New Guide Provides Concrete Elections Integrity Recommendations for Online Platforms
Integrity Institute releases the second best practices guide for supporting healthy elections across platforms
T-minus one year of the next United States presidential election is fast approaching. In addition, 2024 will bring a historic number of elections around the world – 65 elections across 54 countries, to be exact, a total we will not see again until 2048. As many campaigns have adopted a “digital-first strategy,” online platforms have become an integral part of the global elections landscape.
Elections matter, and history has demonstrated online platforms will find themselves grappling with these challenges whether they want to be or not. The two key questions facing online platforms now, as they stare down the tsunami of global elections heading their way, are: Have they initiated an internal elections integrity program? And if so, how do they ensure the best possible preparation to safeguard democracies globally?
The Integrity Institute’s Elections Program – supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – is creating resources for integrity professionals and stakeholders to protect elections online. In May 2023, the Integrity Institute released its first elections integrity best practices guide as a comprehensive resource for online companies, particularly those who are newer or smaller, to better support healthy elections by starting their own elections integrity programs.
Today, the Integrity Institute is proud to launch a second elections integrity best practices guide on “Defining and Achieving Success in Elections Integrity.” This latest guide extends the first and provides companies – large or small, established or new-on-the-block – concrete details as they fully implement an elections integrity program. These details include:
Setting specific goals, defining success, and measuring and monitoring with metrics;
A typology and examples of product design considerations and interventions;
Working with external parties, for various purposes and in various contexts;
Discussions of critical topics including how new generative AI may impact elections; various types of potentially abusive actors; and more.
“It’s one thing to start an elections integrity program. It’s a whole other to define what that means and set measurable goals. We hope this guide provides a framework for anyone who cares about these issues - whether at a platform or not - to think through their own definitions of success.”
This second elections integrity best practices guide covers topics spanning policy decisions, product and process implementation, as well as targeted explorations on metrics and goal-setting. We hope that this latest guide will provide a wealth of ideas and knowledge that can directly inform how platforms can address concretely election integrity risks via their internal elections integrity program.
###
Contact: Sean Wang, sean@integrityinstitute.org