Knight Foundation

Photo by Flickr user Nathan Gibbs. Today, we’re announcing $1 million in new support for Democracy Works, to expand the TurboVote platform and support the launch of Ballot Scout, a tool for local elections officials and voters that uses Postal Service barcode technology to track absentee ballots. We’re particularly excited to be joined by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which is announcing $400,000 in support for Democracy Works. The grant to Democracy Works--the third we’ve made since 2011--is part of our strategy to take advantage of new digital tools to improve the ways in which Americans relate to their government and to one another.

Voters waiting in line. Photo by Flickr user redagainPatti. Seth Flaxman is co-founder and executive director of Democracy Works. Innovation is at the heart of Democracy Works, a civic tech nonprofit I co-founded five  years ago to make voting easier. As Democracy Works grew, creating partnerships with funders that shared our vision became increasingly important. Working with Knight Foundation has been a perfect example of how funders and grantees can grow and learn together as we seek to achieve transformational impact. This week, Democracy Works announced $1,000,000 in support  from Knight Foundation and  $400,000 from the MacArthur Foundation for our second round of fundraising, which began in late 2014. Because of their support, we’re on track to become financially sustainable and can continue building innovative technology that helps Americans more actively engage in our democracy.

Jeremy Epstein is a senior computer scientist with SRI International in Arlington, Va., where his research topics includes voting system security. Below he writes on this topic for Knight News Challenge: Elections, which asks the question, How might we better inform voters and increase civic participation before, during and after elections? Winners will share in more than $3 million. Apply at newschallenge.org.Elections are one of the last institutions where computing and the Internet have not made significant inroads for most people. While we bank online, shop online, and even pay our taxes online, some aspects of voting are decidedly offline.This isn’t an accident; the requirements for privacy and anonymity in elections are fundamentally different than for any other aspect of our lives. And the stakes – our democracy – are among the highest, with a centuries-long history of people interfering with elections proving that the motivation is present to interfere with fair elections. The odds of rapid detection of a successful attack on an election are slim; the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other sources report that most attacks on corporations and government offices aren’t detected until months after they happen, even with the most sophisticated monitoring software and well-qualified staff. State and local elections offices have limited technology budgets, far smaller than banks and insurance companies that are regularly targeted by (and fall victim to) hackers and online thieves.