Type of Activity: General Operating Support
Grantee: Defending Digital Campaigns
Amount: Updated to $300,000 in 2022
What is Defending Digital Campaigns?
Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC) is a nonprofit and non-partisan organization committed to bringing cybersecurity tools and resources to federal election campaigns.
Defending Digital Democracy works to make our political process more secure by providing political parties and campaigns with the knowledge, products, and services to defend themselves from cyber threats and attacks.
Why do we think this organization is important?
Defending Digital Campaign provides free and reduced-cost cybersecurity services to campaigns that are operating at the federal, state and local levels.
Election campaigns lack support for cybersecurity even though they are primary targets for cyber attacks from those who would seek to disrupt an election. Establishing a robust and secure system is difficult due to the high cost of products, lack of technical expertise, and the decentralized nature of political campaigns. Defending Digital Campaigns overcomes these challenges by working with credible vendors to obtain access to cybersecurity tools at a lower cost, and by providing education and information sharing for campaigns.
Ensuring that our elections are safe from outside influence is necessary to maintain the public’s trust in electoral results. For democracy to succeed, voters need to be confident in the integrity of the electoral process.
How is Democracy Fund Voice supporting Defending Digital Campaigns?
In 2022 an amendment was approved to increase the amount of the grant by $150,000, for a total of $300,000, with an extension of the grant period through March 2023.
In 2021, Democracy Fund Voice approved a grant of $150,000 to Defending Digital Campaigns. A previous grant of $250,000 was made in 2019.