An International Democracy Internship -- As Half the World Votes This Year
Hey everyone!
My name is Hank, and I’ll use this blog to chronicle my summer working in Nova at the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, or IFES! I finished my first week here, and it’s been a blast. I’m the legal intern for IFES’s Center for Anti-Corruption and Democratic Trust (CDT), so I get to help the staff at the Center with finding and briefing election law cases and materials. Most of my summer is going to involve assisting the team at the Center with updating one of their databases, electionjudgments.org – a database for election law cases decided across the globe.
Some of the countries whose cases I’ve worked on include Zambia, Libya, Sweden, South Korea, and Serbia, and the cases range from smaller issues like polling centers accidentally closing early, to widespread allegations of vote tampering and blackmail. I’ll also get to work on a data visualization project for the Center that will help users of the database find where certain types of cases are cropping up the most, as well as other creative ways to view the info in the database.
I can’t wait to share my summer with everyone here! I lived in Washington, DC for a few years before I returned to William & Mary (class of 2020, woo!) for law school, so it feels great to be back in the area. Quite a few of my friends in law school are also working in DC (including some of my fellow bloggers), so you’ll be seeing plenty of photos of us all getting to enjoy finishing our first year of law school and working at our cool internships!
Lastly, if anyone – especially prospective students – ever would like to reach out to me to ask questions about law school, please feel free to do so! My email is hsblackburn@wm.edu and I’m always happy to talk.
Thanks for deciding to read along about my summer! Hope it doesn’t disappoint!
Hank