Voting Rights
About this Priority Action Area
It’s 2020 and the year of a major presidential election. There is renewed energy and organizing to ensure people feel safe and secure in the voting process, and understand who they are voting for.
Projects
Projects currently exist to give people helpful information about the voting process like Open Oakland’s Open Disclosure and Open Maine’s Maine Ballot. These projects focus on access to information in the areas of campaign finance and ballot initiatives, and we’d like to deepen our impact in the space by looking into ways to intersect voting information with our work in record clearance.
Are you working on (or looking to work on) a project in the Voting Rights area? Let other Brigade leaders know by posting about it on the Brigade Network Discourse.
Learn more about Voting Rights projects through their Brigade Project Canvases below.
Partnerships
Vote.org Partnership
This year, Code for America engaged in a partnership with Vote.org to ensure that accurate information easily gets to voters, and that we can increase the amount of people that are able to participate in the democratic process. Particularly in the times of COVID-19, voting information is constantly changing, which can lead to ambiguity and missed opportunities for people to make their vote count. Eight Brigade members joined the Voter Information Research Team and added updated information and links to Vote.org’s website, which reached over three million people before Election Day.
USC Partnership
In addition to the Vote.org partnership, four volunteers from the Brigade Network assisted with a project for the University of Southern California. USC’s Voting Location Sitting Tool expansion this year. The tool was created by the Center for Inclusive Democracy (CID) and provides assistance to county election offices when looking to place voting locations. The tool began in California, and is now serving ten states.
Four volunteers contributed fifteen hours each to the project, helping with pulling down and prepping data, particularly with regard to GTFS and Open Street Map data. Their contributions were critical to the expansion of the tool.
Do you want to get involved in a project in this Priority Action Area?
Join our Slack community to pitch in.