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Democracy Fund Announces 2018 National Advisory Committee

Lauren Strayer

June 7, 2018

We are excited to announce the new cohort of the Democracy Fund National Advisory Committee. This group of leaders from across the political spectrum brings expertise in politics, academia, media, culture, and philanthropy, and are committed to helping us find achievable solutions to our nation’s biggest problems.

Three years ago, shortly after Democracy Fund became an independent foundation, we established our first National Advisory Committee to help us think big, identify gaps in our work, and dig into the tough questions facing our political system. We are deeply grateful to our first cohort for their advice, candid feedback, and partnership. We look forward to elevating the expertise and ideas of our new committee, which includes new and returning voices, in our work to support a healthy democracy.

The Democracy Fund’s 2018 National Advisory Committee includes:

Hon. Robin Carnahan, National Advisory Committee Co-Chair
The Honorable Robin Carnahan leads the State and Local Government Practice at 18F, the team of digital technology consultants housed within the General Services Administration. Carnahan was twice elected Secretary of State of Missouri and served as senior director at the global strategy firm Albright Stonebridge Group.

Brett Loper, National Advisory Committee Co-Chair
Brett Loper is Senior Vice President, Global Government Affairs, for American Express. In that role, he coordinates the Company’s engagement strategy with policy makers in the United States and countries around the globe. Before joining American Express, he held the position of Deputy Chief of Staff to U. S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

Kristen Soltis Anderson, Member
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a researcher, pollster, and political analyst and co-founder of Echelon Insights, an innovative research and analysis data analysis firms. She is a leading expert on the millennial generation and is author of The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up).

Francis Fukuyama, Member
Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and the Mosbacher Director of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He is professor (by courtesy) of political science.

Lanhee Chen, Member
Lanhee J. Chen, Ph.D. is the David and Diane Steffy Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution; Director of Domestic Policy Studies and Lecturer in the Public Policy Program at Stanford University; and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. Chen served as the Policy Director of the Romney-Ryan 2012 presidential campaign.

Cherie Harder, Member
Cherie Harder serves as President of The Trinity Forum. Prior to joining the Trinity Forum in 2008, and previously served in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and Director of Policy and Projects for First Lady Laura Bush.

Lisa Leingang, Member
Lisa Leingang has worked in the media and entertainment business for over 25 years and is currently Senior Vice President of Scripted Programming at First Look Media. With senior executive roles ranging from production to development executive, she has held posts at various media companies including HBO, NBC, CBS and Viacom, discovering, nurturing and developing creative talent from all over the world.

Kierna Mayo, Member
Kierna Mayo is the Senior Vice President of Lifestyle Content + Brands at iOne Digital, Inc. A veteran culture writer/editor and brand architect, Mayo has been recognized by Folio, The Root, and the NAACP among others as a modern media trailblazer.

Hon. Mellissa Mark-Vivierito, Member
Melissa Mark-Viverito is Senior Advisory to the Latino Victory Fund (LVF) and former Speaker of the New York City Council. In her current capacity, Mark-Viverito works with LVF to identify and recruit progressive Latino candidates, expand the Political Action Committee’s fundraising and state infrastructure, and help launch state chapters in Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada. Her work will focus heavily on the 2018 midterm elections.

Raju Narisetti, Member
Raju Narisetti is the new director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economic and Business Journalism and professor of professional practice at the Columbia Journalism School. He was most recently the CEO of Gizmodo Media Group, a portfolio of digital journalism sites that included some of the web’s most beloved and authentic brands, including Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Lifehacker, The Root. A media executive with a track record in creating, rethinking and managing major media organizations in North America, Europe and Asia, Raju was also previously Senior Vice-President of Strategy at News Corp.

Chip Sullivan, Member
Chip Sullivan serves as Executive Vice President, Communications, at NBC Entertainment where he is responsible for strategy, development and execution of public and media relations for the network and Universal Television.

