ISS MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Each month, Innovations for Successful Societies publishes an email newsletter, highlighting recently-published case studies and related interviews. To learn more about how local leaders around the globe are generating and implementing effective reforms, sign up to receive our newsletter.

ISS MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

February 2023

Enhancing Fairness: Wisconsin Experiments with Nonpartisan Election Administration

What might induce politicians from opposing parties to join in creating a nonpartisan elections management body? In the wake of a 2001 scandal over the use of government employees to assist political campaigns, public interest groups in the US state of Wisconsin pushed for adoption of nonpartisan governance of its ethics and elections boards and found a champion in moderate Republican senator Michael G. Ellis. Five years of negotiation came to fruition in 2007, when the state senate and assembly voted to create a consolidated election and ethics agency directed by retired judges. The first nonpartisan election administration authority of its type in the United States, the new agency, called the Government Accountability Board, replaced a system that had vested governance of elections in a commission made up of members of both major parties. But eight years later, political alignments shifted. Arguing that the board had overreached in its handling of certain sensitive cases, state legislators in 2015 voted to shutter the institution and reverted to the pre-2007 system run by representatives of the two major political parties. This case illuminates both the circumstances that can drive politicians to introduce a nonpartisan election management system and the challenges associated with the design, implementation, and sustainability of the approach.

Cape Town Resevoir

Defending the Vote:France Acts to Combat Foreign Disinformation -After a hack-and-leak operation that targeted a candidate in France’s 2017 presidential election and a social media campaign against the country’s exports in 2020, the French government decided to take steps to protect its politics from foreign digital interference. With another national election approaching in April 2022, Lieutenant Colonel Marc- Antoine Brillant began designing a new unit that aimed to detect foreign information manipulation while preserving freedom of speech by separating responsibility for identification of attacks from responsibility for framing and executing a response. After the proposal cleared legal hurdles, Brillant’s team, under the authority of the Secretariat- General for National Defense and Security, set up an interagency governance system, initiated a dialogue with social media platforms, and monitored social media to detect hostile campaigns. During the 2022 campaign, the unit, called Viginum, identified five foreign interference attempts and referred them to other parts of government that could decide whether and how to react. The elections ran smoothly, and the Viginum team started to focus on building stronger public understanding of its mission and activities.

ISS MONTHLY NEWSLETTER