Philanthropy and the Ballot Box

Grant makers try new ways to stir voter interest, ensure fair elections

Foundations have spent the past decade — and millions of dollars — trying to solve a nagging national problem: Americans’ growing apathy about the political process.

But enthusiasm for projects to encourage people to cast their Election Day ballots has been waning,

in part because voter turnout has remained weak despite foundation efforts. In 1996 voting rates reached an all-time low for a presidential-election year, with fewer than half of all eligible voters going to the polls.

“A lot of foundations now have the same kind of fatigue about election issues as the public,” says Geri Mannion, who oversees campaign and election grants for the Carnegie Corporation of New York and also coordinates a network of grant makers known as the Funders Committee on Civic Participation. “I can count on my hands the foundation people who have even been interested in issues such as campaign finance or voter turnout this election.”

Seeking to come up with new approaches, and to counter Americans’ frustrations with the political process, leaders of several big foundations — including the Joyce Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Pew Charitable Trusts — are rethinking their strategies for election-related grant making.

Grant makers say cynicism about government, particularly among young people, raises serious concerns about the strength of American democracy and the country’s ability to recruit talented political leaders in the future.

Among the approaches shaping election-related grants in 2000:

• New attention on young people. While many past efforts have been aimed at persuading young adults to go to the polls, many foundations are now supporting projects that encourage candidates to reach out to first-time voters. Some foundations are also putting money into civic-education courses for kids.
• More emphasis on state elections, including projects to bolster the disclosure requirements for private donations made to state-level campaigns.
• Increased use of the Internet to get information on election issues, candidates, and campaign financing into the hands of reporters and the public.

Making Voting Easier

Many foundations have been moving away from supporting registration and education efforts for potential voters in favor of seeking structural changes in the election process, such as improving the way campaigns are financed. Some foundations say they hope to explore ways to make voting easier, such as encouraging state and local governments to test allowing people to cast ballots over several days or on weekends.

One reason for the move away from voter-registration efforts: A 1995 federal “motor voter” law made it much easier for people to participate in elections by requiring states to register people to vote when they obtained a driver’s license or received other government services.

But foundations have also begun to question the effectiveness of get-out-the-vote efforts.

“This year I’ve given the last of my voter-education grants,” says Ms. Mannion of the Carnegie Corporation. “Because, truthfully, it’s very hard to evaluate whether my grants have made a difference or not.”

She says it is almost impossible to figure out whether people voted because a charity went door to door asking them to do so or because they were motivated by a controversial issue or a charismatic candidate.

Instead, Ms. Mannion says she hopes Carnegie will spend money on programs aimed at engaging children in the country’s civic life long before they become eligible to vote.

“There’s been an erosion of basic civic education,” she says. “Kids need to hear why government matters. Why is it important to have smart and concerned public policy? Government leaders need to talk about why they went into public service. We’ve spent an entire decade turning the electorate off.”

Kids Voting USA, based in Tempe, Ariz., has been doing such work for nearly a decade with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, in Miami, among others. The Knight Foundation this year awarded over $450,000 in grants to Kids Voting USA’s national office and several of its local offices to help the organization expand its reach.

The group is currently developing online curriculum guides for teachers as part of Youth-e-Vote, a national campaign that lets kids cast votes for president, a member of Congress, and a Senator in a mock online election. The results of that election will be announced Nov. 2, a week before grownups cast their ballots.

The charity is also teaming up with other charities and with Working Mother magazine as part of a Take Your Kids to Vote campaign.

“One thing we’ve realized is that you have to build a future generation of voters, and you have to give them not only education but the real-life experience,” says Karen T. Scates, chief executive officer of Kids Voting USA.

Mobilizing Young Adults

Foundations also continue to look for ways to get young adults excited about politics. Many are alarmed at the particularly low voter-turnout rates among young adults. Estimates of voter turnout during primaries held this spring are that fewer than 10 percent of Americans under age 30 went to the polls, compared with an overall turnout rate of 19 percent.