Sonal Shah, Member
Sonal Shah is an economist and entrepreneur. She is the Executive Director of the Beeck Center of Social impact and Innovation at Georgetown University. She led policy innovation at the White House for President Obama and the Treasury Department for President Clinton.

Anthea Watson Strong, Member
Anthea Watson Strong designs and builds technology that supports our shared civic infrastructure as a Project Manager for News at Facebook. She leads a new program that establishes stronger ties between Facebook and the news industry. She previously lead the Civics team at Google and launched products in over 30 countries, reaching hundreds of millions of users.

Charlie Sykes, Member
Charles J. Sykes is a an author/commentator. He is a contributing editor of the Weekly Standard and a contributor to NBC/MSNBC. A former conservative talk show host, Sykes has been published in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, Politico, Newsweek, and other national publications. He is the author of nine books. His most recent book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, was published in 2017; an updated paperback edition will be published in October.

Geneva Overholser, Member
Geneva Overholser, an independent journalist in New York City, is a senior fellow at USC Annenberg’s Center for Communication Leadership and Policy. She was until 2013 director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. She serves on the boards of the Rita Allen Foundation, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, the Women’s Media Center, and the Academy of American Poets.

Rev. Starsky Wilson, Member
The Reverend Starsky D. Wilson is a pastor, philanthropist and activist pursuing God’s vision of community marked by justice, peace, and love. He is pastor of Saint John’s Church (The Beloved Community), president & CEO of Deaconess Foundation and chair of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

Democracy Fund National Advisory Committee members serve for three-year terms and meet twice yearly to advise Democracy Fund on matters of organizational strategy. They play a critical role in helping the Democracy Fund develop effective strategies that ensure the American people come first in our democracy.

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Increasing Trust in Elections: Democracy Fund’s Election Validation Project

Tammy Patrick

May 29, 2018

What motivates voters to participate? The love of a charismatic candidate? The disgust of a less-than desirable one? Passion for a specific ballot initiative? Habit? The answer is as varied as the voting population, as is the reason that voters do not participate. Research shows that while voters’ confidence in their own vote being counted accurately remains relatively constant, their belief that results at the national level are correct is in decline. The threat of interference in our elections by another nation-state has heightened this sentiment.

At Democracy Fund, we believe that our election system can remain both accessible and secure. We invest in organizations working to bolster public confidence in our elections through modern, voter-centric election administration and registration, as well as other projects that are helping to identify and elevate best practices and protocols to improve the American voting experience. With these goals in mind, Democracy Fund is launching the Election Validation Project which aims to increase trust in elections through rigorous audits, standards, and testing.

Jennifer Morrell, a nationally recognized election official with over eight years of experience managing local elections, has joined Democracy Fund as a consultant to lead this project. Jennifer’s work in Colorado was instrumental in the successful implementation of the first statewide risk-limiting audit and she has been an outspoken advocate of implementing election audit standards beyond just post-election audits and has a vision of creating uniform audit and testing standards for all critical components of the voting system.

According to Jennifer, “Many states do a tremendous job testing voting equipment and performing post-election audits, but the scope and method vary. Improving trust in elections requires a uniform set of audit standards that go beyond auditing ballot tabulation equipment.”

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) called for the review of testing and auditing being done by the states in their 2014 report as well as the need to replace aging voting equipment—another reason why testing and auditing is so critical. Jennifer has been a proponent of testing and audit standards as the next iteration of guidelines to boost confidence and trust in our elections—and the election administration profession. In her experience as an election official, PCEA served as the foundation for collaboration amongst the profession and transformed it into a field of public service.

As states purchase new voting equipment and implement improved audit requirements, our hope is that we can provide information and guidelines about risk-limiting audits tailored to election administrators as well as policy makers and the voting public through our work. Jennifer’s work will include:

Creating a collaborative of election officials and subject matter experts to identify best practices for pre- and post- election audits, standards, and testing.
Completing an assessment of the current state of post-election audits and outlining a path towards risk-limiting audits.
Meeting with election officials to illustrate the pros and cons of different types of audits and providing a plain language explanation of what a risk-limiting audit is and how it works.
Most importantly, Jennifer will be working directly with a handful of states that can benefit from observation and informing their auditing and testing policies.

