, a partnership with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Rita Allen Foundation; the open call is accepting applications until April 3.

First Look Media Grant, Total $550,000 over two years

  • This grant supports a partnership between The Intercept & the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute for investigative reporting on Wall Street and on environmental issues.

 

 

About FIRST LOOK MEDIA:

A bold, independent spirit defines everything we do at First Look Media – from journalism that holds the powerful accountable, to art and entertainment that shape our culture. Launched by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, First Look Media is built on the belief that freedom of expression and of the press, diverse voices, and fiercely independent perspectives, are vital to a healthy democracy and a vibrant culture.

About DEMOCRACY FUND:

The Democracy Fund is a bipartisan foundation established by eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar to help ensure that our political system can withstand new challenges and deliver on its promise to the American people. Since 2011, Democracy Fund has invested more than $50 million in support of effective governance, modern elections, and a vibrant public square.

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Press Release

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

Democracy Fund
/
October 4, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Approaching Democracy as a Complex System

Joe Goldman
/
August 10, 2015

Our democracy is a complex political system made of an intricate web of institutions, interest groups, individual leaders, and citizens that are connected to each other in countless ways. Every attempt to influence some aspect of this complex system produces a ripple of other reactions – some may be predictable, but many are not. This can make it difficult to anticipate what will happen when we intervene to try to make our democracy work better.

Our team at the Democracy Fund is not the first to find that it is easy to fall into the trap of oversimplifying the challenges faced by our democracy as we endeavor to strengthen it. While we all know that democracy is never fixed when a court case is won or a new law is signed, we have found that our strategies often fail to recognize how fixing one piece of the system will be inadequate for achieving our long-term aims. The passage of major legislation, whether it is McCain-Feingold or the Help America Vote Act, is usually met with legal challenges, loop holes, and resistance, which undermine our goals and can lead to unanticipated results that are sometimes worse than the problems with which we began.

Adopting a Systems Approach

The answer is not to give up hope or to abandon our cause. Instead, we believe that widespread system change calls for the humility to acknowledge that there are no simple answers or silver bullets in a complex world. We need to embrace the complexity of the problems we are facing, which requires that we experiment, learn, and iterate. Progress must be made through multi-pronged strategies that reinforce one another, are sustained over time, and reflect a more holistic understanding of the major forces driving and constraining change.

One method for avoiding the trap of oversimplification is called “systems thinking,” which refers to the practice of seeking to understand and influence complex systems. The Democracy Fund, along with some of the other organizations within Omidyar Group, is adopting an approach informed by systems thinking to improve our ability to achieve our goals of making our democracy work better. To this end, our team has begun a process of documenting our understanding of the dynamic systems in which we are working.

We are using a tool called “systems mapping” to make sense of the complex problems we are working on and to open ourselves up to new, creative solutions. A systems map is different than a network map that describes how different individuals or organizations are connected to one another. Instead, a systems map describes the dynamic patterns (or feedback loops) that occur in a system, whether they are vicious or virtuous cycles of behavior and reaction.

Take an arms race for example. In this type of vicious cycle, one party buys arms because it feels threatened by another. This leads the other to feel threatened and to buy arms, which in turn leads the first party to buy even more arms. The result is an endless chain of escalating reactions.

The stories we tell ourselves about the world around us determine how we try to act in it. At the end of the day, a systems map is really just a rich story that lets us see how our world is interconnected and helps us be more effective in our attempts to improve it. To better understand what this kind of map that focuses on dynamic feedback loops can look like, take a look at these maps created by the Hawaii Quality of Life initiative.

Iterative and Participatory Maps

As we apply systems thinking to our work, the Democracy Fund has decided to make our process highly participatory and iterative. We chose a participatory approach because we know that even with the expertise of our staff, our understanding of the systems on which we are working is incomplete. By engaging diverse groups of experts, advocates, public officials, and peer funders, we gain much broader insight into the systems on which we are working, which will hopefully allow for more creative solutions to emerge. Collectively, we can harness the power of systems thinking as a means of taking a step back and being more comprehensive in our depiction of both problems and opportunities. We at the Democracy Fund are grateful to all those who have already contributed their time and expertise to our process and look forward to engaging more voices in the months to come.

