Democracy Maine-stream: A Conversation with Anna Kellar
Anna Kellar of Democracy Maine outside the State House in Augusta.
In my last post, I touched on the imperative of denationalizing our democracy, seeing ourselves not just as voters but as citizens, and revitalizing our civic culture and community-level ties. This work has to be done at the state and local levels. What does it look like? Who are the civil society groups and civic leaders that can help us tackle it?
In today’s post, we hear from a state-based civic leader who is uniquely positioned to illuminate these challenges. Anna Kellar leads Democracy Maine, an innovative collaboration that includes the League of Women Voters of Maine, Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, and Maine Students Vote.
I wanted to speak with Anna for a few reasons. As a nonprofit leadership and management nerd, I admire how Anna and the board members, staff, and volunteers of Democracy Maine have joined forces across organizational boundaries in fruitful ways. Their collaboration is unconventional and exemplary.
Maine is also a fascinating laboratory for state-level democracy reforms. It is one of a handful of states to have passed and maintained a clean elections law that provides public financing for candidates running for governor and state legislative offices. It was also the first state to adopt ranked choice voting on a state-wide basis.[1] I was particularly interested in learning from the experience that Anna and Democracy Maine have had working with national funders and advocates advancing these and similar reforms in their state.
The following interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, touches on the following themes.
Why the groups that comprise Democracy Maine opted for a deep collaboration but stopped short of a merger.
The fresh and holistic leadership that Anna brings to this work and how it has paid dividends.
What distinguishes Maine’s political and civic culture–and how Anna and team have sought to work with rather than against the grain of it to make progress.
The opportunities and challenges for state and local civic groups when working with national funders and advocates–and some “do’s” and “don'ts” for the latter.
The special power and potential of organizing to improve democracy and citizenship in small towns and rural areas.
How Democracy Maine is exploring ways to adapt and remix innovations like citizens' assemblies to enliven and complement old-school New England town meetings.
Daniel: Anna, welcome–I’m eager to catch up! Let’s start by having you give us an overview of Democracy Maine, the network that you lead, and how it came together.
Anna: Under the umbrella of Democracy Maine, we have three organizations. They all have a shared mission of increasing civic engagement and making democracy work in our state.
In 2017, the League of Women Voters of Maine, which was an all-volunteer organization, and Maine Citizens for Clean Elections, which was a small, staffed nonprofit, were both doing strategic plans. I was then on staff for the Clean Elections organization. Both organizations had been working closely together. We also had some overlapping board members, and they noted we were becoming more like each other. So we all asked, is there really space for two multi-issue nonpartisan democracy reform organizations in a state like Maine? It seemed clear we were either going to be in competition with each other in a way that could be really destructive, or we would have to figure out a way to work together.
So that's where the conversation began. A merger was going to be complicated, and we didn’t want either organization to disappear. There was also a huge amount of work to do in defending and implementing ranked choice voting. We had to do a lot of voter education, which the League is really good at, and a state-wide campaign, which Clean Elections had experience with, as well as the reach and scale necessary for that. We needed both organizations and decided to share not only our missions but also our resources and back-office support.
I ended up in the shared leadership role. The combination was transformative right away. I was able to hire other staff and launch us into this ambitious shared project. Everything that could have been overly complicated and dragged on forever with a merger––all that stuff got pushed aside in favor of, simply, how do we get the work we need to do together done right now?
To be clear, there was still a lot of change very quickly, a lot of cultural shifts that we had to catch up to. It was like when you are running downhill and trying to keep your feet underneath you. But we did it having already built a shared sense of purpose and infrastructure by doing the work together. Focusing on what we needed to make happen externally allowed us to treat our internal problems as obstacles we had to overcome in order to do the outside work that was so important to all of us.
Then, in 2019, Maine Students Vote came in as a fiscally sponsored project. It has a distinctive external brand and mission that we have incorporated, but it can also take advantage of all of our back-end resources without having to develop them itself. Now that we have a shared structure and are five years into it, we are looking at ways to simplify things further, while still not fully merging everything so we can maintain the separate brands and types of work that we do.
Daniel: As a rising leader at the outset of your career, you were navigating a situation of tremendous organizational complexity at a demanding time externally. In retrospect, do you think your approach gave you more degrees of freedom to try things, or perhaps an openness to experimentation, that helped you lead through this? What do you think were the leadership attributes you brought to bear that turned out to be most helpful? I know I am asking you to toot your own horn here, which won’t come naturally to you, but I am very curious about your reflections on this point.
Anna: My greatest strength is that I'm good at seeing connections between issues, people, and organizations. I tend to think in terms of networks and the ways that things can be more or less in alignment. I truly believe in intergenerational work, and in being able to build partnerships across differences that don't erase the ways that we are different. But nonetheless, I look for how we can be in alignment with each other, both within the organization and externally.
