In the four years since Americans last elected a president, a new nonprofit field has sprung up to reinforce the machinery and processes by which votes are collected and counted.
After the tumult of 2020, a new set of organizations aims to reinforce how votes are tallied on November 5, as well as in 2026, 2028, and beyond.
The 2020 election — conducted under the pandemic’s strait-jacket conditions and contested in the courts and via the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol — laid bare weaknesses in the system by which tens of millions exercise their democratic right to vote. That prompted the establishment of a host of new groups, projects, and funder collaboratives. Together with a few older organizations, they are trying to make repairs and upgrades for November 5 — but also for 2026, 2028, and beyond.
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In the four years since Americans last elected a president, a new nonprofit field has sprung up to reinforce the machinery and processes by which votes are collected and counted.
After the tumult of 2020, groups aim to reinforce how votes are tallied on November 5 as well as in 2026, 2028, and beyond.
The 2020 election — conducted under the pandemic’s strait-jacket conditions and contested in the courts and via the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol — laid bare weaknesses in the system by which tens of millions exercise their democratic right to vote. That prompted the establishment of a host of new groups, projects, and funder collaboratives. Together with a few older organizations, they are trying to make repairs and upgrades for November 5 — but also for 2026, 2028, and beyond.
There’s a lofty goal behind it all. Fair, secure, and well-run vote counts can build trust in elections, advocates contend. That in turn will take away issues that fuel polarization. When votes take days or weeks to be tallied, for instance, conspiracy theories and misinformation easily fill the void.
“We’ve got to be ready for challenges now and in the future, and we don’t see ourselves as ready,” says Ashley Quarcoo, executive director of the two-year-old Election Trust Initiative.
Much of the work isn’t glamorous. States provide most of the funding and oversight for local election offices, yet that support is often spotty. Groups are helping officials professionalize and improve efficiency, replace outdated technology, and counter shortages in poll workers. They’re also promoting transparency and helping local officials hold forums in their communities to explain the exactitude with which votes are counted.
Arguing that democracy is on the line, several prominent names in politics are leading efforts, including veterans of presidential campaigns, a former Cabinet secretary, and a former federal judge.
Echoes of 2000 Florida Recount
Philanthropy has invested in election administration previously, says Dan Tokaji, dean of the law school at the University of Wisconsin and an authority on election law. After problems in Florida’s vote count in 2000 forced the U.S. Supreme Court to determine the winner of the George Bush-Al Gore race, a lot of foundations and nonprofits stepped up to help improve election infrastructure, Tokaji says. They played a key role in the 2002 passage of the Help America Vote Act, which set minimum standards for state administration of the vote.
“But over the course of time, that money dried up,” Tokaji says. Critics argue that stronger voter-identification laws are what’s needed to build trust in elections. They see partisan politics behind these new efforts, noting that several of the groups have 501(c)(4) affiliates. States United Democracy Center fights misinformation about elections, for instance, while its sister 501(c)(4) organization,States United Action, tracks candidates and officials who declared the 2020 election illegitimate.
Clockwise from top: Ian Bassin, Ben Ginsberg, Ashley Quarcoo, Ben Keiser, and Tiana Epps-Johnson.
Notably,more than half of states have passed laws prohibiting, limiting, or regulating private funding of elections. This flurry of legislation followsclaims that 2020 election-administration grants by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan — “Zuck Bucks,” as they became known — aimed to boost Biden turnout.
Advocates for building trust in elections, however, include some with conservative credentials, among them former federal judge Michael Luttig and GOP political attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, who was part of George W. Bush’s legal team during the 2000 recount. Also, the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the R Street Institute are bringing together conservative leaders and election administrators across the country to find common ground on the issues.
“We need spaces like this for folks on the right to test these issues out and have candid conversations with other conservatives,” says Scott Warren, founder of Generation Citizen, a civics education organization, and an Agora fellow.
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People to Watch
Earlier, the Chroniclecompiled a list of nonprofit leaders who are pursuing structural changes to elections that include ranked-choice voting and open primaries. Now, we have asked more than a dozen experts and advocates to identify top 501(c)(3) nonprofit leaders working to build trust in elections. This list is not comprehensive but attempts to capture a range of people and approaches.
Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy. The Yale-educated attorney, Obama White House denizen, and 2023 MacArthur Fellow co-founded the organization in 2016 as a bulwark against authoritarianism. Protect Democracy election-law experts helped fashion changes to the Electoral Count Act that became law in 2022. To fight what it sees as disinformation and conspiracy theories, its legal teamhas adopted the novel strategy of filing defamation suits on behalf of election officials against Rudy Giuliani, Kari Lake, and others who argue the 2020 election was fraudulent. The organization also supports some structural changes to elections, including proportional representation.
