Impact Bytes: Bolstering Democracy Through Data

Across the globe, 2024 is a banner year for elections, with more people expected to vote than ever before. More than 1.5 billion voters are expected to head to the polls this year, with significant elections planned in over 50 countries representing almost half of the world’s population.

In a pivotal year for democracy, data is more important than ever before. Open data gives citizens the information and access they need to fully participate in their democracies. It’s the foundation for transparent and inclusive democracies, playing a vital role in every stage of the electoral process—from voting to holding our elected officials accountable for how they govern.

This year, Splunk was pleased to support several remarkable organizations leveraging data to empower citizens and strengthen accountability. Free Our Vote restores voting rights for citizens who have lost them due to past convictions. ProPublica empowers the electorate by supporting nonpartisan, data-driven journalism, and the Investigative Journalism Foundation helps ensure the public sector remains accountable to its citizens through public-interest databases that power hard-hitting reporting. We are honored to highlight each organization below.

Free Our Vote: Restoring Voting Rights for People with Past Convictions

Millions of Americans with past felony convictions could vote but don’t, not because they don’t want to—but because they don’t know they can. Complex state voting laws have created a confusing landscape that deters them from participating in the country’s democracy. 

Free Our Vote leverages AI and other advanced technology, analyzing criminal court data to identify people with past convictions who may be eligible to have their voting rights restored and any specific legal barriers they may face, like repayment of court debt. Then, it conducts hyper-targeted outreach efforts that assist those citizens in registering and voting. Their proven model has increased voter turnout by up to 26%.

“Free Our Vote was able to call and get my fines and fees taken care of. [They] moved a mountain that I didn’t have the energy or funds to move,” says Latanya, who is again a registered voter in her state.

Founded in 2020, Free Our Vote is scaling up to reach millions of potential unserved voters. Additional funding allows for crucial investments in technology infrastructure, supporting their long-term vision of expanding voting rights to all eligible Americans and restoring trust in democratic institutions.

ProPublica: Data-Driven Journalism for a More Just Society

At a time when many local, independent media outlets have closed their doors, investigative journalism is more vital than ever. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that seeks to create a more just democracy by pursuing challenging news stories that fuel a stronger culture of accountability—and empower citizens to take informed action. 

ProPublica’s team of data reporters has skills ranging from data visualization to advanced statistical analysis and coding. They partner with narrative reporters to analyze large data sets, identify trends and patterns, and present complex information clearly and compellingly based on empirical evidence. To further its mission, ProPublica offers data expertise to support other newsrooms in producing investigative journalism of their own.

Data journalism has the power to drive significant change. ProPublica’s reporters modeled and analyzed five years of modeled EPA (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) data to identify more than 1,000 toxic hot spots. They found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable. By holding government agencies accountable, their reporting spurred reforms like expanded air monitoring, additional unannounced inspections, two state cancer studies and ultimately led the EPA to announce new regulations that will cut annual emissions by 80% of ethylene oxide (the single biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide). 

The Investigative Journalism Foundation: Transparency to Strengthen Canadian Democracy 

The Investigative Journalism Foundation (IJF), Canada’s leading nonprofit investigative newsroom, strengthens Canadian democracy by increasing transparency and accountability in the public sector at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. It publishes public-interest databases on topics like political donations and lobbyists and leverages those databases in its own hard-hitting investigative reporting. Today, IJF is the country’s only organization that centralizes and preserves these types of databases.

With just a few clicks, reporters can learn who is giving money to politicians, whether those donors are meeting to lobby with politicians, and which behind-the-scenes conversations happen before and after those meetings. In other words, they can discover who tries to influence the government and whether they succeed—stories that formerly took reporters weeks, if not months, to find. That makes IJF an impact multiplier that helps ensure more investigative stories about the Canadian public sector are published.

The IJF’s databases currently include 175,000 company names that likely represent only several thousand genuinely distinct companies, hampering efficiency and complicating database searches. With support from funders including Splunk, IJF has embarked on a project that draws on open records, data science algorithms, and investigative reporting techniques to standardize those names—positioning IJF to make an even greater impact in the Canadian public interest journalism sector.

Learn more about Splunk’s 2024 strategic grant recipients on splunk.com.