Though it feels like years ago these days, CTCL hosted its 5th Annual Ballot Data Convening less than two months ago on February 7th at the Google Offices in Washington DC. First organized by CTCL and the Democracy Fund in 2016, the Ballot Data Convening brings people together each year to focus on the question “How can we work together to better connect the public with critical voting and election information?” This year more than 30 attendees from over 20 organizations across the data publishing, technology, and civic engagement fields to accomplish three main objectives:

• Learn about the ballot data related work organizations have planned for 2020
• Identify challenges facing organizations’ 2020 work and discuss strategies for mitigating those challenges
• Gather feedback and commitments on solutions for commonly identified problems facing the ballot data community.

The morning session consisted of large and small group discussions where participants learned about each other’s work, what everyone was excited about, and anticipated challenges facing the field in 2020. In the afternoon participants broke out into smaller groups to discuss specific questions in commonly identified challenge areas. The subjects discussed in afternoon sessions included:

• Political Geography: What needs to be included in building an open-source system for sharing political geography data across organizations, and what does it look like to start populating it in 2020?
• Audience & Impact: What best practices and recommendations can we share with practitioners, funders, and others to better measure who our work is reaching and how it is making a difference?
• Data Collection & Sharing: What needs to be included in a system for sharing collected ballot information across organizations, and what does it look like to start populating it in 2020?
• Trust & Security: What best practices and recommendations can we share with practitioners, funders, and others to prevent dis-, mis-, and mal- information in our work eroding voter confidence?

You can view the list of participants at this year’s convening here, and notes from the day can be found online here. A full report and follow-up materials will be released in the coming months, so stay tuned to this space for more information. In addition to helping shape CTCL and other organizations’ collaborative approaches to the work, the convening serves as a touchpoint for the broader community to come together to connect and learn from each other each year. We look forward to next year’s convening, where we can continue to foster that connection between organizations and debrief what will doubtlessly be a uniquely challenging election for all of us.