Experts from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) today urged President Biden to establish a bipartisan presidential commission to recommend ways to restore public trust in democracy.
CDT Senior Technologist on Elections and Democracy William T. Adler and ASD Elections Integrity Fellow David Levine are providing a blueprint for the creation of the new presidential commission in a joint report, Trusting the Vote: Establishing a Presidential Commission on Election Resilience and Trust.
“Distrust in American democracy is nearing catastrophic levels,” says Adler. “The violent insurrectionists at the Capitol were partly driven by false claims of widespread fraud, and the Department of Homeland Security is warning about threats of violence from domestic extremists driven by false narratives and anger over the presidential election results.”
Levine says he and Adler are calling for “an all hands on deck approach to understand how to address this crisis.”
“We believe this new commission should convene experts from the public and private sectors across the political spectrum to study the phenomenon of mis- and disinformation and make recommendations to prevent its spread and bolster confidence in elections,” he says.
Specifically, the report calls on the new commission to focus on three areas:
- Best practices for bolstering trust in elections, such as more widespread adoption of robust post-election audits, which can increase voter confidence in election outcomes regardless of who wins;
- Best practices for countering false information from foreign and domestic actors that undermines confidence in election integrity; and
- How and whether to make permanent some of the administrative and policy changes state and local officials made in response to the coronavirus pandemic, such as expansion of absentee voting and early voting.
CDT is a 25-year-old 501(c)3 nonpartisan nonprofit organization working to promote democratic values by shaping technology policy and architecture.
The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), a nonpartisan initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, develops comprehensive strategies to deter, defend against, and raise the costs on autocratic efforts to undermine and interfere in democratic institutions.
For press inquiries, contact CDT’s Elizabeth Seeger at press@cdt.org and Rachael Dean Wilson at rwilson@securingdemocracy.org.