“Advancing democracy reflects our values and is an important means of advancing America’s interests and protecting our national security in a turbulent and often violent world,” said NDI president Kenneth Wollack in testimony this week before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs. This was a full committee hearing entitled Democracy Promotion in a Challenging World and the discussion was a broad overview of both the hurdles and successes in fragile states.

As part of the National Democratic Institute’s ongoing mission to work for democracy and make democracy work around the world, we are updating some of our policies in order to ensure the privacy of those who interact with the Institute. Effective May 25th, 2018, NDI is updating it privacy policy, online platforms and organizational procedures to bring them into alignment with General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”).

Brussels, Belgium — The Defending Digital Democracy project (D3P) at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center joined the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) for the public launch of the “The Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook: European Edition” in Brussels on May 22, 2018.

While disinformation in traditional media has been used for decades, digital disinformation and computational propaganda, which uses artificial intelligence and political “bots” or pieces of code to manipulate public opinion online, have grown exponentially. An increasing number of elections across Europe and Eurasia are influenced by disinformation tactics.

To address this challenge, NDI conducted a four-day academy for 15 citizen election monitoring organizations from 11 countries. The event, which was held in Belgrade in April 2018, provided citizen activists with new strategies, skills, and tools to identify and expose disinformation during elections and to use electoral data to raise the level of fact-based discourse.