On Oct. 9, UC San Diego opened the Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections, a nonpartisan research initiative with the goal of improving voter confidence in United States elections. The center receives funding from a $2.5 million grant from the Election Trust Initiative, “a nonpartisan grant-making organization working to strengthen the field of election administration.”
The center is co-directed by Thad Kousser, a professor in the department of political science, and Lauren Prather, an associate professor of political science at the School of Global Policy and Strategy. It is located in the Social Sciences Public Engagement Building.
The Election Trust Initiative only accepts grant proposals by invitation. “We are one of 20 universities across the country invited to apply to host a center, and we were fortunate to be awarded the center,” Kousser said.
Kousser has studied American politics and elections and has written a number of books, including “The Logic of American Politics” and “Politics in the American States.” Prather has studied elections from an international perspective, co-wrote “Monitors and Meddlers: How Foreign Actors Influence Local Trust in Elections,” and has worked with groups such as the Carter Center to study the impacts of election monitors.
The Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections’ goal is to conduct research that meets the needs of election officials — including secretaries of state, state election directors, and county registrars — which will be collected through systematic surveys.
“This center is an important moment for universities to promote the work that university researchers do in improving the lives of people in their communities,” Prather said. “We hope to help elections run smoothly by building a playbook for election officials and practitioners so they are able to run elections with integrity and communicate that with the public so there is confidence in the system.”
Kousser expects transparency strategies to be the most impactful.
“When election officials open the doors to their vote counting facilities, give tours, create videos of those tours, and create public information campaigns that show real people behind these balloons, it effectively moves the needle in trust,” Kousser said.
Prather shed light on one of the center’s first projects.
“We are now planning to work with a new county in Idaho who is also interested in starting tours of their election faculty,” Prather said. “We can never say exactly for sure if what’s effective in one place is going to be effective in another, but it is our hope to build a body of evidence where we can start to generalize things that work and don’t work.”