Bob Bauer and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, Election Official Legal Defense Network, part of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. The two are well-known political veterans from opposing camps — Bauer was White House counsel during the Obama Administration, and Ginsberg has served as counsel to Republican campaigns (including the presidential bids of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney) for decades. They help connect election officials under fire with pro-bono attorneys and communications professionals. To encourage faith in elections, their Pillars of Community project hosts conversations between politically diverse community leaders and election officials in battleground state efforts to ensure secure and accurate vote counts.
David Becker, Center for Election Innovation and Research. Becker started the center in 2016 in part to support voting offices and champion best practices for election administration, integrity, and accessibility. Previously, at the Pew Charitable Trusts, Becker led the creation of theElectronic Registration Information Center, a multistate information-sharing partnership that helps election officials update voter lists and identify fraud. (Several GOP governors last year ended their states’ participation expressing concern that data was being shared with partisan groups).
Soren Dayton, Niskanen Center. Dayton, who ran a war-room operation for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, leads anew governance program at the nine-year-old Niskanen Center, an incubator of policy ideas with cross-ideological appeal. Among other things, Dayton is working with center-right think tanks and advocacy organizations to identify ways to increase confidence in election results, often through faster vote tallies.
Jennifer Flanagan and Melissa Spatz, Trusted Elections Fund.The two-year-old pooled fund — backed by donors including the Omidyar Network and the Wellspring Philanthropic Fund — invests in groups that prevent election violence and battle what it calls illegitimate disputes over election results. It’s criticized by conservatives as a stalking horse for Democrats. Flanagan is a former Common Cause executive and a former deputy secretary of state in Colorado; Spatz previously was the longtime director of thePiper Fund, which backs grassroots groups to protect protest rights, opposes money’s influence in politics, and supports democracy efforts generally backed by progressives.
Ellen Gustafson and Ben Keiser, We the Veterans. Vet the Vote, the biggest program of this three-year-old organization, recruited more than 60,000 veterans and military family members to volunteer as poll workers in 2022 and will more than double that number this year. Gustafson is the spouse of a Navy officer, and Keiser is a former Marine.
Sarah Hunt, Rainey Center. Hunt, a clean-energy advocate and election-law attorney, leads the six-year-old research and leadership group. The center’s national poll in Julyshowed strong bipartisan support for voter-ID requirements — sometimes seen as a conservative issue — but also for counting ballots more quickly.
Jeh Johnson and Michael Luttig, American Bar Association. Johnson is a former Obama Cabinet member; Luttig is a retired federal judge and a prominent conservative. They lead a newtask force that, among other things, is rallying ABA chapters to defend sound election results and crack down on lawyers who may violate ethics rules with questionable election-related lawsuits.
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Joanna Lydgate, States United Democracy Center. Lydgate started the organization — with high-profile names such as former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman — in response to the 2020 allegations of election fraud. It has pursued litigation and filed bar complaints against Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and other Trump attorneys who fought to overturn the 2020 results. Lydgate is a former chief deputy attorney general in Massachusetts.
Ari Mittleman, Keep Our Republic. The group, which launched in 2020, pledges: “Let every eligible voter vote. Let each vote be counted. Let the electoral count stand.” It’s running town-hall meetings in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with local leaders discussing the ballot-counting process to counter misinformation and suspicion. Mittleman is a former senior aide to Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Bob Casey Jr.
Rachel Orey, Bipartisan Policy Center. Orey leads research into the nitty-gritty of election administration regarding funding, maintenance of voter rolls, and staffing, among other topics. A key concern: how low pay and increasing pressures are increasing turnover.
Ashley Quarcoo, Election Trust Initiative. This is a regranting arm — $100 million over five years — of the William and Flora Hewlett, Klarman Family, and Peter G. Peterson foundations as well as the Pew Charitable Trusts. Quarcoo is also a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on polarization and elections abroad.
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Charles Stewart, MIT Election and Data Science Lab. Stewart is the founding director of the lab, which launched in 2017 to analyze how voters interact with the electoral process and measure the performance of elections, polling place operations, and elections administration. A political scientist who also studies polarization, he helped develop the influentialElection Performance Index, which ranks state election administration.
Michael Waldman, Brennan Center for Justice. A longtime advocate for voting rights for all — he wrote the 2016 book The Fight to Vote — Waldman as CEO has planted the center’s flag on issues of election security, administration, misinformation, and gerrymandering.
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