One group trying to reverse this trend, Youth Service America, in Washington, has decided to play to young adults’ strong interest in volunteering by emphasizing how voting and volunteering are related. The campaign, ServiceVote 2000, has been endorsed by Sen. Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat, and Sen. John McCain, the Republican from Arizona. Its efforts include a Web site that encourages young people to sign an electronic pledge to vote and that offers to send them an electronic reminder as Election Day nears. Its posters include messages such as: “Today you and your buddies hauled a ton of trash off the beachWhat is Congress going to do to keep it clean? You gotta vote too!”

Some non-profit groups are devoting most of their energy to persuading politicians to court young voters. Youth Vote 2000, a coalition of about 60 charities that was formed last year with an $800,000, two-year grant from Pew, hopes to persuade presidential, as well as Congressional and gubernatorial, candidates to devote at least one debate in each race to issues of interest to young people.

The problem of low voter turnout among the young, according to a project called Neglection 2000, has been part of a “vicious cycle of mutual neglect” between young adults and those running for office — a chicken-and-egg scenario in which young people don’t vote because they don’t hear from the candidates, and candidates don’t spend time or money to reach them because they don’t vote.

Two men in their 20’s started the project to try to document and quantify the problem. Working under the auspices of Third Millennium, a charity in New York that promotes the civic involvement of people in their 20’s and 30’s, Brent McGoldrick and Russ Freyman have analyzed thousands of campaign advertisements, studied voter-participation rates, conducted surveys and a focus group, and interviewed hundreds of young voters, candidates, and political consultants.

Among the project’s early findings: Few candidates in the current election campaign have run political advertisements on the television shows that people 18 to 34 tend to watch, such as “Friends” or “Ally McBeal.” Instead, they favor programs with an older viewership, such as morning news programs and talk shows.

The project, which has raised roughly $530,000 from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, has published one report, which includes recommendations for candidates. Also planned, among other efforts, is a study of the effectiveness of Internet campaign advertising on voting behavior.

“We were concerned that everyone just says, Oh, young people are apathetic, we’re never going to get them to vote,” says Mr. Freyman. “We need to cultivate a generation that is otherwise never going to be interested in politics or we’ll end up with a glorified oligarchy.”

Running for President

Such a concern prompted the Kauffman Foundation’s support of the project.

“Kids used to talk about wanting to be president or running for public office,” says Stephen L. Roling, a senior vice president at the foundation. “But more and more, you hear that it’s not cool anymore. That’s scary for me.”

A growing number of foundations are coming to the conclusion that one way to increase voter participation among all age groups is by revamping the political system, particularly the way in which campaigns are financed.

The Florence and John Schumann Foundation, for instance, has given about $15-million in campaign-finance-related grants in the past five years.

Bill Moyers, the television journalist who is president of the Montclair, N.J., foundation, says: “It became clear to us a few years ago that just about every purpose of our grant making, especially the environment, was being frustrated by the hidden power of money.”

The Pew Charitable Trusts, in Philadelphia, has also made campaign finance a major focus. Many of its projects support Web sites and other efforts to track campaign contributors.

“A major piece of our efforts has been pushing for more disclosure to make it transparent where money in campaigns is coming from and where it’s going to and to make it easier for the media to be able to cover that,” says Michael X. Delli Carpini, a program officer for Pew. “I still have enough faith in the system to think that if you point out policies or behaviors that violate most people’s sense of what is fair, you’ll get action on that.”

Many grant makers have also begun to push for changes in the way campaigns are paid for on state and local levels.

“I have no illusion that Washington is going to deal with campaign-finance reform in a serious way any time soon,” says Mark Schmitt, a program director at the Open Society Institute, the New York philanthropy started by the financier George Soros. “But people in the states are really getting into a deep examination of the relationship between democracy and capitalism, and they’re being very creative about it.”

