Executive Summary Ukraine has become a different country over the past decade. Compared to the closed post-Soviet oligarchy that it was before the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine is now an open society governed as a vibrant democracy that resp [...]
Executive Summary The October 15, 2023 Polish parliamentary election will not be fair. The country’s last fair election was in 2015, when the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) came to power and promptly set about undermining constitutional govern [...]
Earlier this month, Harris County sued the State of Texas to temporarily block a law, known as Senate Bill 1750, that would eliminate the Harris County elections administrator position effective September 1st. Harris County really messed up its ad [...]
Announcements Today we launched the War in Ukraine: Military Bloggers dashboard, an interactive, open-source tool for analyzing the reach and messaging of prominent Russian military bloggers on Telegram! Check out key takeaways from the dashboard h [...]
Senior Elections Integrity David Levine joined Transparencia Electoral on August 4, 2023 to discuss strategies to counter disinformation about election administration. [...]
David Levine and Krystyna Sikora discuss findings from their recent paper "Countering the Weaponization of Election Administration Mistakes" at the Electoral Integrity Project's third annual virtual conference. Watch their panel at 1:12:31. [...]
Introduction When people perform tasks in a complex work environment, mistakes are bound to happen. Election systems are no exception. Although the 2020 presidential and 2022 midterm elections in the United States were free, fair, and well-adminis [...]
Ongoing innovation is innate to the human spirit and stops at no borders. While Americans are rightly proud of being the nation that gave the world powered flight, we owe the development of the modern monoplane design to a Romanian, Trajan Vuia, who [...]
Introduction Protections are baked into each stage of US election administration. For example, nearly every state has paper records of each vote, safeguards to ensure the chain of custody of those ballots, and the ability to go back and count each [...]
A few weeks ago, at an event focused on democratic decline in the United States, I raised the persistent threat of foreign autocratic actors. The audience reacted ambivalently. “That’s so 2016,” one attendee remarked. The conversation moved on to mo [...]
Experts in opinion polling and politics join this discussion around the 2024 presidential race in the United States. Presidential politics could impact the trajectory of the “New Atlanticism” and US support for Ukraine as isolationist or “America Fi [...]
What happened in the first round? In Turkey’s first round election held on May 14, tens of millions of voters turned out for both sides. There was intense competition on a playing field that the incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan skewed heavi [...]
Elections in Turkey had high turn-out, meaningful results, and little violence, but that doesn’t mean they were free from autocratic manipulation on the part of the regime. On Sunday, Turkish voters went to the polls in a mostly free but highly unf [...]
Executive Summary The greatest threats facing the two most consequential elections in and around Europe in 2023—Turkey in May and Poland in the fall—come from autocratic corruption within these two backsliding democracies. Both these countries are [...]
Introduction As a result of the 2020 and 2022 federal elections, the job of administering elections has dramatically changed in the United States, and the demands on the dedicated officials that run our elections have also increased. The people wh [...]
David Levine is an experienced elections professional with a wide range of expertise in election security, administration, and policy. He currently serves as the Election Integrity Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a nonpartisan initi [...]
At the start of the new year, we asked our experts to each put forth one recommendation that would strengthen democracy during a period of declining trust, emboldened autocrats, and war. Their answers touch on a variety of issues—from the war in Ukr [...]
A favorite tune in the foreign information operations playlist is that democracies are in disarray, are inefficient, and do not deliver for citizens. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, China attacked the ability of democracies to ha [...]
Despite fears of false and misleading election information resulting in more election worker threats and doubt about the 2022 elections, Idaho appears to have emerged from the midterms relatively unscathed. Idaho election officials and their partner [...]
OSET Institute's feature interview is with David Levine, Elections Integrity Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy of the German Marshall Fund. David is a non-practicing lawyer and previously, the Ada County, Idaho Elections Director. David [...]
Should members of Congress be able to object to election results as part of a strategy to draw greater attention to election reform efforts, as two Democratic members tried to do following George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004? Should members of Congr [...]
Rachael Dean Wilson, Head of External Affairs at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at GMF, joined Newsy to discuss the results of the 2022 US Midterm elections. She discussed what we can expect from this split Congress and how voters widely reject [...]
Despite fears of political violence and deepening societal divisions, the United States appears to have avoided the worst-case scenarios in the lead-up to and immediately following the midterm elections. Election officials and local law enforcement [...]
David Levine, elections integrity fellow at GMF’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, joined Newsy in the lead up to the 2022 US midterm elections. He discussed potential cyber threats, the effects of Twitter’s change of ownership on the platform’s pol [...]
Tomorrow’s midterm elections will be a benchmark for the state of American democracy. As early voting surges, people around the country (and the world) are watching to see what happens in what is perhaps the most important midterm election in recent [...]
The midterm elections are just 4 days away, and over 34 million people have cast their vote. And yet, there are still many people who don't believe our elections are safe and secure, who haven't cast a vote yet. David Levine from the Alliance for S [...]
Using our interactive tool to examine social posts, we found numerous false claims of election fraud and differences in the online conversations in English versus Spanish. The Midterm Monitor is a joint project of the Alliance for Securing Democracy [...]
While much has been written about the nearly 300 election-denying candidates seeking public office this November, Americans who believe in democracy shouldn’t lose hope yet. But they do need to act now to ensure the integrity of future elections. D [...]
This episode is Dirty Moderate’s official response to election deniers. We understand a certain group of Americans cannot accept truth, reality, science, etc…but here is some anyway. You know, for the hell of it. Call us dirty moderates. America’s [...]
It’s a commonly employed political cliché that every election is “the most important election of your lifetime.” But this time, the cliché may be appropriate. Not because of who wins or loses a particular race or even majorities in the House and Sen [...]
The Midterm Monitor is an interactive tool that provides a snapshot of social media messages and narratives shaping the conversation around voting and election administration in the leadup to the 2022 midterm elections. The Midterm Monitor tracks so [...]
Amidst an already mixed and muddled information morass, this election cycle, a new social media platform has joined the US political information environment: Chinese-owned viral video app TikTok. Despite years of warnings from researchers and lawmak [...]
David Levine discusses the dangers around rogue poll workers on WISN’s ‘UpFront’ and his guidance on how to vet poll workers. [...]
Maricopa County, Arizona, has become a focal point for our crisis of trust in democratic elections. According to the Arizonans I met, the state is in a dangerous place, and Maricopa is in the eye of the storm—representing one of the largest voting [...]
Is the public discussion in our democracies an open dialogue, or do malicious actors manipulate the debate for their own purposes? META (the owners of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) published a report in September 2022 about “Coordinated Inauthen [...]
Less than two weeks from Election Day, we continue to see false claims of widespread election fraud drive distrust of the electoral process and create real security challenges for election administrators. In Maricopa County, Arizona last Friday, two [...]
The Midterm Monitor is an interactive tool that provides a snapshot of social media messages and narratives shaping the conversation around voting and election administration in the leadup to the 2022 midterm elections. The Midterm Monitor tracks so [...]
Rachael Dean Wilson, head of external affairs at GMF’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, joined Newsy on Saturday, October 22 to discuss the state of play ahead of the US midterm elections: Is democracy on the ballot this election season? How impact [...]
Two notable polls came out this week. The first shows that Americans’ faith in democracy is under stress, with just 9 percent of respondents saying democracy is working very or extremely well. The second provides new insights into growing Republican [...]
The Midterm Monitor is an interactive tool that provides a snapshot of social media messages and narratives shaping the conversation around voting and election administration in the leadup to the 2022 midterm elections. The Midterm Monitor tracks so [...]