This new project comes at a critical time in election administration, and Jennifer understands what needs to be done to be successful, “This is a complex project that will take some time and some trial and error before it is successful. But starting the discussion is the first step. I am optimistic that election professionals at all levels will be willing to collaborate and lend their ideas and expertise to this endeavor. The table for this discussion needs to be large. We need researchers, we need technologists, we need policy experts and statisticians, but most importantly we need election officials who understand the complexity of running a successful election.”

Democracy Fund is thrilled to engage with Jennifer on this project and to be able to offer additional tools and guidance for election officials to use. We are confident that the collaboration will serve to inform the field and make certain that our elections continue to demonstrate the validity and integrity of the Great American Experiment.

If you are interested in working with Jennifer, she is available to work with states and present at association meetings on these topics. For more information, reach out to jmorrell@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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Strengthening Democracy by Supporting a Just and Inclusive Society

April 16, 2018

At Democracy Fund, we believe in the dignity of every individual and in the equal protection of their rights under the law. All people have intrinsic value and dignity, and bigotry in any form undermines our democracy. When these values are threatened, we will stand up to protect and preserve fundamental individual rights as enshrouded in the United States Constitution.

Though bigotry and prejudice are not new phenomena, the 2016 presidential campaign marked a turning point in the tone and tenor of modern political conversation — including a sharp increase in charged rhetoric across cultural, ideological, and partisan divides. Subsequently, findings from Democracy Fund’s Voter Survey Group, have revealed that existing political divides were super-charged by a seemingly renewed cultural anxiety related to Americanism, race, immigration, and Islam/Muslims.

Like many who care about the health of our political system, we at Democracy Fund have been increasingly alarmed by what has followed the election — from the implementation of policies targeting immigrant and minority communities to the rise in hate-crimes against communities of color and Muslim, Arab, and South Asian (MASA) communities.

In response to these disconcerting developments, Democracy Fund has followed the lead of extraordinary Americans throughout the country who are working to ensure the resilience and safety of targeted communities by launching our Special Project on Fostering a Just and Inclusive Society. Through this initiative, we aim to help protect those whose civil rights and safety are endangered in this volatile political landscape—particularly Muslim, Arab, and South Asian (MASA) and immigrant communities. This project centers around a few main objectives:

Funding honest and positive communications efforts that support MASA and immigrant communities and promote civil discourse.
Creating bipartisan community networks to help and defend MASA communities in the face of threats.
Challenging infringements on civil rights through litigation, legal services, and legal education.

Since we began supporting these projects in June of 2017, our grantees have made significant progress building relationships across the field and providing legal support. For example:

The Security and Rights Collaborative (SRC) played a central role, with the National Immigration Law Center, Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus, and over 100 other MASA and allied field organizations, in organizing the national #NoMuslimBanEver campaign.
The Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) filed four amicus briefs, in support of a challenge to DACA’s termination and in support of challenges to anti-sanctuary city policies. Following the events in Charlottesville, ICAP filed a lawsuit to prevent the return of unlawful private paramilitaries.
Vets for American Ideals’ #WhatIFoughtFor campaign has reached over four million people. The portrait campaign portrays refugees alongside service members to emphasize that embracing diversity is a core American value.

There is a tension inherent in this work. Every day we see headlines that remind us of the profound urgency of supporting organizations working on the front lines of our communities and our courts ensure the safety of targeted communities and to defend the dignity our democracy demands. And yet, we recognize that the work of building resilience and combating hatred is long haul work and that the daily struggles of our grantees are steps in a long road toward a more perfect union. We are grateful for their work and pleased to be able to support it.

