It’s been longer than I’d like since I last posted. We lead a lot of projects to successful completion, however, taking a breath and sharing more about our work is something I am pledging to do better in the new year.

For those who are new here, let me fill you in a bit. Since 2015, The Turnout has been working to help non-profit organizations, academic institutions, companies, and federal, state, and local governments to better understand, assess, and improve their transactional data, visualize and analyze their processes, and standardize and validate their data. Most of The Turnout’s current work touches the fields of election administration and technology.

I’m sure you still have a few questions after reading that, so for more info on The Turnout and a few of our client projects, please see our company overview. We’ll also be refreshing our website heading into 2024, and we’ll talk about those updates here as they happen.

After that intro, I’ll get to the main reason for my post. I’m really proud to announce that Grace Gordon has joined our team here at The Turnout as Research Associate and Project Manager—and this could not have happened at a more opportune time as we look ahead to the 2024 presidential election season (NB: feel free to read the entire press release here).

For those of you who do not know Grace, you are truly missing out. She is an extraordinarily talented professional who brings a wealth of experience, expertise, and a fresh perspective in election policy and technology to our team at The Turnout. This will be hugely beneficial to our clients’ and collaborators’ teams.

Grace comes to us by way of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) Elections Project where she produced several in-depth reports on aspects of election administration and policy in the U.S. including: "The Federal Role in U.S. Elections Visualized" and "Ballot Pre-Processing Policies Explained." Prior to BPC, Grace served in positions at the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College and California Voter Foundation (CVF).

Grace earned her Master of Development Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, where she wrote her capstone thesis–“Documenting and Addressing Harassment of Election Officials”–on the threats and harassment experienced by state and local election officials resulting from the 2020 election, later published by CVF. As I state in our official announcement on her arrival below, Grace is a valuable addition to our team and a great fit for our culture and vision. Welcome, Grace!

In closing, as we come off the Thanksgiving holiday and look to the last weeks of 2023, I want to say how profoundly grateful I am for every one of our team members here at The Turnout. I am enormously proud of all of them and thankful for their dedication to our work and their unwavering support of our clients and their needs. I’m also very thankful for our clients, collaborators and friends—and to all who are reading this. Thank you and Happy Holidays!