We also have adopted an approach that is deeply iterative. By definition, you can never understand everything about a complex system given the sheer volume of dynamic relationships at play. Perhaps, more to the point, a complex world is always changing. As the system changes, we need to change with it. We will need to regularly revisit our maps and our plans to reflect all that we learn as we experiment and intervene, making our systems maps adaptive, living tools.

Beginning to Map Our Systems

We are currently working on three initial systems maps—one on election administration, one on local journalism, and one on the legislative branch of our federal government. We expect these systems maps to contribute to smarter interventions and we anticipate that the maps will foster collaboration with our partners by transparently laying out our understanding of the problems on which we are working. In this way, each map will become a tool for telling a better, more comprehensive story about our strategies. The systems maps also have the potential to support greater opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and insight. These first three maps will be followed by others that look at additional aspects of our political system.

We believe that the process of creating systems maps will help us challenge and test our assumptions, as well as identify areas where we want to learn more. Once the relationships and causal pathways are created, we hope to see the opportunities for engagement in the system more clearly. Moreover, through systems thinking, and systems mapping more specifically, we hope to focus on building a political system that is resilient to new and recurring challenges and shocks, rather than trying to find silver bullet solutions that give a false sense of fixing a problem.

We have only just begun this journey of ours, but we are excited about the potential of systems thinking to help reveal new connections, questions, and approaches to a set of challenges about which we care deeply. Over the next year, we look forward to hearing your feedback as we share our draft maps here on this blog.

Stay tuned for more to come.

(Special thanks to Tiffany Griffin, our Manager of Learning and Impact, for spear heading our work on systems thinking and working with me to produce this introductory post on our approach. I’d also like to thank Rob Ricigliano – Omidyar Group’s systems and complexity coach – as well as his colleague Karen Grattan for their guidance as the Democracy Fund has approached its systems work.)

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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.

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Press Release

While Most Americans Prefer Democracy, More Than One in Four Express Sympathy for Authoritarianism

Democracy Fund
/
March 13, 2018

​Voter Study Group report questions conventional wisdom that democracy is in decline, but finds concerning trends as authoritarian support consolidates among Trump supporters

Washington, DC — Americans’ support for an authoritarian leader declined for the first time in two decades, according to a new report from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. “Follow the Leader: Exploring American Support for Democracy and Authoritarianism,” nevertheless finds worrying developments among the 29% of Americans who say that an authoritarian alternative to democracy would be favorable.

The new report by Lee Drutman (New America), Larry Diamond (Hoover Institution), and Joe Goldman (Democracy Fund) is part of a unique, multi-year study from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a research collaboration of leading analysts and scholars from across the political spectrum examining the evolving views of American voters.

“The good news is that the sky is not falling — Americans are not abandoning democracy,” said Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman. “But in the midst of historic levels of polarization and new pressures on our constitutional checks and balances, the reality that more than a quarter of the American public seems open to turning away from democracy should worry anyone who cares about a healthy, responsive political system.”

Key findings from the report include:

  • The overwhelming majority of Americans support democracy and most of those who express negative views about it are opposed to authoritarian alternatives. In fact, the report finds no relationship between dissatisfaction with democracy and support for an authoritarian system in which a strong leader doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections.
  • Nearly a quarter of Americans say that a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections would be “fairly” or “very good,” and 18 percent say that army rule would be “fairly” or “very good.”
  • Support for a strong leader declined to 1995 levels after a two-decade increase. During these two decades, Democrats expressed greater support for a strong leader, but this reversed in 2017 as Republicans became far more likely to say that having a “strong leader” is a good system.
  • Thirty-two percent of Trump primary voters support a “strong leader” who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections. Support for this option is especially high (45 percent) among those who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and then voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
  • The highest levels of support for authoritarian leadership come from those who are disaffected, disengaged from politics, deeply distrustful of experts, culturally conservative, and have negative views towards racial minorities.

