The Concord Project
Elections are how a country holds power accountable and remains a country of laws, not of men. The Concord Project protects that promise through three programs: Elections, Judiciary, and Electoral Trust.
Three programs
In practice, that means election complaints are handled fairly, judges stay independent (including where they are elected), and judges and adjudicators can do their work without being threatened. Each of our three programs takes on part of that work.
Resolve, our Elections program, helps states settle election complaints quickly, fairly, and at low cost through Administrative Election Dispute Resolution (AEDR). The complaints are decided by people who know how elections work, and we build the process directly with election administrators.
Elections →Resolute, our Judiciary program, works on judicial elections and independence, on the safety of judges and election adjudicators, and on how courts and other bodies decide electoral complaints.
Judiciary →Through Assure, our Electoral Trust program, we carry out independent electoral trust and risk assessments with built-in technical advisory support, and we work on voter and civic education and on money in politics. Experts who want to join our roster apply through this program.
Electoral Trust →Nonpartisan commitments
Why us
Electoral trust and risk assessments make up much of that work, in roughly 30 of those 40 countries.
Assessment teams are drawn from experts we have vetted, so we can staff an engagement quickly.
Our new assessment and monitoring systems are thorough and fast, and they keep costs down without lowering the quality of the work.
We work with lawyers, judges, and election administrators we have known and worked with for years.
Our comparative research on AEDR underpins the Resolve pilot plan, which starts in Maryland and then moves to North Carolina and Arizona.
Latest from Insights
Our article in The Review of Litigation looks at why U.S. courts carry so much of the load in election disputes and what other democracies do differently. This summary covers the five design principles those systems share and what they mean for U.S. states.
If you administer elections, sit on a court, fund this field, or have the expertise to join an assessment team, we would like to hear from you.