Jobs & Marketplace

Location: Brooklyn, NY (upon office reopening) or remote within the US
Fellowship dates: July 21, 2020 – November 6, 2020
Stipend: $22,400 for 16 week fellowship (paid in semi-monthly installments)
Level: Junior

Organizational overview:
At Democracy Works, we believe voting should fit the way we live. To that end, we build technology for both voters and election administrators that simplifies the process and ensures that no voter should ever have to miss an election.
TurboVote, our first service, helps voters register, stay registered, and cast a ballot in every election, from municipal to national. We’ve signed up more than seven million voters for TurboVote by building the largest college, nonprofit, and corporate voter engagement coalition in the country, including more than 300 campuses, nonprofits like Headcount, the Sierra Club, Climate Strikes, and the Hispanic Federation, companies like Starbucks, Univision, Facebook, Google, Snap, and dozens more. We also helped (basically) everyone find their polling place through the Voting Information Project. Its data had 123 million impressions in 2016, and over 11 million voters looked up where to vote on GetToThePolls.com. Ballot Scout helps election administrators track absentee ballots through the mail, providing transparency in the vote-by-mail process and making it easier to follow up when things go awry. And in 2018, we became the organizational home of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED).
The Voting Information Project (VIP) coordinates with state election offices to publish nationally standardized information about where and how to vote—data that powers everything from Google’s polling place search, to our text and email reminders to TurboVote users. VIP’s dataset has served millions (and hundreds of millions) of voters since 2008.

You will:
Work with Democracy Works technical staff to write, run, and debug Python scripts to parse data
Assist with standardizing & sanitizing datasets
Perform quality assurance checks on the information to ensure accuracy and completeness of the data
Research and respond to user-reported errors
Write and update technical documentation so that other members of the team can recreate processes

You are:
Extremely attentive to details
Comfortable writing scripts and wrangling data
Able to organize non-centralized, non-standard information into a coherent format
Skilled at managing competing priorities
Happy to pitch in wherever help is needed

You have experience:
Creating, modifying, and running scripts in Python, R, SQL, SAS, or a similar language
Communicating across different areas of expertise and working in teams
Working on tight deadlines and quickly turning around deliverables

Physical demands:
This position requires regular, daily use of a computer to conduct work and communicate with colleagues. Our Brooklyn office is currently closed, and all staff members are working remotely from their homes. For those working out of our Brooklyn office upon its reopening, the F train stops closest to our office, but exiting the station requires the use of four flights of stairs. Our office has an elevator available at street level. Streets and buildings nearby are currently under construction, which can disrupt sidewalks and results in varying levels of construction noise audible from the office. Our offices share a set of gendered bathrooms with other offices on our floor, and there are no gender neutral bathrooms in the building at this time.

Social expectations:
This position requires regular check-ins with colleagues and occasional external-facing meetings.
Time and travel expectations
Democracy Works’s regular operating hours are 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. Eastern Time. No travel is expected for this role.

Application Instructions:
To apply, please send a resume and respond to the following questions (instead of a cover letter) using the form below.
In your responses, please include only the following information:
How did you find this job listing?
In one sentence, what makes you interested in Democracy Works?
In one sentence, what makes you interested in this role?
Would you be available to start by July 28?
Do you have any planned travel or absences between July 28 and November 3?
Are you willing to work at a non-partisan organization?
Do you have experience working with Python, SQL, R, SAS, or a similar scripting language?
As part of our application, you’ll see an optional form used to collect EEOC demographic information. The data collected in this form is useful in our EEOC reporting and in our assessment of our recruitment practices. However, please keep in mind that the standardized EEOC language used in this form does not reflect the values of Democracy Works–for example, we don’t view gender as binary. We also encourage all applicants to state their pronouns when applying for any job opening at Democracy Works.
Democracy Works is committed to diversity and inclusion in everything we do and aspires to have a team that’s representative of the voters we serve. When hiring, we practice proactive outreach to top talent that’s underrepresented in our sector. We conduct an anonymized skills evaluation, to reduce implicit bias and resume-dependency in our process. We’re a woman- and gay-founded nonprofit, and promote an inclusive culture that stands against racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (to name a few). To be explicit, we strongly encourage applicants of all races, ethnicities, political party associations, religions (or lack thereof), national origins, sexual orientations, genders, sexes, ages, abilities, and branches of military service.

Feel free to contact work@democracy.works if you have any questions about our commitment to inclusion or about general hiring practices, or if you need an accommodation for a medical condition during the hiring process. Democracy Works posts all current career opportunities at democracy.works/careers.