A report by The Carnegie Review charts the organization’s path in electoral reform.

”Electoral Reform: Charting The Course to Voter Engagement” illustrates how beginning in 1997 the Carnegie Corporation of New York by providing funds to under-represented groups to further their causes.

The corporation became involved with The Joyce Foundation in the mid 1990s, when Carnegie and Ford were the top two organizations involved in electoral reform. A request by Larry Hansen, vice-president of The Joyce Foundation, helped create a surge of support and funding in electoral reform by foundations. Hansen explained how the creation of the Midwest Democracy Network allows reform organizations to share resources and strategies at a grassroots level.

“It’s been said time and again, ‘all politics is local.’ Truth be told, most people think of politics in national terms— this year more than ever,” said Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, and Cynthia Canary, executive director of the ILlinois Campaign for Political Reform, in the Jan. 2009 issue of The American Prospect. “But the greatest potential for rethinking American democracy may lie in working at the regional level.”

Carnegie also began working with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University at the same time to work on voting reform to undo remnants of Jim Crow. Carnegie also worked with the Brennan Center on the Johnson v. Bush case to overturn the lifetime ban on voting for anyone with a felony conviction.

In October 2004 the Carnegie Corporation began supporting work by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on developing a research agenda for electronic voting technologies.

The report concludes with a listing of each organization that received funding by the Carnegie Corporation, the number of grants they received, when the grants began and the total amount of funding they received.