Using Data to Fight Voter Suppression in 2020
Experts in election protection convened to discuss, collaborate, and chart the way forward for protecting voters’ rights in the upcoming election cycle amidst the greatest public health crisis of a generation.
In the days leading up to the Wisconsin presidential primary in April, Americans watched on as politicians in the state played a tug-of-war over how to handle an election in the midst of a pandemic. While many worked to protect the most fundamental right we have as citizens — the right to vote — bickering in the state legislature and a partisan-fueled legal challenge led to confusion on top of concerns already prevalent in the midst of the greatest public health crisis of our time.
While COVID-19 is not the only issue facing election protection groups in 2020 — issues of registration access, ballot access, and ballot counting have been issues of voter suppression long before coronavirus swept the nation — the pandemic is shedding new light on the webs of cracks threatening voters’ rights. Now, more than ever, the nation needs to be able to detect, and overcome, issues of voter suppression.
At Alloy, we’re in the business of serving up data that organizations need to strengthen our democracy and promote civic participation. From our research with election protection groups, we have expanded on our understanding of the challenges we can expect to see in the coming weeks and months, on our way to November 3rd. We’ve learned that a lack of early insight for key data keeps voter protection groups in the dark until the last moment — and that this is one of the most challenging aspects within their portfolio of work.
We want to change that.
Working with partners across the progressive and Democratic ecosystem, we’ve learned that access to high quality, affordable, and timely data can be part of the solution to these problems, and the time was ripe to take that into action. On April 15, 2020, Alloy convened a virtual working session with 16 leaders in the election protection space.
Over the course of the workshop, we were collectively able to:
- get to a shared understanding of how election protection groups are currently using data
- create opportunities for more data sharing within election protection work
- lay the groundwork for more election protection groups to incorporate data into their voter rights advocacy
- provide direct insight for how data teams and data organizations can support election protection work
The details, conversations, and ideas discussed in this working session have been captured in a summary report. The outputs are now available for use by any other election protection entity who might benefit from this knowledge.
In this summary, you’ll find:
- Opportunities to improve election protection using better data.
- Prioritized challenges to realizing those opportunities.
- Ideas generated by the group of how data can address those challenges.
- A collectively generated dataset “wishlist.”
Progressive, Democratic, and other organizations who are dedicated to election protection efforts can request access to the output summary here.
At Alloy, we left the conversations inspired.
In the weeks since the working session, our team has been sprinting to explore what our role can be in helping to design and deploy several of the solutions proposed by the group. Given the extraordinary amount of work ahead, we hope many others will join us in doing the same for our democracy.
Interested in participating in a gathering like this one? Let us know. Alloy is committed to breaking down the barriers between the people fighting on the front lines of change and the information they need to win…and we want you to be a part of it.
