Meet the Male Champions Supporting Kenya's New Women Politicians

In China, rampant sales tax fraud was addressed with a unique solution. In an attempt to increase transparent sales and receipt use, the government implemented a scratch lottery system on receipts. This solution, using lottery systems to increase turnout and engagement, is being used across the globe, even in the United States to help increase voter turnout.

Corruption in Mexico is ingrained in all systems and interactions. President Vicente Fox and his administration are trying to change this. Their mentality is that for corruption to truly be fought the government needs to actively make change and implement rules to counteract it, and some of Fox's changes are now beginning to see improvements.

Voter registration groups, such as Next Gen and the Florida Federation of Young Republicans, were the second most common method of getting new voters to register in Florida. To grab young voters, these organizations showed up in classrooms and club meetings and focused on issues that youth care about, including the cost of college and gun violence.

In Rochester, NY, the Center for Teen Empowerment, a nonprofit that trains youth in community organizing, personal development, and anti-violence, is working to bring kids off the street and into safety. The program, which started in Boston, is centered on four ideas: jobs (paying the youth hired as organizers), teamwork, agency (letting them build their own activist agendas), and peer influence. While hard to evaluate because of its situational, qualitative nature, city officials, including law enforcement, point to the program as a factor in the decrease in violence across the city.

Ameelio is a technology startup launched by Yale students to facilitate free communication between people who are incarcerated and loved ones. In their first six months, the group went from sending 300 to over 4,000 letters a week to facilities in the United States. Their initial goal was to provide a not-for-profit alternative to the oftentimes predatory prison telecommunications industry. Recently they began a voter registration initiative where they send registration instructions, a blank voter registration application, and ballot request form to people who are incarcerated and eligible to vote.

The coronavirus made cramped or high-risk polling locations untenable so at least 39 sports arenas have opened up their facilities for voting. Their expansive size allows them to welcome large numbers of voters while maintaining social distancing protocols. Many are outdoors, which lowers the risk of transmitting the virus even further. Prompted by calls from athletes, arena owners’ site the summer’s racial-justice demonstrations as inspiration for supplying the spaces since voting is a key way to create definitive changes. Voters were thrilled to cast their ballots in a sports arena.

A growing number of governments, companies, and nonprofit organizations are working together with new technology and data to identify fishing vessels that are breaking laws and engaging in human rights violations. Using satellite imagery and tracking signals, for example, a philanthropic company and a nonprofit worked with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to help the Ghanian navy arrest four vessels for illegal fishing practices. Technology by itself won’t stop forced labor and unregulated ships, but it can be helpful for cash-strapped governments looking to increase oversight of their fisheries.

Illinois’ 2018 automatic voter registration law resulted in 111,000 additional voter registration applications. Under the automatic system, eligible voters are automatically registered to vote with their most up-to-date address and information every time they interact with state agencies, like the DMV. Each time there is a new interaction with a state agency, voter rolls are updated and individuals who don’t want to be registered can proactively opt-out.

Unite Here, a 300,000-member labor union of hotel and restaurant workers, has organized mass protests to pass voting rights legislation. In 2020 they ran a huge door-knocking operation with 500 full-time paid canvassers. The weekly salary helped canvassers, many of whom were hotel workers that lost their jobs due to the pandemic. And the well-organized ground campaign that encouraged over 48,000 infrequent voters in Arizona to vote for Biden, likely helped push Biden to a narrow and surprising victory in that state.

Non-citizen residents of Takoma Park, Maryland have been able to vote in municipal elections since 1993, and 16- and 17-year-olds there have had access to the ballot since 2013. Residents of the city, where roughly 30% of the population was born outside of the United States, say participating in city elections makes them feel more welcome in the community and helps them get invested in local issues.