Grantees under the Just Inclusive Societies Project include the following:

Asian Americans Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus
Business Forward Foundation
Civic Nation
Faith in Public Life
Georgetown University: Institute for Constitutional Accountability & Protection
Hopewell Fund: Over Zero
Human Rights — Vets for American Ideals
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law
Movement Law Lab
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
National Immigration Law Center
Proteus Fund — Security and Rights Collaborative
ReThink media
The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding
USCRI — Freedom to Believe

Cover Photo: Protestors assemble to push for racial justice. Photo by Forrest Walker.

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Defending Democracy and the Rule of Law through Accountability and Oversight

Lara Flint

April 2, 2018

Checks and balances. Separation of powers. Rule of law. Accountability.

These are terms that are thrown around a lot in D.C. But what does upholding these fundamental tenets of our system of government look like in practice? Last year, Democracy Fund embarked on an effort to tackle this difficult question, investing $6 million over the course of two years.

Through our special project on Government Accountability, Transparency, and Oversight we aim to defend and strengthen the democratic norms that underpin our system of government. Our democracy is strongest when each branch of government serves as a check on the other to ensure there is a balance of power that allows no single branch to dominate the others.

Governmental watchdogs and other institutions of civic life play a critical role in monitoring our government and holding it accountable to the Constitution, the law, and the people. They are engaged in education, advocacy, litigation, research, and other actions that reveal abuses and improve Congress’ ability to conduct oversight. Ultimately their work should lead to increased public demand for action, and more effective checks and balances across the three branches of government.

This special project is an expansion of the critical work we are already doing to improve our institutions. The Governance Program at Democracy Fund has worked for years to strengthen Congress’ capacity to conduct constructive oversight of the executive branch—the type of oversight that helps government better serve the American people. But the current political environment poses new threats to the rule of law and to the system of checks and balances. The question is: Can we protect the rule of law through a constructive approach that brings people together to support the foundation of our system of government? In this partisan moment, can we find bipartisan approaches to protecting democratic norms and holding the government accountable to the American people?

We believe the answer to these questions is “yes.”

We must do all we can to ensure that the structural safeguards of checks and balances established by our Constitution—and the mechanisms that influence and support those safeguards—will work as intended. This holds true regardless of the party that controls the White House, or the two chambers of Congress.

With that in mind, Democracy Fund is investing in a few different areas through this special project. We are working to strengthen the capacity of Congress to engage in effective oversight through watchdogs like the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). Executive branch oversight is a core function of Congress, but congressional capacity to conduct effective oversight has suffered from the same institutional weaknesses—hyper-partisanship, lack of capacity—that have imperiled Congress’ ability to legislate effectively. POGO, along with the Levin Center and the Lugar Center, train congressional staff on both sides of the aisle about how to do effective, bipartisan oversight. That could include working with federal whistleblowers, who are a critical source of information about government wrongdoing. Federal employees who witness waste, fraud, abuse, or who are ordered to engage in actions they believe to be unlawful—and refuse to go along—are a key backstop to ensure accountability. They deserve strong legal protections and representation, which is why we have invested in organizations like the Government Accountability Project (GAP).

Other key elements of accountable government are transparency, and strong ethics rules. We are working to enhance the transparency of government actions and decision-making through our investments in groups like Open the Government and the National Security Archive, and to provide independent fact-checking of government statements on complicated issues through groups like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. We are likewise supporting organizations like Issue One, who identify and enforce ethics violations, conflicts of interest, and other forms of corruption to ensure government decisions are made for the benefit of the American people—not to enrich a few.

The current climate has shown that we cannot take for granted the rule of law. To strengthen our constitutional system of checks and balances, we are supporting organizations who are working to strengthen our democratic system and prepare for and respond to potential crises, such as the R Street Institute and the Protect Democracy Project.

The fundamental goal of our special project is to ensure that checks and balances, separation of powers, rule of law, and accountability aren’t just Washington buzzwords, but rather, that they remain the principles that form the foundation of our democracy. And if nothing else, we should all be able to agree on that.

