Our Impact

At Issue One, we don’t just imagine a better democracy — we’re taking action to build it.

We’re working to ensure a democracy enhancing information environment:

• For over a year, Issue One has been advocating for legislation to ensure kids’ online safety – the Kids Online Safety Act. In late July 2024, the U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act in a historic and bipartisan vote. The bill, which combines two pieces of bipartisan legislation — Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) Children’s and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) — directly addresses the harmful social media business model by placing the health, well-being, and privacy of minor users over advertising revenue. Next up on the legislation’s journey is passage in the U.S. House, where Issue One continues to push for its advancement.
• In late 2022, we established the Council for Responsible Social Media to bring together a multi-sectoral group of leaders who are focused on finding solutions to the technological harms to our kids, communities, and national security.

We’re strengthening and protecting our elections:

• In the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, Issue One was at the forefront of crucial efforts to support election officials, combat false election information, and educate voters about how elections work to ensure that voters have confidence in the integrity of election results, even when their preferred candidate does not win. By reinforcing transparency and informed participation, we aim to safeguard the democratic process and uphold the legitimacy of elections.
• Our Faces of Democracy campaign — powered by election workers themselves — was built to strengthen our country’s critical election infrastructure by winning sufficient, regular, and predictable federal funding for state and locally-administered elections, bolstering protections for election workers and facilities, and building trust in our system of free and fair elections. Faces members have testified before Congress, lended their voices to efforts to call for more election funding, and so much more.
• Following the 2020 election, we worked with partners for nearly two years to bring Republicans and Democrats in Congress together to pass the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act (S. 4573) in Dec. 2022 to ensure the peaceful transfer of power following future presidential elections.
• Throughout the years, we’ve helped advocate for and win federal election funding so that election administrators around the country have the resources they need to continue to run safe and secure elections. We’ve done so throughout the years, and will continue to do so until those who run our elections have reliable and consistent federal funding.
• We established the National Council on Election Integrity (NCEI) in advance of the 2020 presidential election to push back against false and misleading information and to promote the safety, security, and accessibility of U.S. elections. In October 2020, the NCEI launched its “Count Every Vote” campaign, a $15 million public education effort to encourage calm and crosspartisan cooperation in the post-election period, and demand that every vote be counted.

We’re exposing the influence of special interest in our politics:

• Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Issue One released an investigative report exposing the funding behind the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a network of 80+ organizations amplifying the false narrative that noncitizens are voting in federal elections. Our analysis tracked $590 million in contributions from over 140 donor organizations, revealing connections to Project 2025 and high -profile efforts to shape the policy agenda of a second Trump administration.
• Led a crosspartisan coalition that urged all candidates in the 2020 and 2024 presidential races to disclose information about their big-money campaign “bundlers,” fundraisers who are often rewarded with special perks and government positions, such as ambassadorships.
• Published the “Outsized Influence” report on political megadonors, which received widespread press attention, including an exclusive story in the New York Times.
• Released a hard-hitting report that identified nine of the most notable companies and political consultants that profited from election denialism and anti-democracy candidates during the 2022 midterm elections.

We’re modernizing the legislative branch:

• After Issue One joined calls for a permanent modernization subcommittee, in early 2023 the House Administration Committee announced the establishment of a permanent modernization subcommittee to continue the important work of the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress – improving and strengthening the legislative branch.
• We helped push to create a pay floor for House staffers to help Congress better reflect and serve the American people, including publishing a report that found that 1 in 8 D.C.-based congressional staffers made less than a living wage in 2020.
• Beginning in 2018, we joined a diverse array of organizations and advocates to push for the creation of the bipartisan Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which advanced a total of 202 bipartisan recommendations — of which 130 have been fully or partially implemented to make the House a more functional, accessible, transparent, representative, and technologically adept institution.
• A bill – that was originally introduced in the Senate in 2003 – which would require U.S. Senate candidates to join all other federal candidates in electronically filing their campaign finance reports was passed as a provision in an appropriations bill in Sept. 2018. This commonsense policy was a victory for government transparency and disclosure.