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Combining Media, Tech, and Election Ideas to Increase Civic Participation

Jessica Mahone

March 17, 2015

Political participation in the U.S. is often reduced to Americans’ engagement in federal elections. During campaigns, political observers combine available data and anecdotes to speculate on whether a candidate has the ground, financial, and likely-voter support to win the White House or a given congressional seat. After Election Day, many of the same pundits lament low voter participation rates, as in the 2014 midterms when turnout was at its lowest since WWII.

Rarely do these conversations meaningfully consider what voters’ participation in campaigns and at the ballot box says about broader civic engagement — particularly when it comes to the down-ticket elections and ballot issues that aren’t top of mind or at the top of news cycles but actually make up the majority of questions on most ballots.

This, in part, is why the Democracy Fund recently joined with the Knight Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Rita Allen Foundation on a $3 million challenge to identify how we can better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during, and after elections. (Apply by 5 pm eastern on March 19th.)

The voter participation lag for state and local elections, particularly in off-cycle and midterm years, is typically well behind federal elections. In recent years, local turnout has been falling even further behind, plummeting to a low of approximately 18 percent in 2009 with an average turnout rate near 26 percent between 1996-2011. This is far below the already low 35.9 percent of eligible voters who cast ballots for federal candidates in November.

At the same time that we have seen declines in voting in local races, state and local journalism has also suffered. Local newspapers have shut down and the number of reporters devoted to state reporting has declined by 35 percent since 2003. The result is a local news environment trying to do more with less and in need of new tools to inform and engage voters at the local level. In this situation, citizens lack the information they need to make critical decisions about local and state issues.

While many factors may account for any voter’s decision to participate in a particular election, confidence in one’s knowledge and ability to influence our governing institutions and public squares are important factors. Fundamental to this knowledge is the need for innovative tools that make it easier for the public to access and use a huge range of information, from voter registration deadlines to in-depth reporting on urgent issues. The types of information that voters would find useful are myriad, and so are the platforms and projects that reporters, election officials, and academics, among others, could use to creatively deliver that information in ways that energize ongoing participation.

As the News Challenge brief states: “This contest is open to anyone, from journalists, students, civic technologists, and academics, to news organizations, businesses, nonprofits, governments and individuals. In addition to the projects that better inform voters and streamline the voting process, we hope to find some ideas that will increase civic participation beyond Election Day. We see democratic engagement as more than just the act of voting. It should be embedded in every part of civic life, extending before and after an election.”

The Democracy Fund seeks out organizations and partners that are working to ensure our political systems are responsive to the needs of the American public. It’s a complicated and long-term challenge that requires collaborations like this one, through which we hope to see innovative ideas that cross the media, technology and election administration fields in ways that could give voters the tools and information they need to engage on Election Day and beyond.

The Democracy Fund is partnering with the Knight Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Rita Allen Foundation on Knight News Challenge: Elections, which asks the question, How might we better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during and after elections? The best nonpartisan ideas will share in more than $3 million. Apply at newschallenge.org by 5 p.m. ET March 19. Winners will be announced in June.

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Improving Forms for Military and Overseas Voters

Stacey Scholl

March 11, 2015

This post is co-authored by Stacey Van Zuiden and Adam Ambrogi.

For the thousands of American voters who live abroad or who are in the military stationed away from their homes, the process of casting a ballot can be full of challenges. For those without regular Internet or in a region without routine postal service, where do you tell your U.S.-based Election Official to send the ballot? And can you receive it in time to vote? Do you need a witness to sign your form? Or will your signature be enough?

These challenges, plus many more, contributed to approximately 21,000 rejected absentee ballot requests made using the standard federal form in 2012, according to the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), which is the Department of Defense program charged with assisting military and overseas voters. It is unclear exactly why these rejections happen, and FVAP is doing additional research, but if the design of the federal form is a factor, there’s something we can do.

With the goal of helping to alleviate confusion or problems for voters, the Democracy Fund recently submitted comments in response to FVAP’s open comment period on the two federal forms used by this community, the FPCA and FWAB.

The Federal Post Card Application (FPCA) is used to both register to vote and request an absentee ballot, and the Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot (FWAB) is essentially a back-up ballot most often used when a voter did not receive an official ballot in time to return it. The variance in election rules across 55 states and territories means that FVAP has the ongoing challenge of making the forms straight-forward and user-friendly, but specific enough to accommodate state law. FVAP has made major advancements to help voters use the forms by creating highly successful online tools, but the fact remains that not all voters will have access to the Internet, so the paper forms should be as useful as possible.

We believe that our recommendations could have lasting and long-term benefits for all overseas voters. The following are some of the areas of high priority. (Read our full comments here and here.)

First, clarify that military and overseas voters who request a ballot by email or fax must still provide a current absentee address.