Grantees under the Special Project on Government Accountability, Transparency, and Oversight Include the Following:

Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System — Project DATA
Brookings Institution — Lawfare
Center for Responsive Politics
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
German Marshal Fund — Alliance for Securing Democracy
Government Accountability Project
Issue One
National Security Archive Fund
Open the Government
Partnership for Public Service
Protect Democracy Project
R Street Institute
The Constitution Project at POGO
The Lugar Center
The Project on Government Oversight
Wayne State University — Levin Center
William J. Brennan Center for Justice

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Local People Will Create the Future of Local News

Teresa Gorman

February 7, 2018

Josh Stearns co-authored this piece with Teresa Gorman.

Local news is critical to a healthy democracy, and we believe that the future of local news is local. This simple idea has shaped the way Democracy Fund has thought about its work to support and strengthen the public square in America.

Today we are announcing two new locally-based and locally-driven funds — totaling more than $2 million — that will invest in ideas, people and organizations that are working to ensure people have access to the news and information they need in these communities. The funds will focus on building more vibrant news ecosystems as vital parts of just communities and a healthy democracy.

These funds are not focused on maintaining the status quo in local news, but on pushing forward changes that improve how journalism serves the public and makes news and information more resilient over the long term. Through these funds, we will work closely with local partners to increase giving to local news and invest in long-term solutions — over short-term fixes — especially in the areas of business models, collaboration and community engagement.

In New Jersey, we will build on our previous work in partnership with the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Knight Foundation by establishing the New Jersey Local News Lab Fund with $1.3 million over two years. New Jersey has become a bold laboratory for new models of collaboration, revenue experiments, and community engagement (read more about previous work in New Jersey in this report). This new fund will continue that momentum and help broaden the work there beyond newsrooms to other civic information networks and institutions.

The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund is the start of a new multi-year commitment to the state. We are kicking off the fund with $700,000 for the first 18 months. The work we’ve done in New Jersey to strengthen their news ecosystem will inform our work, but we recognize that this new fund must be built to respond to the unique local context of North Carolina. To that end, we commissioned local journalist and community organizer Fiona Morgan to undertake a year-long research project on the strengths and challenges of local news and information in North Carolina.

The two funds, housed at the Community Foundation of New Jersey and North Carolina Community Foundation, will be managed by advisory groups made up of local stakeholders and Democracy Fund. As a national funder we recognize that we are guests in these communities and have set these funds up to ensure funding decisions are rooted in local knowledge and experience. We take seriously the advice from longtime philanthropy leader Pru Brown who wrote in a paper prepared for Democracy Fund, “ultimately, perhaps the most useful lens for place-based philanthropy is asking at every stage whether the decisions the national foundation is making and the way it is operating promote or undermine local ownership.”

A key goal of these funds is to catalyze new momentum locally around supporting local public-interest news that serves all communities. As such, both funds are built as open platforms for partnership with other funders and donors. We are working closely with local and regional foundations in each state to expand the size of the funds, leveraging even more dollars to support local news and information efforts. That work is ongoing, and we look forward to sharing more about the amazing partners we are working with in the coming weeks and months.

This work is just a piece of Democracy Fund’s broader work on local news, which includes the national NewsMatch campaign, revenue research, and shared services like Membership Puzzle Project and News Revenue Hub. Additionally, Democracy Fund supports bridge builders and network connectors in local regions who are on the frontlines of weaving together stronger news ecosystems through collaboration and capacity building.

We are thrilled and humbled by this work and by the people who are working with us. Democracy Fund is committed to working in deep partnership with local communities, to learning, and to operating transparently and openly. If you are interested in working with us reach out at LocalNewsLab@democracyfund.org and sign up for our weekly newsletter The Local Fix.

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Celebrating Civility in 2017

Betsy Wright Hawkings

December 19, 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo from the Congressional Accountability Hearing

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

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

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Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?