The National Institute on Money in State Politics, for example, has received a total of almost $2.4-million in recent grants from Carnegie, the Open Society Institute, and the Ford, Joyce, and Schumann Foundations. Among its top projects: building a searchable database of state campaign-finance information that it will make available as part of its Web site (http://www.followthemoney.org).

Judicial Campaigns

While foundations have traditionally concentrated on elections for legislative and executive offices, the Joyce Foundation has recently focused on a new and controversial trend: campaigns for state judgeships.

In many states, supreme court justices are elected, not appointed. Races this year in Michigan, Ohio, and other states have received national attention, as an article in The New York Times explained, because they involve millions of dollars and “accusations of race baiting, dirty politics, catering to rich trial lawyers, and abdication to business interests.”

Troubled by the development, the Joyce Foundation decided to make a $213,376 grant to the American Bar Association to establish a committee to study and develop standards for government financing of state judicial campaigns. The two-year project is expected to develop recommendations to guide states that want to overhaul their judicial-campaign system.

“This was a departure for us, but our board decided that this was a place where we ought to try to draw a line,” says Lawrence Hansen, a program officer at Joyce. “There are certain practices that arguably can be tolerated in the so-called political branches of government that really are intolerable in the one branch that is supposed to be non-political, at least in a partisan sense.”

Information Online

Since the last presidential election, the most significant change for charities working to get Americans more interested in politics has been the widespread popularity of the Internet. Many of the projects getting grant money this election cycle are using Web sites as an inexpensive way to distribute information and survey findings to a huge number of people.

Projects such as Democracy Network , which is paid for by the Ford Foundation and others and is run in part by the League of Women Voters, has set up a Web site (http://www.dnet.org) to serve as a central location for candidates and voters to exchange information.

Bradford K. Smith, a vice president at Ford, says he believes that such efforts can go a long way toward helping the foundation achieve its goal of a strong American democracy.

“Even if we don’t increase voter turnout, a democracy is premised on voter choices being as informed as possible,” he says. “The press tends to cover the most sensational or the hottest issues, but in any election there are lots and lots of issues. And different constituencies have different issues that motivate them.”

Project Vote Smart, in Philipsburg, Mont., has had great success using its Web site to help educate voters about the campaign positions and voting records of the 13,000 candidates for elected office that the charity pulls together, largely with volunteer labor.

When the group first started, it relied on a toll-free telephone number that people could call to obtain information about candidates. In 1992, the group logged 211,000 inquiries from people. This year, the group is getting more than 1 million “inquiries” a day, a figure that includes phone calls but primarily consists of hits to the group’s Web site (http://www.vote-smart.org).

But Richard Kimball, president of Project Vote Smart, says he worries about his group’s survival. Companies are now building Web sites that will offer similar kinds of information. And although foundations have given Project Vote Smart a couple of million dollars over the past decade, some have now moved on to other causes or are interested in specialized projects rather than in providing basic operating support or helping the charity build an endowment.

While some people argue that companies are better suited to running such sites, thus freeing up foundations to move on to the next big challenge, Mr. Kimball believes it is essential that a non-profit group like his exist with stringent rules in place to insure that the public has access to independent, abundant, and accurate campaign information.

“Obviously we’ve hit a spot with the public; our usage has gone up dramatically,” he says. “But we may end up vanishing.”

Off-Year Starvation

Foundation leaders say they sympathize with the money worries facing non-profit groups that work on election and campaign issues.

“This isn’t a well-funded field, and these charities tend to get starved during non-election years,” says Ms. Mannion of Carnegie.

She says she hopes that election issues will get more attention from grant makers. “Foundations tend to forget, if they’re interested in education or the environment or housing, to make the connection to public-policy issues,” she says. “But what better way to improve an educational system in a community than to advocate among parents to hold their public leaders accountable for why their school system works or doesn’t? You can do this kind of work in a very nonpartisan way.”

Adds Ms. Mannion: “Foundations have a real opportunity — and obligation — every year to think about how to engage the electorate and ensure that our democracy is strengthened.”