In 2009, Congress enacted the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE Act) requiring these voters have the option to receive their blank ballots electronically, potentially cutting ballot transit time in half. On both FVAP forms there are fields labeled: “Where to send my ballot”/“Where to send my election materials.” Voters could easily assume that an email address or fax number is sufficient for this box. However, most election officials require a foreign or absentee address so they can confirm a voter is away from their home jurisdiction, even if the voter is requesting to receive their ballot electronically. Instead, we recommend this box be labeled: “Absentee address/ Where you reside now.”

Second, keep the affirmation tailored to the voter and don’t make voters “swear” to more than they have to.

Each form also has an affirmation section where the voter must attest to meeting certain eligibility requirements. The affirmations are written broadly to cover variations in election laws across the states. However, as the terms try to cast a broad net, the affirmation length grows and may require a voter to swear to a requirement not applicable in their state on penalty of perjury. And the longer the affirmation paragraph becomes, the less likely voters are to read it. We believe there are three key things a voter should need to affirm: 1) the information is true and accurate to the applicant’s knowledge, 2) they are a U.S. citizen and they meet other state eligibility requirements, and 3) they are not registering to vote or voting in any other U.S. jurisdiction. We can solve the qualifications question by “incorporating by reference” the state-specific requirements.

Third, FVAP and states should do more to reduce unnecessary hurdles for these voters by eliminating witness requirements.

There is an area on the forms for a witness to sign underneath the voter’s signature, but there are only a handful of states that require witness signatures. Unbelievably, in Alabama, absentee voters are required to have two witnesses sign the form. In 2012, less than half of the military and overseas ballots submitted by voters from Alabama were counted in the November General Election.

The MOVE Act banned notary requirements, but witness requirements are an archaic holdover from a time when there were less sophisticated ways to validate a voter’s signature. Today, election officials can more easily compare signatures from DMV files. The Democracy Fund recognizes that the witness lines must stay for now because of these remaining state-based requirements, and we challenge FVAP to talk to these states and the public about the burden this places on voters who are often working with early deadlines to send their forms home.

Fourth, simplify the ballot portion of the FWAB. Voting shouldn’t be overly complicated—the cleaner the design, the better the experience.

We believe there are significant design flaws with the ballot portion of the FWAB. The area where a voter writes the office or issue on which they are voting does not clearly correspond to where the voter writes the name of their preferred candidate or ballot choice. While not quite as bad as Florida’s famous “butterfly ballot,” this format has the potential to produce confusion.

It is worth noting that FWABs are more likely to be rejected than regular state absentee ballots, making up 33.1% of rejected military and overseas ballots even though they are only 7.4% of the total ballots submitted. And while there could be a number of reasons for this, such as whether a voter’s state ballot is returned in time, we believe the design of the FWAB could be adding to the total number of rejections. Because this is a basic usability issue, we recommend FVAP consider incorporating arrows or another design element that makes the form clearer. There are ballot design resources available with guidance on how to make election forms much easier to use.

These are four primary recommendations DF made to FVAP as part of the official comment process. We commend FVAP for both running a meaningful open comment period — where actual engagement was requested. They are required to update the form from time to time — we believe they have a real opportunity here to take several clear steps forward. For some, these changes may seem small, and perhaps inconsequential, but if one imagines the improvement overall for tens of thousands of individuals using these materials to register and request an absentee ballot—every way the forms are improved increases the likelihood that they will have their vote count.

When considering the testimony for the MOVE Act, the Senate heard from Air Force Lt. Col. Joseph DeCaro (in his own capacity). He reflected that service members wanted to vote. The challenge, he indicated, was navigating the complexities of the rules and requirements to receive a ballot. It is with that spirit that we continue to support FVAP’s effort to make voting a little bit easier for Mr. DeCaro and others like him.

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Following the Path of History in Alabama

Betsy Wright Hawkings

March 8, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Restaffed EAC Advances Voting Systems in First Meeting

Adam Ambrogi

February 25, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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How Will Technology Reshape the Way We Think about Elections and Campaign Finance?

Joe Goldman

February 19, 2015

Tomorrow, leading technologists from Silicon Valley, political consultants, commissioners from the FEC, and academics will come together at a conference sponsored by the Democracy Fund to discuss how emerging technology will impact campaign communication, mobilization, and fundraising in the future.

“The Campaign of the Future” has been organized by Stanford Professor Nate Persily and Ben Ginsberg, the former National Counsel to the Romney campaign. It will take place on February 20, from 9 AM to 4 PM, at the Bechtel Conference Center at Stanford.

The full conference agenda may be found here and will include discussions about such questions as:

How dominant will TV advertising, and other traditional media, be in the coming campaign and when, if ever, should we expect their relative demise?
How have big data innovations transformed the relevant players (both insiders and outsiders) in political campaigns?
How will technological advances alter the methods of campaign financing?
How do new technologies affect the nature and tone of campaign fundraising appeals?
Do new campaign technologies present different policy challenges than their predecessors?
Does the anonymous nature of internet communication present unique obstacles for disclosure?
How must a policy paradigm developed in the 1970s be altered to account for the nature of a Twenty-First Century campaign?