“While the overwhelming majority of Americans support democracy, there is a reason to be concerned, as support for democracy in the U.S. and rejection of authoritarian options is weaker than in many of our peer democracies around the world,” said Larry Diamond, senior fellow, Hoover Institution. “We need to renew our understanding of and commitment to democracy and the values that undergird it-pluralism, mutual respect and tolerance, flexibility, a willingness to compromise, and critical thinking. We cannot take democracy for granted.”

“This report highlights a problem with our current two-party system,” said Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America. “If some Americans feel a political party does not represent them, they are left with only one other option. If that party becomes a party of racial resentment and authoritarian leadership, many individuals will update their beliefs to fit with their partisan identity. Otherwise, they can drop out of the political system altogether, which will presumably lead to more doubts about democracy.”

The full “Follow the Leader” report can be found at www.voterstudygroup.org, along with other research from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.

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

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

VOTER Survey Methodology Summary
In partnership with the survey firm YouGov, the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group commissioned the 2017 VOTER Survey (Views of the Electorate Research Survey) of 5,000 adults who had participated in similar surveys in 2011, 2012 and 2016. A complete 2017 survey methodology is available here.

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

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Blog

Sneak Peek: New Data on What Americans Think About Voter Registration

Natalie Adona
/
September 22, 2017

In 2016, the Democracy Fund participated in the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) in partnership with Reed College. (1) Through this partnership, we sought to gain a better understanding of public opinion about election administration and voting, use the data to inform Democracy Fund’s strategic priorities, and add to the growing body of knowledge in election policy. The Reed/Democracy Fund module, which was administered pre- and post-election, includes several questions, grouped in the following categories:

  • Voting behavior and the voter experience;
  • Election administration;
  • Election integrity, fairness, and trust; and
  • Policy preferences.

As National Voter Registration Day approaches, I’d like to offer a preview and some initial thoughts about our findings—specifically, those covering certain aspects of the registration process. As I explain below, our findings suggest that voters need ongoing education to understand key aspects of the voter registration process. The data also suggest that election officials are well positioned to provide clear, easy-to-understand information about registration and to continue educating the public about the availability and benefits of online voter registration.

Public perceptions of the voter registration process

States have a long history of requiring registration before a person may vote. However, voters and potential voters might not be completely familiar with, and may even be confused by, certain aspects of the process. Missing the state registration deadline or experiencing a significant life change like a marriage or a move without updating registration can lead to a person being unable to cast a valid ballot.

In our survey, we asked participants about some key aspects of the registration process so that we could better understand and then address potential gaps in voter education. Because it’s available in 35 states and DC, and is a relatively recent change in election policy, we included questions about respondent’s knowledge and use of online voter registration (OVR). (2) We also wanted to know whether people understand when to update their registration and how respondents find out about voter registration deadlines.

1) Knowledge and use of OVR

When asked about whether their states offer OVR, about 51 percent of respondents did not know. Over 17 percent answered incorrectly; of those respondents, 56 percent believed that their state did not offer OVR, and 44 percent believed that the state does offer it. (3) Of the third of respondents who provided the correct answer and had access to OVR, over 60 percent of them had not registered or updated their registration using the state’s online system.

At first glance, these data may be discouraging and reflect the need for stronger efforts to educate voters about the availability and benefits of OVR. There are, however, some caveats to these results that prompt the need for further study:

  • Many respondents were already registered. Almost 86 percent of CCES respondents answered that they were registered to vote. Though questions of this type are sometimes susceptible to social desirability bias, we assume that CCES respondents answered truthfully, and might not have had the need to use OVR at the time they completed the survey. So, while we encourage states to offer OVR to their citizens, some groups of voters may not use it for several years.
  • Some respondents prefer the paper form. While 49 percent of respondents answered that they would prefer to use OVR, 35 percent indicated that they preferred a paper form. It is unclear whether those answers reflect a lack of trust in using OVR or were motivated by some other reasons. However, these data make it clear that states should not completely phase out paper—at least, not while a significant number of people prefer paper or lack access to the Internet.
  • Some respondents may have been registered at DMV. Even though the CCES does not ask about the manner in which respondents registered to vote, we assume that some may have registered through their state department of motor vehicles (DMV). Data from the United States Election Assistance Commission shows that, between 2014 and 2016, election officials received 33 percent of registrations from DMVs, which is the largest single source of registration applications compared to in person (12 percent), by mail (17 percent), online (17 percent), and other sources (15 percent).