Tom Glaisyer

October 4, 2017

Today The Omidyar Group released a paper co-authored by me and two colleagues at Omidyar Network on the role of social media platforms on democracy and the public square. This paper – called “Is Social Media a Threat to Democracy?” – comes at a moment when there is new scrutiny on the role Facebook, Google, and Twitter played in spreading misinformation and divisive propaganda during the 2016 election. Those debates loom large, however, our analysis goes well beyond any one election to try and understand how social platforms are disrupting core elements of a democratic society.

In June 2017 Facebook raised the question “Is social media good for democracy?” Like them, we have been wrestling with these questions for some time, and while we do not take for granted how these networks provide value to civic life, we are also deeply troubled by the dangers they pose. Their algorithms and their vast storehouses of data gives them fundamentally new capacities abilities to shape discourse, media, and civic and democratic life in American.

As my co-authors – Stacy Donohue and Anamitra Deb – and I reviewed the research of leading voices on this set of issues, we identified six key ways social media is threatening democracy:

Exacerbating the polarization of civil society via echo chambers and filter bubbles
Rapidly spreading mis- and dis-information and amplifying the populist and illiberal wave across the globe
Creating competing realities driven by their algorithms’ intertwining of popularity and legitimacy
Being vulnerable to political capture and voter manipulation through enabling malevolent actors to spread dis-information and covertly influence public opinion
Capturing unprecedented amounts of data that can be used to manipulate user behavior
Facilitating hate speech, public humiliation, and the targeted marginalization of disadvantaged or minority voices

There are no easy answers to the challenges represented above, and any group of potential solutions must account for the diverse interests of multiple stakeholders if we are going to have the public square we deserve. As our founder, ebay creator Pierre Omidyar, wrote today in The Washington Post, “Just as new regulations and policies had to be established for the evolving online commerce sector, social media companies must now help navigate the serious threats posed by their platforms and help lead the development and enforcement of clear industry safeguards. Change won’t happen overnight, and these issues will require ongoing examination, collaboration and vigilance to effectively turn the tide.”

For our part, at Democracy Fund, the potential effects of social media on democracy are closely tied to many lines of our work. This includes longstanding investments on issues ranging from combating hyperpartisanship with constructive dialogue to developing digital election administration tools, and from understanding the impact of fact checking to supporting communities often targeted online. A few examples of this work include:

Politifact, one of the nation’s leading fact checking organizations, has partnered with Facebook to combat the spread of misinformation on the platform.
The Center for Media Engagement, formerly the Engaging News Project, works with newsrooms, social platforms and the public to develop and test ways to make trusted online information more engaging and impactful.
The Coral Project builds open-source tools focused on helping newsrooms build safe, secure and vibrant online communities.

In addition, we supported the Knight Prototype Fund on misinformation earlier this year, which focused on many of these issues. The full list of 20 projects can be found here, but the four projects we funded are:

Viz Lab — Developing a dashboard to track how misinformation spreads through images and memes to aid journalists and researchers in understanding the origins of the image, its promoters, and where it might have been altered and then redistributed across social media.
Hoaxy Bot-o-Meter is a tool created by computer scientists at the Center for Complex Networks to uncover attempts to use Internet bots to boost the spread of misinformation and shape public opinion. The tool aims to reveal how this information is generated and broadcasted, how it becomes viral, its overall reach, and how it competes with accurate information for placement on user feeds.
The Documenters Project by City Bureau creates a network of citizen “documenters” who receive training in the use of journalistic ethics and tools, attend public civic events, and produce trustworthy reports on social media platforms.
The American Library Association is collaborating with the Center for News Literacy to develop an adult media literacy program in five public libraries, focused on how to be a savvy digital citizen in a platform world.

We are going to continue to ask hard questions and support people and organizations who are working to create a robust public square that serves our democracy. We look forward to continuing this work alongside these and other partners. Please email the authors at inquiries@omidyargroup.com if you’d like to discuss how we might work together.

