In preparation for the 2020 presidential election, foundations and donors poured billions of dollars into mobilizing voters, training election workers, and supporting efforts to ensure people could vote even though the country was in a pandemic lockdown. The November election saw a record number of voters despite fears that Covid would keep them away.
As voters return to the polls this year, the threat of Covid has waned. But a thicket of barriers to a secure, representative, unmanipulated vote remain.
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It’s still unclear whether philanthropy will rise to the occasion as it did during the 2020 election cycle. But many recent grants — including a December commitment of $50 million by the Open Society Foundations to support civic engagement among women and young people, and a $10 million gift from MacKenzie Scott to the State Infrastructure Fund, a collaborative that works to increase civic participation and protect voting rights — suggest donors remain involved.
Grant makers continue to support ongoing causes in the democracy space, such as changing the congressional redistricting process to prevent gerrymandering, mounting legal defenses against attempts to water down the 1964 Voting Rights Act, and pushing for extended voting periods, or a national Election Day holiday.
Alongside those perennial issues, the upcoming election presents more acute challenges.
Erica Linnick, senior director of the State Infrastructure Fund, says it might be difficult to match the philanthropic dollars democracy efforts received in 2020.
“There were funders that had never funded in the space, and they were putting money into all these efforts to make sure folks would be able to vote safely,” she says. “It was an extraordinary year.”
In jurisdictions across the country, she says, policies designed to increase the vote, like longer early-voting periods and the proliferation of ballot drop boxes, have since been limited.
“There have been rollbacks,” she says.
Other new challenges to ensuring election integrity have emerged. Artificial intelligence has made it easier for bad actors to manipulate candidate images and distribute incorrect information about voting days and polling places.
“It is easier and cheaper and faster than ever before to create misleading images,” says Alexandra Reeve Givens, chief executive of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.
On top of that, a threat of violence hangs over the entire process. Droves of election workers have left their jobs since the last tally; many aged out, and some left because they were targeted. Since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, election deniers and saboteurs have made threats against election officials, and armed observers intimidated voters at polling stations during the midterm elections last year.
The challenges of administering a successful election come as many fear a collapse of democratic principles in the country. The rise of authoritarian tendencies, a mounting distrust of institutions, the dysfunction of elected bodies, and the cacophony of political discourse online have all helped raise the alarm.
According to the Democracy Fund, a nonprofit started by philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, giving to support democracy grew by as much as 40 percent between 2018 and 2022 among 70 institutional funders already committed to supporting voting rights, election administration, get-out-the-vote efforts, and combating misinformation, among other issues. If other grant makers that made election-related grants were included, the fund estimates that as much as $6.9 billion went to democracy projects in 2021 and 2022 combined.
Almost all of the core democracy funders surveyed by Democracy Fund say they will maintain or increase their grants this year. But Joe Goldman, the fund’s president, has also seen a softening of support, mostly from smaller philanthropies that may have jumped in to back election projects during the pandemic.
A big problem, Goldman says, is that many of the officials and volunteers who will administer the elections may not be prepared, even as their work comes under greater scrutiny from election deniers. According to one recent study, 40 percent of election officials in the 11-state Western region are new to the job.
“These are wildly complex systems that need to be run with as few mistakes as possible, and they’re going to be run by people who’ve never done it before under a tremendous amount of pressure,” Goldman says.
Nonprofits that work to increase voter participation, like the League of Women Voters, are bracing for a long election season, says Adam Ambrogi, the league’s chief of external affairs.
The organization is prepared to send volunteer observers to watch over vote counting and certification, and to file for restraining orders against people who intimidate voters, as they did against armed election “monitors” during the midterms in Arizona.
Says Ambrogi: “Nobody should ever feel afraid to go and cast their ballot.”
