Memories of Long Lines and Machine Malfunctions Prompt Election Grants

Foundations and charities involved in get-out-the-vote activities are expecting a heavy turnout

for November’s presidential election. But they are also worried about what will happen once the voters get to the polls.

Some grant makers are spending money to try to head off the administrative glitches that have marred recent national elections, such as machine malfunctions, excessively long lines, and voters improperly purged from registration rolls.

“We’ve been concerned about vulnerabilities in the past and the stakes are going to be even higher in terms of the enthusiasm this election is already generating,” says Allison Barlow, who advises a number of foundations that are involved in voting projects.

Election Fund

One group of grant makers banded together last December to create the Election Administration Fund, which has raised $5.1-million to coordinate projects aimed at ensuring that the election system works properly this November.

“The fund’s goal is to make sure everyone who wants to vote can vote and that every vote is counted,” says Lisa Versaci, coordinator of the fund, which is housed at the Tides Foundation, in San Francisco.

In a separate effort, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the JEHT Foundation, in New York, have approved $2.9-million in grants this year to respond to “critical flaws in our elections system” — and plan to approve $1.5-million more later this summer.

Such flaws drew national attention in 2000, when selection of the president was delayed and eventually decided by the U.S. Supreme Court because of problems counting votes in Florida.

But problems have also surfaced in subsequent elections, including this year’s presidential primaries.

In a report on the primaries, the National Campaign for Fair Elections — operated by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law — documented problems that included poorly trained poll workers, breakdown of election machines, ballot shortages due to high turnout, inaccurate voter-registration rolls, and improper requests to show identification.

Some experts are worried that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Indiana to require voters to present government-issued identification will confuse matters further, deterring voters even in states that don’t have such strict requirements.

Foundations that are trying to fix the election system express concern that the people they are trying to get to the polls will give up on voting if they find it too complicated or lose confidence in the results.

“If we could repair the systems, over time we wouldn’t have to spend so much time on voter mobilization,” says Nancy Youman, deputy director of U.S. programs for the Open Society Institute, which has contributed $1-million to the Election Administration Fund.

Other donors to the fund include the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Carnegie Corporation, and the HKH Foundation, all in New York, and the Cedar Tree Foundation, in Boston. Additional money, half of the total, has been provided by the Democracy Alliance, in Washington, a group of wealthy individuals who give to liberal causes and organizations, Ms. Versaci says.

Most of the money goes to the Advancement Project, a racial-justice group in Washington; he Brennan Center for Justice at New York University; the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, in Washington; and Project Vote, in Washington and Little Rock, Ark., which promotes voting in poor and minority neighborhoods.

Those groups, other grant recipients, and donors meet regularly to coordinate how best to raise public awareness or respond to decisions by election officials or courts, Ms. Versaci says.

The fund’s immediate goal is to ensure that the 2008 election goes smoothly, but it also hopes to raise money to “set the stage for longer-term election reform,” she says.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has committed more than $20-million since 2000 to projects to fix the nation’s election system, says Michael Caudell-Feagan, director of the foundation’s Make Voting Work project in Washington.

“Foundations over recent election cycles have become aware that we need to fix the base elements of the way the election system performed so that those already energized and mobilized to vote will come away with some level of confidence in the integrity of the election system,” says Mr. Caudell-Feagan.

Among the grants that Pew has awarded since January with the JEHT Foundation:

• Almost $670,000 to a variety of groups — including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the secretary of state’s offices in Washington, Ohio, and Minnesota; the U.S. Postal Service; and the Overseas Vote Foundation — to assess ways to improve voter-registration systems. The foundations say many registration rolls are created from “piecemeal data” that “fail to keep pace with a mobile society.”

• Almost $570,000 to Ball State University, Rice University, and the University of Tennessee to work with local election officials to design alternatives to “overcrowded, inconveniently located, or poorly designed” polling places.

• More than $240,000 to the California Institute of Technology to evaluate a Pew-supported project to test the effectiveness of including voter-registration forms in change-of-address packets that are sent by the U.S. Postal Service to people who are moving.

Some of the work will carry over into 2009 and 2010 because fixing the election system will be a long-term project, Mr. Caudell-Feagan says.

And he remains worried about this November. “We use the rhetoric that every vote counts,” he says. “But that’s not backed by a system that’s prepared to handle a significant turnout.”