How Democracy Works Is Innovating Government From The Outside In
By Kathryn Peters
We asked several participants in the upcoming Techonomy 2014 conference to write an article for us on what they are passionate about right now.
A federal election is one of the most logistically challenging business models you can imagine: its a business thats open only one day a year, staffed almost entirely by temps (practically volunteers) with limited advance training. Would-be customers have to sign up days or weeks in advance, but everything is still first-come, first-serve. Oh, and theres zero margin for error. No wonder the election administrators prayeris Lord, let this election not be close.
In 2010, my friend Seth Flaxman and I set out to simplify voting. We wanted to make voting fit the way we live. In an age when the Internet connects us to nearly all the goods, services, and experiences we can imagine, and has radically changed how we buy, rent, borrow, collaborate, and more, our elections would still be largely familiar to the 18th- and 19th-century bureaucrats who established the systems we still use to run them.No wonder nearly 60 percent of registered voters who dont cast ballots in a given election cite process issues when asked why they didnt vote. We created Democracy Works to ensure that no voter would ever miss another election because they didnt know how to participate.
Seth and I knew that real change calls for building innovations together with (and for) the administrators already running elections. But we also understood just how risk-averse election administrators are, even compared to other government offices. So we set out to innovate the fundamental relationship between a citizen and her democracy, from the outside. Democracy Works builtTurboVote, a site that lets anyone sign up, answer a few simple questions, and then receive all the materials and information needed to get registered, stay registered, and vote in every election. Through partnerships with colleges and non-profits, we even mail paper copies to voters, along with stamped, addressed envelopes for their local election office. Since our launch in 2011, weve helped over a quarter of a million people cast their ballots.
Voting at a town hall meeting in Calais, Vermont (image via Shutterstock)
But redesigning the voter experience for all 240 million or so eligible voters in the U.S. calls for more than giving them forms, texting them a polling place, and trusting that the rest will go smoothly. We know better than that. So, after the 2012 election, we set out to get acquainted with a few of the 8,000 or so local election officials across the country. We shadowed the real work of running elections, and met the dedicated staff who make it all happen. We embedded ourselves in election offices from the town of Brattleboro, Vermont (with 8,000 voters), to Travis County, Texas (with well over half a million).
What we found were dedicated civil servants testing their own improvements and making remarkable innovations. Those six offices were already incubating dozens of great ideas that just need more supportive technology and broader adoption. But where Travis County has the scale and influence to build a better voting machine from scratch, most of the others dont have either the resources to build sophisticated tools or the communications channels to publicize their creative hacks to election officials across the country.
As it turns out, local election administrators need and welcome external innovation support. They have big ideas they would like to try, if the right platforms and supporting tools existed. Theyll accept new processes, so long as theyve been rigorously tested and wont disrupt Election Day. And so we combed through all the great ideas they offered us and then spent 2014 working with nine election offices to design and develop Ballot Scout, a simple system to add intelligent mail barcodes to absentee ballots and give each one a tracking dashboard that lets them keep tabs on every ballot.
Going forward, this dual trackusing TurboVote to test new ideas and reach voters directly, and a network of local election offices to build sturdy infrastructure and deploy voter outreach tools after theyre well-tested and ready to scalewill make it possible to significantly improve voting.
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How Democracy Works Is Innovating Government From The Outside In