Report Archives

Report

Understanding The Voter Experience: The Public’s View Of Election Administration And Reform

Natalie Adona and Paul Gronke

October 16, 2018

This report provides insights into the state of public opinion about election administration and reform. The findings are primarily drawn from the 2008–2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a survey conducted each federal election year since 2006. i We hope that the findings contained in this report, and suggestions for future research, will help election officials, lawmakers, advocates, and others understand attitudes of the American people toward one of their most-cherished rights.

The takeaways in this report include:

Deciding to Vote

A significant number of nonvoters choose not to participate because they do not like the candidates, and some may be generally unenthusiastic about participating.
Lack of information may keep people from voting in certain contests, especially down-ballot races.

Navigating Voter Registration

Many people know that they are responsible for registering and updating registration. Most know where to register and that a move requires them to update their information. Most people are likely to rely on internet searches for registration information.
Many people could benefit from ongoing education about how the voter registration process works in their states, especially states that have recently implemented modernization reforms.
The majority of people support online voter registration but might not know whether it is available in their state. Some continue to prefer to use the paper registration form. The public does not currently express strong support or opposition to automatic voter registration.

The Voter Experience

There is not one most-preferred method of voting. Many like the convenience of early in-person and absentee or vote-by-mail voting. Absentee or vote-by-mail voters are more likely than early in-person voters to say that they distrust certain aspects of the voting process. Not surprisingly, voters provide compelling reasons to continue to vote in the way they have done before.
People express a higher tolerance for waiting in line when they are told that the wait is 15 minutes. Tolerance decreases as the anticipated wait time increases. i More about the CCES is offered in the Survey Methodology section of this report and on the project’s website at: https://cces.gov.harvard.edu.
Significant numbers of people are confused or unfamiliar with their state voter identification requirements. Many appear to learn about these requirements during election cycles, suggesting the need for ongoing education.
Overwhelming majorities of people provide good or excellent job performance ratings for their poll workers. Most people like that poll workers are polite and knowledgeable and demonstrate other signs of excellent customer service.

Trust and Confidence Measures

Election administrators enjoy higher levels of public trust when compared to officials in other public institutions. State and local election officials should continue to enjoy high public approval if they are viewed as nonpartisan experts.
Levels of voter confidence are influenced by the voter’s polling place experience, partisanship, and support for the winner (sometimes referred to as the “winner’s effect”). Most are confident that their own votes and votes across the country are counted as intended, though there is a noticeable gap between individual and national level confidence. There was a dramatic up-tick in voter confidence levels among Republicans and Trump supporters in 2016.
Perceptions of voter fraud, electoral integrity, and electoral fairness are deeply intertwined and powerful indicators of a healthy democracy. Most people believe that our elections are run with integrity and that outcomes are fair, but perceptions about the prevalence of voter fraud raise concerns.

We hope that readers find this informative report as interesting as we do. Thank you for reading!

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Supporting Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion In Journalism

Katie Donnelly And Jessica Clark

June 19, 2018

Efforts in journalism to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) over the past decade have been ineffective in creating dynamic change in the stories, sources, and staff of news outlets in the United States.

Clearly, the dramatic financial downturn in newspaper advertising revenue has placed strain on all legacy journalism organizations. However, those dynamics alone do not explain the persistent gap in employment opportunities between minorities and their white counterparts seeking jobs in journalism following college graduation. Or excuse the historic leadership failure of large and profitable outlets to fulfill their promise to diversify their ranks, which has an outsized impact on communities of color given the dearth of opportunity at smaller newsrooms.

The purpose of this report is to begin to understand philanthropic interventions supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism from 2009 – 2015. As a foundation new to DEI funding in journalism, which has not made any grants in this area during the period under consideration, we plan to use this report to identify major funders and recipients of institutional grants.

This report represents our first attempt to get at this information using data from Foundation Maps for Media Funding, created by the Foundation Center for Media Impact Funders. We are aware of the many limits of this data set due to self-reporting and challenges in categorization. Even with those challenges we are proud of the work that Katie Donnelly and Jessica Clark at Dot Connector Studio have done so far to illuminate larger trends and we plan to use this report as a launchpad into further analysis of the organizations supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in journalism.

We are already getting started. We are partnering with funders including the Knight Foundation and Open Society Foundations to support data training from the Ida B. Wells Society; News Integrity Initiative and Gates Foundation in leadership training from the Maynard Institute; Ford Foundation to support the National Association of Black Journalists; Google News Initiative with the revamp of the ASNE Diversity survey led by Dr. Meredith Clark; Nathan Cummings in support of DEI initiatives at CUNY; MacArthur and McCormick Foundations with new approaches in Chicago like City Bureau and the Obsidian Collection; and Heising-Simons Foundation in paid internship with the Emma Bowen Foundation.

At Democracy Fund, our approach to journalism is focused on building trust and engagement. We break our Engaged Journalism Strategy into three tracks focused on (I) Audience-Driven Storytelling, (II) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and (III) promoting Transparency.

Through our Audience-Driven Storytelling work we invest in innovations and projects that support journalists in reorienting their work towards a focus on the concerns of their audience. This involves building inclusion into newsroom practices, supporting universities as teaching hospitals for innovation, creating communities of practice around engagement, and developing new practices, people, and products hard-wired for engagement.

Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work focuses on improving the diversity of sources, stories, and staff in news outlets. This work involves creating an inclusive environment at news outlets; recruiting, retaining, and promoting diverse staff, including leadership; and working to develop and sustain minority ownership of media properties.

In our Transparency work, we seek to help news outlets and the public better understand one another. We are committed to supporting innovations in engaged journalism through grantmaking, partnerships, and collaboration to strengthen the Fourth Estate and the democratic principles on which our nation is founded. This report is part of that commitment. We will continue to seek opportunities to collaborate with news outlets, journalism support organizations, and partner funders to achieve this goal.

