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Covering Elections and Voting in 2024: A Media Guide
Get PDF"Covering Elections and Voting in 2024" by Pam Fessler, a communications advisor for The Elections Group and former National Public Radio correspondent, serves as a comprehensive resource for journalists covering the intricacies of elections and voting processes in the United States. The guide emphasizes the pivotal role of accurate, informed journalism in sustaining democracy and public trust in the elections process. It outlines the variability in election laws and practices across states and localities, underlining the complexity of the U.S. voting system and the challenges reporters face in navigating misinformation, legal changes, and the logistical aspects of election coverage.The guide offers practical tips for engaging with election officials, understanding the rules of voting, and exploring the human elements of elections. Additionally, the guide provides a directory of resources – including government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions and media outlets – offering tools, data and expert insights to support reporters.With contributions from experienced journalists and election experts, the guide offers story ideas, from the maintenance of voter rolls and the processing of mail ballots to the safety of election workers. It calls for a balanced approach to covering both the challenges and positive aspects of voting
Contextualizing Turnover Among County-Elected Local Election Officials from 2019-2023
Get PDFThis report will serve as the first part of a series researching LEO turnover and retention. The goal of this first report is to more comprehensively understand the extent of LEO turnover across the U.S. through snapshots of county-elected LEOs from 2019-2023 and to contextualize why LEO turnover might be happening. Ultimately, the desired outcome of this series is to provide insights about LEO turnover that are useful in advocating for much-needed resources for local election officials
Restoring Confidence in American Elections
Get PDFIdeally, voting rules and processes in mature democracies should be stable over time and instill high public confidence in the outcomes of elections. That is not the case in the United States currently. The electoral features embedded in the federal Constitution have stability, but they are under unprecedented stress in the highly polarized United States of today. State and local rules concerning the time, place, and manner of elections are constantly in flux and often gamed for partisan advantage. Election controversies and rhetorical challenges to the reliability of US elections have become more frequent, visible, and intense in recent years.Since the 2000 election, proposed bills about election administration reforms have strongly diverged along partisan lines, with Republicans prioritizing "election integrity" with additional protections to guard against voter fraud and Democrats seeking to expand voter participation by making it easier to vote. The core division over election reform is often now characterized as "fraud versus suppression," and the partisan gap on this issue is wider today than in the past. Public faith in the accuracy of US elections is currently at an historic low, with more than 30 percent of the population doubting the accuracy of elections. If unaddressed, this could severely undermine the US political system and its form of government, which is rooted in the peaceful transfer of power.The question we address here is whether there is some common ground across party lines on these election administration concerns. As a first step in this inquiry, we give a brief overview of the evolution of US election administration disputes to provide some historical perspective. We then review common myths and misunderstandings that pervade the current public dialogue about these matters and what they portend for restoring confidence in the US electoral system. Lastly, we put forward four topics that have the potential for bipartisan agreement
2022 Resource Tracking Report: LGBTQ Grantmaking by U.S. Foundations
Get PDFThe 2022 Resource Tracking Report: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Grantmaking by U.S. Foundations (2024) explores the scope and character of U.S. foundation funding for LGBTQ communities and issues in calendar year 2022. This report marks the 20th edition of our resource tracking project and represents the next iteration of work from Funders for LGBTQ Issues to document the scale of philanthropic support for domestic LGBTQ communities and issues.Our research finds that foundation funding reached a high of 7.3 million (or less than 3 percent) from the total of 100 awarded by U.S. Foundations, only 25 cents specifically supported LGBTQ communities
Catalyzing Change: Powering the Movement through Community & Collaboration
Get PDFIn 2022, Women Moving Millions (WMM) launched a Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning Program to better understand our impact on our membership community and the gender-lens philanthropy our members practice.Through this program, we aim to build a body of knowledge, insights, and best practices to improve our core community building work, expand our influence on the philanthropy sector, and further our mission to catalyze greater resources for a gender equal world. Additionally, we seek to clarify the value of participating in the WMM network and how our contribution is strengthening the funding ecosystem of the gender equality movement.With generous funding from The David & Lura Lovell Foundation, WMM partnered with ORS Impact to build a measurement and evaluation strategy for the organization. As part of this effort, ORS Impact conducted a baseline assessment, engaging with more than 150 members through a robust survey and focus groups to better understand the community, including composition, membership experience, giving, and impact. Through this work, we refined our theory of change, determined data collection tools and processes, and identified key measurement indicators to track our progress and impact over time.In late 2023, WMM then commissioned ImpactMapper to conduct our inaugural Community Impact Survey. Through this study, we were able to assess our impact on members' personal growth, philanthropic leadership, advocacy, and grantmaking.Â
Electoral Rights of EU Mobile Citizens Facing Homelessness
Get PDFThis article discusses the challenges faced by EU mobile citizens,particularly those experiencing homelessness, in exercising theirelectoral rights. It highlights a range of EU directives allowing citizens to voteand run for office in their host countries but also underscores a number ofobstacles such as language barriers, the complex registration processes, anda lack of awareness. The article puts forward several strategies to improveparticipation including better information dissemination, simplified registrationprocedures, and targeted campaigns
Testing Change project summary report
Get PDFThe Testing Change project was a 10 year project to test organizational changes nonprofit organizations would need to make to adapt to changes in the external environment in order to remain effective and relevant.  Areas of change explored included new approaches to youth engagement, impact assessment and leadership. This is a summary report
Proportional Representation and the Voting Rights Act
Get PDFThe Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 remains a core legal tool for preventing racial discrimination in voting. Proportional representation (PR) offers an additional mechanism for ensuring the fair representation of minority communities, yet some suggest it may be subject to challenges under the VRA. This report addresses a series of issues related to PR and the VRA, explaining that the two are, in fact, compatible and that PR might be adopted more widely as a remedy under both the VRA and state VRAs when other systems are found to be unlawful
The Color of Infertility: Race, Infertility, and Reproductive Justice in the U.S.
Get PDFThe issue of infertility is critical to the reproductive justice and birth justice movement and demands increased funding, attention, awareness, and advocacy now more than ever, given the interconnected links between current attacks on reproductive freedom, gender, bodily autonomy, and democracy that are being orchestrated and coordinated by similar political actors.This landscape analysis provides an introductory overview of the structural and systemic barriers facing women and nonbinary people of color by highlighting the racial, ethnic, gender, ability, and class-based disparities that fertility challenges bring, as well as the stigmas and biases inherent within our health care systems and social, political and cultural contexts
The Disinformation Economy
Get PDFOnline misinformation has presented a challenge to governance around the globe. False narratives about election fraud, public health measures, and political leaders are now commonplace in our political discourse and play a pivotal role in efforts to destabilize democratic institutions. How these narratives begin, evolve, and spread is often difficult to identify, but one popular mechanism is through fake new websites that intentionally produce misinformation. These sites often masquerade as legitimate news sites with content designed to diminish the reader's skepticism by mimicking the format of traditional online news outlets. While these sites regularly espouse a political ideology, the motivation for the creation of this content is also driven by economic incentives, as the vast majority of traffic on these sites can be monetized by online display advertising. This is the core of The Disinformation Economy. While The Disinformation Economy incentivizes websites to produce harmful content, it also presents an opportunity to take concrete steps to curb the spread of misinformation. If the online advertising industry and ad buyers restrict the sale of ads on these sites, the loss of revenue will dramatically reduce the appeal of misinformation as a business model. In this report, we investigate the scope of The Disinformation Economy based on extensive data collection and provide a set of recommendations for reducing the production of disinformation.Â