Elections & Democracy

We work closely with global civil society partners, conducting monitoring, data gathering, and analysis to ensure information integrity, monitor and address toxicity and hate speech, and map and analyze extremist networks, inauthentic networks, and foreign influence operations targeting democratic processes, infrastructure, and elections.

Elections have become flashpoints, allowing antidemocratic actors to advance polarization and undermine political processes, institutions, and the foundations upon which governance and due process are built. Further, we have observed that increased toxicity, hate speech, and polarization create a hostile and unsustainable environment for marginalized groups, Indigenous communities, women, and others. This limits access to participation in political discourse processes and elections. For targeted communities, this poses an existential threat, limits freedom of expression, and undermines the integrity of democratic institutions and due process.

Our analytic and data capabilities at Revontulet offer a unique opportunity to monitor and map threats targeting democratic institutions, processes, and elections. This empowers communities to take preemptive action to protect infrastructure, candidates, and the meaningful participation in democratic processes of stakeholders from diverse communities across the political spectrum.


What we offer

We take a comprehensive approach to protecting elections and democracy. Elections are one element of wider political and democratic processes; long-term engagement both before, during, and after elections is thus vital to maximizing the impact of the support we can provide in ensuring the safety and sanctity of elections and the availability of meaningful participation in democratic processes.

Challenges we address throughout our efforts include:

  • Toxicity and hate speech that limits the space for meaningful participation of targeted individuals and groups in political processes.

  • Conspiracy theories, dis/mis/malinformation driving societal polarization and disrupting political processes and meaningful participation. 

  • The contents and actors involved in coordinated attacks and inauthentic behaviors, such as malicious foreign influence operations, information warfare, malicious campaign finance, lobbying, corruption, etc.

  • The landscape of hate and threats faced by women politicians and participants in democratic and political processes.

  • The relationships between online threats and physical violence, both through doxxing & release of personal info of candidates and participants in political processes, and threats against officials, voting locations, and infrastructure.

We strive to work continuously with local implementing partners to ensure the integrity of democratic processes, elections, and political participation throughout the democratic and electoral cycle.

Our Election Focused Cycle

  • Mapping threats and stakeholders, conducting preliminary analysis of discourse, actors, and malign influence efforts that may threaten elections and democratic infrastructure; contributing to polarization, hostility, and malicious influence in the political landscape.

  • Monitoring, analysing, reporting, and responding to threats, development of materials, and delivery of capacity-building efforts and programming with local stakeholders and partners to address localized risks and threats facing elections and democratic processes prior to the election.

  • Ongoing monitoring of extremism, toxicity, inauthentic coordinated influence operations, and mis/dis/malinformation in the online information landscape, support on strategy development, and ongoing evaluation of efforts to preserve electoral integrity.

  • Threat assessment and monitoring of threats against election locations, officials, international monitoring efforts, and attempts at interfering with the electoral process.

  • Monitoring of election conspiracies, attempts at delegitimizing the outcomes of electoral processes and otherwise undermining electoral results, transfers of power, and establishing new governments and governing structures after elections and democratic transitions.

  • Aggregate results from monitoring and other efforts into a report, showing trends and potential shortcomings in regulation and national response, evaluating key findings and challenges, and feeding into preparation for the continuing cycle and extending learnings to other democratic processes globally.

Our Clients

Our clients include civil society organizations, international non-governmental organizations, municipalities and local government, and other stakeholders engaged in protecting the integrity and sanctity of the democratic process and political discourse.

Key deliverables offered to clients throughout this cycle may include:

  • Continuous monitoring of extremism and disinformation in the online and offline information landscape.

  • Written briefs summarizing extremist and disinformation narratives and trends.

  • Dataset and dashboards for near-real-time monitoring and analysis. 

  • The development and implementation of capacity-building efforts, training materials, and resources to counteract threats to democracy and meaningful participation.

Our services are developed in partnership with clients to empower teams to take strategic and impactful action. The goal is to provide internal teams at partnering organizations with the knowledge and data they need to do more with less and maximize cost-effective impact to protect democratic institutions and ensure political participation.