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Inaugural Election Sciences Conference Kicks Off in Portland, Oregon

Natalie Adona

August 9, 2017

The first conference on Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration* (ESRA) took place July 27-28, 2017 in the lovely and laid-back City of Portland, Oregon. Before I describe the conference, I’d like to take a moment to explain this “election science” thing I’m referring to, and why this conference is timely and important.

Defining election science

Election science is, in essence, the study of election administration and related matters. Studying election administration is important because it’s where the rubber meets the road; where election laws and regulations, organizational decision making, administrative efficiency, technology, voting rights, politics, and academic theories are put to the test on Election Day (or for many states, the voting period). Specifically, election scientists seek to better understand the following elements that election officials grapple with:

The policies and processes affecting the cost of elections;
The balance between efficiency, access, security, and voting rights;
The impact of technology on election conduct; and
The relationship between laws, rules, administration, and voter behavior.

Scholars who take part in this emerging discipline frequently partner with and provide support to election officials, as well as help policy experts, advocates, and other stakeholders better understand the way elections are run and the impact of policy changes on the electorate. Can administrative practices improve voter confidence? Who was added to the Oregon registration rolls when the state implemented automatic voter registration? How can local election officials reallocate resources to mitigate long lines at polling places? – This is a sample of the types of questions election scientists seek to answer and share with others.

Studying election administration and the importance of establishing networks

In the meetings that the Democracy Fund co-organized prior to this event, I gained a better understanding of the incentive structures in academia that motivate political scientists and inform their research agendas. I was surprised to find out that the number of academics studying election administration is small, and too few to successfully create an organized section. To make a long story short, this results in election scientists presenting their work at conference panels that don’t always fit neatly into established organized sections, and in front of an audience of peers that are not always able to provide nuanced feedback on the subject matter.

Providing election officials and academics the space to get to know each other on their own is key to enriching our shared understanding of election administration. In my work with the Elections team, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from several election officials from all parts of the country and the people who support improvements in elections. I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from them, celebrate their successes, and listen and think carefully about their shared pain points. Because election scientists present primarily at academic conferences, it leaves little opportunity for election officials, who don’t often have the time or resources to attend, to inform research agendas and add richness and nuance to the existing body of research. And while those of us in philanthropy and in the advocacy space can serve as bridges, our networks remain fairly small. When connected with this academic community, election officials benefit from the analytical rigor and perspective on administrative processes that election scientists provide — a provision that helps administrators learn and take steps to improve their processes.

The ESRA conference

The purpose of the ESRA conference is to feature academic work in election science, not only for the benefit of scholars, but also to familiarize election officials with the work these scholars present. The conference organizers successfully brought together a mix of primarily election scientists and election officials, and also advocates, civic tech experts, and small (but mighty) group of bright young students interested in establishing their careers in academia. Because the ESRA conference was located in the West, studies about vote-by-mail, vote centers, and automatic voter registration were prominently featured – a timely regional theme that I hope will be replicated next year when the ESRA conference is held in the Midwest.

The ESRA conference included a healthy mix of panels and breakout sessions, all of which kept this group of about 50 people engaged and inspired. The sessions over the two days covered:

Administering Elections and Evaluating Capacity
Voter Registration Records and Data Administration
Assessing the Effectiveness of Voter Registration List Maintenance
Turnout in Mayoral Elections (the “Who Votes for Mayor” study)
Voter Identification Laws and Elections
New Approaches to Voter Registration and Turnout
Evaluating Elections Under Pressure (i.e., contingency planning and recounts)
Election Administration Professionalization
Modernizing Voter Registration (breakout session and plenary)
Intersection of Election Administration, Nonprofits, and Advocates
Alternative Polling Places of the Future (breakout session and plenary)