2) Updating registration upon moving

Most respondents knew that they need to register or update their registration after a move; however, a significant percentage of people did not. To challenge our respondents on the basics of registration, we presented them with various scenarios that may trigger registration updates, e.g., moves across town, other counties, or other states.

There were varied responses to our scenarios about moving. While most of our respondents understood that a move to another state requires them to change registration, 46 percent of respondents either did not know or said “no” when asked if an across-town move triggers this need. Nearly 30 percent of respondents answered incorrectly when asked about an out-of-county move, and about 23 percent erroneously thought that they did not need to re-register after an out-of-state move.

We do not yet know what role the DMV might play in shaping the public’s understanding of the registration process, and whether DMV interactions may explain the difference in these responses, if at all. Given the large percentage of people who register through DMVs, we look forward to using these CCES findings as a jumping off point for future analysis.

3) Finding voter registration deadlines

When asked about the top three resources that they turn to for voter registration deadlines, about 70 percent of our respondents said that they rely on their county election website; about as many rely on their state’s election website for the same information. Over 60 percent of respondents also use search engines like Google to look up voter registration deadlines—and very likely receive reliable information from the states, thanks to our friends at the Voting Information Project.

In contrast, relatively fewer respondents get information from other sources such as campaigns or friends and family. There may be a chance that some respondents chose these government websites as socially acceptable alternatives to admitting that they rely on other sources for registration information. But if it’s true that voters prefer the county or state website, then election officials have significant influence over how people understand voter registration requirements.

The need for voter education

From this snapshot of our findings, the need for information about key aspects of voter registration is clear. The good news is, state and local election administrators are well positioned to educate voters about these aspects of the voter registration process and to communicate the availability and benefits of OVR. As the data indicates, voters pay attention to information from state and local election officials and would benefit from existing voter outreach and educational services.

However, simply building a website and expecting people to use it is not enough—ongoing voter education is needed to keep voters up to speed with voter registration processes and deadlines. Fortunately, election officials are not alone in this effort. Events like National Voter Registration Day are a wonderful opportunity for election officials, advocates, and community-based groups to engage with voters and potential voters, offer up-to-date information about the registration process, and provide the tools and resources that voters need to complete their registration forms and keep them updated—and well in advance of the next election.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that showcase our findings from the CCES. We look forward to sharing more in the coming months.

This blog was updated February 2018. It was first published in September 2017.

 

Sources

(1) The Cooperative Congressional Election Study is a survey administered by YouGov that includes Common Content and invites participation from up to 50 academic teams The Reed/Democracy Fund pre-election survey was administered to 1000 respondents, and our post-election survey includes answers from 845 respondents. More information about the CCES and its methodology is available at the Harvard Dataverse, found at: https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/data.

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

(2) Though 38 states and DC have authorized online voter registration, 3 states have yet to implement it. See “Online Voter Registration,” from the National Conference of State Legislatures, updated September 11, 2017. Available at: http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/electronic-or-online-voter-registration.aspx.

(3) Data on states with online voter registration as of the 2016 primary elections come from the National Conference of State Legislatures (see source #2).

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Press Release

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

Democracy Fund
/
December 14, 2017

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

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

Washington, D.C. – December 14, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOTER Survey Methodology Summary

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

About the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC)

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

About the Democracy Fund

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

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Blog

Competent Poll Workers Bolstered Voters’ Confidence in 2016

Jack Santucci
/
November 1, 2017

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

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

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

Winner’s and loser’s effects

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

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

Graph: Candidate Success May Influence Voter Confidence

The importance of competent poll workers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy Fund is a foundation working to build an inclusive, multiracial democracy that is open, just, resilient, and trustworthy.

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