The conference will be audio streamed at the following link.

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

Joe Goldman

December 31, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Our Growing Team

Joe Goldman

November 10, 2014

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

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

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

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

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“We’re going to fix that.”

Adam Ambrogi

November 4, 2014

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama brought national attention to ongoing problems in election administration and most notably long lines at polling places on Election Day with the quote above. What came next was the creation of the temporary Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA).

A year later, the PCEA released a report that recommended policies addressing some of the bigger problems in election administration. Since the release of the report, members of the PCEA have traveled the country speaking to audiences of election officials, lawmakers, and the public, hoping that its recommendations would catch on and find willing agents for implementing its changes.

In states and localities where election officials took the lead on implementing some of the recommendations, today’s midterm elections will be the first time voters experience new policies. The election community will be watching closely as the effects of three big recommendations—new online voter registration (OVR) systems, interstate exchanges of voter information, and mandated adoption of PCEA’s resource allocation tools for use at the local level—are tested.

The PCEA made it clear that the value of OVR cannot be overstated. At the time of the report, states with OVR experienced a reduction in voter information errors, which led to an increase in the accuracy of voter rolls and reduced wait times for voters. States also experienced a decrease in the number of provisional ballots issued, which can indicate problems with voter rolls. And now, with the addition of Illinois, Delaware, and Georgia, 20 states have OVR. Will these states see the same improvements, what else will they encounter?

Beyond the OVR benefits for voters who traditionally show up to vote, there are broad higher-level questions of how OVR affects voter confidence and turnout overall. Does the experience of registering to vote online translate to showing up to vote on Election Day, voting early, or casting an absentee ballot? Do online registration services such as provided by TurboVote or Rock the Vote employ other mechanisms for informing and engaging voters? These and other questions will be answered over the months and years to come.

The PCEA also recommended states participate in an interstate exchange of voter registration information. The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) allows member states to check voter rolls against lists from other member states, in addition to state DMV records, the National Change of Address list, and the Social Security Administration. ERIC’s data matching program helps state election officials more confidently determine which voters should be removed due to a move out of the state, or death. All voters benefit from accurate rolls, and the goal of ERIC is to ensure that no voters are removed improperly.

ERIC also identifies potentially eligible individuals who have not yet registered to vote. ERIC member states are required to mail registration information to these individuals. The question to be answered: how many will register as a result and show up for this midterm? Pew’s initial responses show great promise for the ERIC system, but the impact and effectiveness will grow as the number of participants grow.

Long lines on Election Day 2013 were a major catalyst for the PCEA, but now there are several practical tools that local election officials can use to give voters a better, faster experience and do so with limited resources. A new toolkit includes a series of calculators that help estimate the appropriate ratios of volunteers, check-in stations, voting booths, and machines so that voters do not experience long waits.

In 2014, the Ohio Secretary of State’s office issued a directive requiring local Boards of Elections to create a plan for election administration. As part of this plan, administrators are strongly encouraged use the Election Toolkit to make resource allocation calculations.

Many in the election community are especially interested in the data and experience this will generate in Ohio because of the potential broad use of the tools. Will the tools effectively account for all of the variables of voter behavior and the environment of all varieties of polling places? Will other variables outside of an administrators control (length of the ballot, voter confusion, etc.) still cause long lines on Election Day? The answers will be here soon enough.

Finally, perhaps the greatest experiment occurring this Election Day in thousands of jurisdictions may answer the question that so many have been afraid to ask: will aging election equipment function properly through yet another election? Some jurisdictions are using Diebold Equipment even though Diebold is well out of the business of manufacturing voting systems. When will the threat of an election technology meltdown prompt a better way of voting?

If there was one warning that the PCEA issued, it is that election equipment purchased in the early 2000s is now nearing the end of its life cycle and yet, jurisdictions are still relying on it to meet high voter demands. It’s unclear how much longer these systems can be maintained by local election offices. It’s clear that there are innovative start-ups and that leading jurisdictions (LA County, CA and Travis County, TX) are working with their voters to imagine next-generation voting equipment. Where will elections look like in 2016? 2020?

In many ways, these questions are not going to be answered today, but will be determined by state & local election officials, advocates, voters and politicians who all share the goal of quality elections. We hope to work in collaboration with those who want to improve the process of making elections something worthy of our country’s history, encourages a process the gives every eligible voter a chance to cast that vote, and have that vote counted correctly.

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2014 for 2016: Supporting Innovations in Voter Information

Tom Glaisyer

October 16, 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we also have (lots of) questions:

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

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