I also tend to gravitate toward trying to figure out how to make things work within systems and what parts of those systems can be made more effective. I keep finding myself in situations where I think to myself, “Well, I am within this structure that needs a lot of change, but here are the pieces of it that are really valuable and worth preserving and pulling forward. So how do we make change without throwing out what was good about the past?” I like to think I have a foot in these institutions and a foot in a place where I'm willing to say, “Let's try something radically brand new!”
Now of course the flip side of my perspective is not always being ready and able to say, this is the bottom line that I'm gonna ruthlessly pursue. I'm always the person who's saying, “Ohhh!—but what if we also added this other element in?”
I should also note that my board has given me a lot of latitude to lead in this way, to try things, to make mistakes, then correct them as we go. Not every nonprofit leader is given this opportunity.
Daniel: Let's talk about Maine, a state with a unique political and civic culture. It is one of a handful of states to introduce public financing for political campaigns. It was the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting. What gives rise to this experimentation?
Anna: I think a part of it comes from the New England town meeting, the idea that you are supposed to know the people making the decisions. Also, the distance between the average person and their representative is small. Those are elements of New England’s political culture.
The fact that the state has had so much homogeneity certainly helps in terms of people being willing to pull together behind ideas of common, shared systems that are going to work for everybody. For example, you can look at Maine and Vermont as the two states that have never banned people in prison from voting. We can be proud of that, and we are, but it also stems from the fact that it wasn't seen as a way to control and dampen a large black voting population.
Maine’s state motto is “the way life should be.” We take pride in being distinct, maybe a little bit eccentric, but maybe also a little bit better than other places. And you can tap into that idea in a way that makes people open to experimentation in small ways.
Another factor is that we have local government organized by town. The municipality is the primary driver of our government. We don't have strong counties, we have 500+ mostly small towns. Not that everybody is engaged with their town, but we all share the idea that there is a community in the places where we live, even in the most rural parts of western Maine.
In all those places, there are a few people who are holding the fabric of the town together. And when you start talking to them, they can connect you to whoever you need to know. I have learned that in many ways it is easier to organize in a small town than in a larger community, where people are a little less networked and are pulled in 100 different directions. I really enjoy doing that kind of organizing town-by-town in rural Maine. It’s something that transfers over into how we think about and do programming now around election observation. It’s a similarly distributed model.
We think about the same thing when doing constituent meetings with legislators. That kind of neighbor-to-neighbor engagement, pulling together a small group of people, can be really powerful. Our representatives only represent about 5,000 voters. If you get a few people together who are willing to say to their representative, “Hey, will you meet with us at the diner and have a conversation about some bills that we're interested in?” The legislator usually turns up. You might not convince them of things, but it can be quite powerful, even with just a few organized people.
That frame has absolutely shifted how I think about both the policies that we aim for and how we go about them. It's all about trying to increase people's ability to engage in politics at the local level, in order to make that accessible to more people and then to make the systems so that that kind of engagement continues to have meaning for the representatives.
Daniel: Let’s consider a challenge that I expect you have encountered. Democracy Maine’s network is deeply rooted in a state with a unique constellation of politics and civic culture. You are working with local allies and authorities on a broad range of issues, and have the local knowledge that comes with that. Then, when a nationally salient reform like ranked choice voting gets traction in your state, national funders and advocates come roaring to advance that single issue. What are the pain points that can arise in those circumstances? What “do’s” and “don'ts” would you like national reformers to keep in mind?
Anna: Well let me begin by saying we really do think about Maine being useful to the national democracy reform movement as a hub of innovation, as a place where policies can be pushed forward and tried out. We always want to know about the next exciting new idea, and how it could help us in Maine. That is not a problem. We like it when people come to us and say, “Hey, have you thought about this?” But then we need to be able to test it, to hold that idea up against where we're at and ask ourselves, “Is this going to help fix something that people really feel is an issue on the ground up here? And do we have the capacity to put this in place now?”
Now the answer to one or both of those questions may be no. You probably won’t know that, coming in from the outside. That's where the long-standing relationships and trust that we have built up over time with local and state allies and officials come into play. All these different players really matter. You can propose any idea or a policy that we might all agree would be the right solution in the end, but you have to ask, how do we sequence this in a feasible process?
Even though I am a huge fan of clean elections and ranked-choice voting, I strongly believe that no one policy is going to get us the democracy we need. So we have to keep saying, how do we layer things? What's next, once we've passed that exciting new thing, because it will take a long time to implement it, and people are going to keep pushing back at it. Also, it will do some of what we hope it will, but it won't do all of it. So what's next after that?
