Our Mission
To train and mobilize a U.S. election Fairness Force to ensure all voters can vote and that our votes are counted accurately.
Our Vision
A nation where all voters and our votes are universally cherished as essential to ensuring that those elected to public office truly represent the honorable values and priorities of the people.
Our History
Emily Levy founded Scrutineers in January 2020, after working for transparent elections since the 2004 election. She recognized that there were likely millions of Americans who were concerned about the security of our elections yet had no idea that there were actions they could take to help create transparent elections we all can trust. At the same time, she saw that people who did know what could be done to increase election transparency were stretched beyond their limits. She wanted to bring these two populations together, so expertise would be shared with people who could fan out to protect elections around the U.S.
The freedom to vote is at the center of our work to achieve elections where every voice is heard.
She wanted to create a place where people newly interested in election protection could learn the basics needed to become effective advocates for voting rights and election security. She built our membership site, where people can watch and participate in online training sessions, ask questions, share their knowledge, and access other learning resources.
What We Do
In our first year, we enrolled hundreds of individual members and eight member organizations. As we trained our members in a variety of election protection tactics, we helped develop, strengthen, and amplify the work of our member organizations.
We advocated for best practices in election administration as the nation moved largely to vote-by-mail in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We trained poll workers to document any incidents they observed, to help verify that the election was being run in ways that follow the law.
Our members became poll workers, election observers, and advocates.
Our public education efforts included a limited podcast series in collaboration with WhoWhatWhy.org and interviews for podcasts and online media outlets.
When the nation’s attention focused on the Georgia Senate runoff election in January 2021, we hired a field team and partnered with our member organizations DemocracyCounts and ProtectOurVotes to obtain and then analyze images of poll tapes at 219 precincts in largely Black communities.
In 2021 we’ve been part of the resistance to attacks on the freedom to vote happening around the nation, while planning our strategy to help protect the 2022 election from sabotage. In this era of deep divisions in civic life, we proudly remain nonpartisan as we work to protect every voter and protect every vote.
For the first 22 months of our existence, Scrutineers was fiscally sponsored by Concentric Media. Our new fiscal sponsor is Netroots Foundation.