This inaugural conference was an enormous undertaking and was artfully planned and executed by Paul Gronke (who’s also a trusted consultant for the Democracy Fund’s Elections team) and Phil Keisling (who I hear knows a thing or two about elections) – a huge congrats to them and their team for successfully pulling off this important event. Also, it’d be remiss of me if I forgot to give a shout out to Paul Manson, Charles Stewart, Bernard Fraga, and Lonna Rae Atkeson, all of whom played a vital role in making the conference a success. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to attend, meet some smart and awesome election geeks who continue to teach me new things, represent Democracy Fund as dinner host, and speak at one of the panels. I’m encouraged by the enthusiasm and passion everyone has invested so far, and seriously hope that the heart of this scholarly effort continues to beat for years to come as new and useful research emerges.

*The ESRA conference was made possible with support from the National Science Foundation, the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, the Early Voting Information Center, the Center for Public Service at Portland State University, and the Democracy Fund.

** Photo credit goes to Cameron Wimpy, Research Director for the MIT Election and Data Science Lab.

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Mapping the Legislative Ecosystem

Chris Nehls

July 5, 2017

Few things about Congress are simple: even different types of information it generates as a legislative body – from bill language and roll call votes, to members’ press releases and statements into the official record – are processed and maintained by a myriad of offices. Over the last half-dozen years, public servants of those offices and citizens invested in open access and easy use of the data Congress produces have gathered annually at the Legislative Data Transparency Conference, hosted by the Committee on House Administration. Originally held as an opportunity for the various stewards of legislative data to discuss collective challenges, in recent years the conference also has become a moment to herald the unappreciated success of the legislative data community in standardizing and releasing datasets that help the American people understand congressional efforts and hold elected representatives accountable.

On June 27, I joined OpenGov Foundation Executive Director Seamus Kraft and Demand Progress Policy Director Daniel Schuman on stage at this year’s conference. Our panel discussed how the legislative data community can use Democracy Fund’s Congress & Public Trust systems map to contextualize its efforts in the broader congressional reform movement.

WATCH: Mapping Congress to Power Meaningful Reform & Innovation

Successes like publishing bill text in machine-readable formats or creating common xml schema are not going to end up on the nightly news. But a proper legislative data infrastructure makes it possible for bill histories and vote records to become evident with a few clicks of a mouse or for instant visualization of how a bill would change existing law. These types of innovations make it easier for members of Congress and their staff and to do their jobs and keep congressional conduct transparent for the electorate. In the broader transformation it encourages, in other words, legislative data reform efforts help strengthen congressional capacity and support a more informed citizenry.

It’s important from a systems perspective to remember that even work on small-scale projects can create ripples of change in a complex environment like Congress. As Schuman reminded the audience, every new dataset that comes online opens possibilities for techies to build new tools that help fill knowledge gaps people within the system can use to solve common challenges.

The panel suggested ways that individual organizations can utilize the systems map to think strategically about their contributions to institutional change. For example, Kraft said that the OpenGov Foundation drilled down on the map in the context of their product design, discovering in the process that constituent engagement was a vitally underserved focus area they could impact with a new project to transform congressional offices’ processing of voicemail and constituent calls.

The systems map also helps remind narrowly-focused communities like the one we addressed Tuesday that their collective efforts also impact the work of similar communities focused on different types of challenges. Washington is full of such groups, whether they focus on government ethics and transparency, the rules and procedures of Congress, of the ways in which advocacy groups make their case to lawmakers. Actions by one community change the dynamics of the system in significant ways for others. The challenge for those across such communities who care about a healthy congressional system is working in concert with one another to amplify efforts.

For our part, our team recently revised our systems map to represent our new thinking on congressional oversight of the Executive Branch. These changes better reflect the importance of government watchdog organizations, transparency and government oversight groups, whistleblowers, the media, and others in holding Congress accountable to its Constitutional responsibility to oversee the conduct of federal offices and the White House.

To learn more about our systems map project, please visit democracyfund.org/congressmap or email us at congressmap@democracyfund.org to sign up for email updates.