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Effective Place-Based Philanthropy

Prudence Brown

October 17, 2017

Democracy Fund believes that strong local news and a vibrant public square are critical to a healthy democracy. Today, local news is struggling in communities across America. Newsrooms, facing dwindling advertising revenue and diminishing trust, have been forced to shrink, or in many places, disappear altogether. While there are bold experiments to rebuild newsroom capacity in some regions, these experiments are unevenly distributed and precarious. The Democracy Fund local news strategy is focused on creating a more connected, collaborative, and sustainable future for public-interest journalism.

Because local news must be responsive to and reflective of the local communities it serves, we have designed our local news strategy around deep partnerships with local funders, journalists, and communities. We want Democracy Fund to be a catalyst for expanding local efforts to create robust news ecosystems. We recognize that in pursuing place-based philanthropy to strengthen local news, we are guests in other’s communities. We can’t do this work alone.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles and practices of national foundations undertaking place-based work. Democracy Fund commissioned Prudence Brown, a respected leader in place-based philanthropy, to provide her insights as we design a new program to support and strengthen local journalism and civic engagement.

Drawing significantly from recent literature and Brown’s own experience and observations, this paper is organized around key questions that national funders can consider as they develop new place-based partnerships. After each question, Brown provides a brief discussion and concrete suggestions for decision-making and action.

Many of the themes and considerations in this paper are applicable to funders in other sectors. As such, we are sharing this work with the broader field. We think this is important both for the sake of transparency and accountability, and because we hope others can learn alongside us. This paper is just the start of our learning journey. We welcome any comments about lessons learned from other national-local partnerships.

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State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Institutional Capacity in the House and Senate

Kathy Goldschmidt

August 8, 2017

“State of the Congress: Staff Perspectives on Institutional Capacity in the House and Senate” reveals that senior congressional staff have deep concerns about important aspects of congressional operations and performance.

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Communities Of Practice

Angelica Das Edited By Jessica Clark

April 26, 2017

At a time when news and journalism are experiencing significant disruption, Democracy Fund is seeking to better understand and equip news outlets and reporters for public engagement. Individual newsrooms are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale transformations in platforms, news economics, and audience habits. Culture shifts are difficult to achieve and often happen from the bottom up or the outside in. We recognize that new solutions are needed across organizations that can be compared, replicated, scaled, and evaluated.

Communities of Practice (CoPs) provide a structure in which this activity can happen adjacent to or outside of legacy settings. This paper examines the theory and evolution of CoPs and explores in greater detail the nascent CoPs developing around engaged journalism. The appendix provides a checklist for building and grouping CoPs.

Democracy Fund is committed to supporting a vibrant media and the public square. By examining how CoPs have developed in the field of engaged journalism to date, we can better understand how a community of practice provides useful structures for learning, growth, and innovation. We can also learn how the ideas can be applied to other communities in journalism, including leaders at local news hubs, media business innovators, and other cohorts where new practices are emerging.

We welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more from you about how communities of practice are being adopted in your newsrooms and communities.

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Pathways To Engagement

Angelica Das, Edited By Jessica Clark

April 25, 2017

Journalists are working with their communities in a range of new ways that are reshaping how newsrooms report, publish, and pay the bills. This emerging trend has roots in past journalism industry movements but has taken on unique contours in the digital age. As Democracy Fund seeks to support new tools and practices that can expand community engagement in journalism, we wanted to understand the landscape of the field in more detail. We commissioned this paper to help us create a taxonomy of engagement practices.

In this paper, we have documented a broad spectrum of efforts that help position communities at the center of journalism. Different approaches are outlined, along with useful examples from the field. We don’t seek to prioritize or rank these different models, but rather understand that each meets different newsroom goals and community needs. Together, we refer to the full spectrum of ideas presented here as “Engaged Journalism.”

Engagement is an emergent practice in journalism although it has been explored and debated for years in other fields, which have invested greatly in documenting, training, and supporting innovation and best practices. But as newsrooms grapple with these ideas anew, it is to be expected that the language they use will be a bit of a contested terrain. It is in language where we hash out the core ideas that shape how we operate in the world.

We undertook this study of engagement to clarify our own thinking, not to enforce a uniformity on others. We hope our taxonomy will be of use to the field, but we also see the value in continuing to push and pull on the meanings behind the words we use. We also welcome your feedback on these ideas and look forward to hearing more stories about how engagement is understood in your newsroom and community.

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Report

Progress Report on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration

Democracy Fund

September 1, 2016

The United States’ electoral system has always been imperfect — a work in progress. And yet the health of our democracy depends on the quality of our elections. All over the country, we entrust local officials to run elections as smoothly as possible. In fact, we depend on these officials to oversee more than 8,000 election jurisdictions nationwide — verifying the eligibility of voters, designing the ballots, and counting the votes.

The decentralized administration of elections means there are always new challenges to be addressed and new opportunities for improvement. It is for this reason that the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) was established by an Executive Order on March 28, 2013, with the goal of confronting problems and institutionalizing processes that allow for improvement.

After an extensive six-month inquiry, the bipartisan PCEA, comprised of experts and practitioners, issued The American Voting Experience report, which stated: “the problems hindering efficient administration of elections are both identifiable and solvable.” In the report, members of the PCEA unanimously agreed on a set of best practices and recommendations they hoped would focus institutional energy on a select number of important policy changes, while spawning experimentation among the thousands of local officials who shared similar concerns.

This update highlights the progress made in several areas, since the reports release, notably in the areas of voter registration, access to voting, polling place management, and voting technology.