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U.S. Building Trust Prize
Open Data
Voter Information
Voting Rights and Access
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U.S. Voting Laws & Legislation Center
The Problem
Transparency is a critical cornerstone of the rule of law. To ensure that electoral processes and transitions of government power are subject to the law, people must first understand what the law requires.
The Approach
The U.S. Voting Laws & Legislation Center was launched in August 2022 as a free, public tool to access and track U.S. federal and state voting and election laws on key voting law topics including proposed legislation. This analytics and research tool provides the public with full-text access to timely, fact-based, unbiased records of such laws and legislation. The growing repository boasts over 50,000 enacted laws, more than 2,000 proposed legislative items, underlying documents, and an interactive heat map. The website includes helpful features such as a U.S. legislative activity map allowing for comparisons across states, as well as a comparison grid to compare specific laws state-by-state. The site also includes a real-time scrolling listing of news related to election laws in the U.S. Access to this information is intended to empower voters and build knowledge about voting law, election law, and the U.S. legal system. It allows everyone to see first-hand all voting law activities that are happening at state and federal levels, without relying on rumor or social media.
The Impact
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Since its inception, the website has had over 23,000 landing page hits, nearly 4,000 searches run, nearly 8,700 jurisdictional comparisons made, and over 3,300 documents viewed.
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Website usage spiked around the 2022 U.S. midterm election and the November 2023 election periods, and usage is again rising in the run up to the 2024 election.
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The website has been presented to the American Bar Association, National Bar Association, International Bar Association, various law schools, judicial groups, media groups, and professional organizations.
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This website is being used by these groups and many more to promote education and uphold election protections
The Future
There are ongoing plans to extend the website’s features and capabilities in 2024. These plans include adding more legal content including selected court opinions, adding new tools to improve one’s ability to review, understand and assess laws, and adding new features that will allow deep comparisons across jurisdictions to assess voting accessibility and requirements state by state. This is an enduring effort to promote free and fair elections, transparency, and the rule of law.