We could use help from national groups with that intellectual and planning work about what comes next, so while we are deep in the weeds of passing something, there's also some space to say, well, what's the implementation going to look like? But also what needs to happen two years from now, because even once that implementation occurs, what else will that set up? We don't always have the time for that. There's a real benefit for us in doing that together with national groups.
Daniel: What about national funders? What could they do differently and better?
Anna: Unfortunately, all too often, funders just jump into the campaign cycles when they are ripe. They want to chalk up the win. There's not nearly enough attention given to the implementation and defense in the long tail that all of these campaigns have. Nor to all the organizing work and the coalition-building and the idea development that it takes to build these wins in the first place. The majority of the work that has brought us our success does not happen during the year or six months of a campaign. It happens before or after the campaign itself.
We often take on work, having no idea whether we're going to be able to get it funded, just because it seems like it's the right thing to do. We hope that if we start laying it out, we'll get there. That is challenging. We've been in places where I think to myself, “I don't know if we're going to be able to be sustainable in the long term.” That is the risk that we took in building this organization. Can a multi-issue democracy reform and voter engagement organization exist over the long term in a state like Maine? The first few years were a great success. That was partly because we were in the national spotlight, both for the reforms that we were passing and also because we had an open Senate seat. But if the funding disappears again, after the campaign is over, it can do so much damage.
The boom and bust funding cycle is very painful. Among other things, it stops us from doing the work that we all know needs to be done, organizing and bringing in new people who don't always have the resources to be at the table. It takes years to build trust in communities of color. For example, there are a number of immigrant community organizations in Maine we've been working to build relationships with. They do not want to be just brought in during an election cycle.
Or take the town clerks. They are very, very wary of people just jumping in during an election cycle and wanting something from them and possibly criticizing them without really understanding them. It has taken us years to get to a point where we can have really frank conversations and have them actually come in and be supportive of policy items when that is needed.
So the jury is out on whether we can be sustainable working in this way. I'm trying to figure out how to do it with more in-state funding because that comes with fewer ups and downs. We have a few funders that have been really strong, year in and year out. It is remarkable how much of a difference that makes in terms of being able to plan, think ambitiously, and build trust with our partners. Multi-year general support grants make such a difference!
Daniel: As you look out over the next two or three years, what are the priorities for Democracy Maine? What are the things that you're endeavoring to accomplish in the near term?
Anna: Our most immediate policy goal is passing the national popular vote measure. We've come very close at times, and we think we're going to get it next year. That is one very concrete thing we can do in Maine to make a difference towards something on a national level.
Beyond that, we are trying to build a stronger coalition around democracy reform in the state. We have the Mainers for Modern Elections coalition that came out of the 2020 election. It has thought a lot about strengthening voting infrastructure, our Secretary of State’s office, and election administration. But it has only very tentatively looked at structural reform like money and politics and governance issues. We’ve gotten over some of the biggest hurdles with things like automatic voter registration, online voter registration, and ongoing absentee voting. There is certainly still work to be done there, but in order to figure out what are the most impactful things that we can be doing as a state, we need to come together and ask that question in a much more broad-based way. So a lot of the work that we're doing right now is in one-on-one conversations and coalition conversations, trying to expose more people to ideas around things like proportional representation, for example, or talking about other ways that we could be expanding on ranked-choice voting.
We have some real questions as a movement about the role of money in politics right now. Are things like independent expenditures how organizations build their power, or are they actually getting in the way of the ultimate power-building we want to be doing at the grassroots level? There are some really meaty questions that we're trying to answer as a coalition to figure out where we want to go together.
Finally, enriching engagement with local government. I say this not just because we look at election engagement and know that when we can get people voting at the local level, it is very meaningful for them and then brings them into other forms of voter engagement and civic engagement. But I say it also because Maine has these existing forms of direct democracy in town meetings that have some really interesting parts to them. Yet who can participate in them is fairly limited to who can afford to go spend a day at this meeting.
We've been thinking about how you take that existing structure of local government and town meetings and weave in innovative ideas like citizen assemblies. We're not presuming we are starting from scratch in a progressive city, but maybe there's a way to bring that innovation into the places that already have living forms of direct democracy right now at the local level and enrich them in the process. This area has a lot of longer-term, big-picture implications for our work.
Daniel: That is a great place to wrap. Thank you Anna for all of this insight, and for the great work you are leading in Maine!
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Notes:
[1] Maine’s Secretary of State’s website notes that “At this time, based on statewide votes, legal decisions and the provisions of the Maine Constitution, the State of Maine is using ranked-choice voting for all of Maine's state-level primary elections, and in general elections ONLY for federal offices, including the office of U.S. President. The ranked-choice rounds are used only in races in which there are more than two candidates.”
