Board of Directors
Douglas M. Chapin, Jr.
Doug Chapin is the director of the Program for Excellence in Election Administration. Chapin came to the Humphrey School after 10 years at the Pew Charitable Trusts, where he served as director of election initiatives for the Pew Center on the States. Under his leadership, Pew’s elections team successfully lobbied for enactment of military and overseas voting reform in Congress and state legislatures; enlisted dozens of states and technology partners like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook to provide official voting information online and via mobile technology; and worked with election officials, academics, and technical experts to design and implement efforts to upgrade the nation’s voter registration systems.
Prior to serving at Pew, Chapin was an attorney in private practice specializing in elections and ethics law. He served as elections counsel to the Democrats on the U.S. Senate Rules Committee from 1997 to 2000, where he focused on federal election legislation and participated in the review of the disputed 1996 Senate election in Louisiana. He holds a law degree from Georgetown University, a master of public administration degree from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and an AB in politics from Princeton University.
Nick Chedli Carter
Nick is the managing director of 2020 Vision Ventures, a civic engagement financing effort dedicated to a more equitable and resilient democracy through innovative and inclusive voter engagement. Nick is keenly interested in furthering initiatives that close the equity gap in civic technology and hold the promise of transformative civic engagement to increase voter turnout, scale equitable best practices and ultimately achieving a civil society that is positively impacted by the realities of the digital age. Core questions driving his work include how do we close the equity gap in civic tech and promote more inclusive civic engagement that increases turnout at the polls while simultaneously improving the lives of low propensity voters too often excluded from our democracy.
Previously, Nick has worked at VICE Media, Planned Parenthood, and has held senior positions in presidential, federal and statewide electoral campaigns. He has held leadership roles in successful issue-advocacy efforts related to pay equity, health care, consumer protections, and climate justice. Nick currently serves on the investment committee for New Media Ventures, the Future Now Fund Kitchen Cabinet, the Movement Cooperative’s Impact Lab and chairs the Census Digital Organizing Advisory Group. Nick is a 2014 US State Department Int’l Exchange Alumni (Young Turkey/Young America) and has studied political systems and elections in the US, the Middle East, and the UK. He started his career as an Americorps volunteer at a community media center serving nonprofits and local government in rural New England. He is currently a 2019-2020 Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center Technology and Democracy Fellow.
Tiana Epps-Johnson
Tiana Epps-Johnson is Founder and Executive Director with the Center for Tech and Civic Life. She is leading a team that is doing groundbreaking work to make US elections more inclusive and secure. Prior to CTCL, she was the New Organizing Institute’s Election Administration Director from 2012 to 2015. She previously worked on the Voting Rights Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
Tiana is a recipient of the 2020 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and was selected to join the inaugural cohorts of Obama Foundation Fellows (2018) and Harvard Ash Center Technology and Democracy Fellows (2015). Tiana earned a MSc in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics and a BA in Political Science from Stanford University.
Katy Peters
Treasurer
Kathryn Peters is a civic technologist, nonprofit entrepreneur, and voting advocate. She co-founded Democracy Works, where she launched TurboVote, an election reminder and voter registration tool that now serves more than 7 million voters in partnership with 175 colleges, several national nonprofits, and corporations that include Snap and Google. She also led Democracy Works’s acquisition of the Voting Information Project, a national open data collaboration that publishes official state polling locations and ballot data.
Her belief in better democracy has taken her from campaign organizing in Southeast Missouri to a master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government to political rights monitoring in Afghanistan. Katy has been honored as one of Forbes magazine’s ’30 Under 30′ in the field of law and policy and as a Champion of Democracy by the National Priorities Project.
Whitney Quesenbery
Executive Director/Secretary
Whitney is the author of three books with practical advice in user experience: A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, Storytelling in User Experience, Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World.Whitney’s work in civic design began with her appointment to the EAC federal advisory committee writing the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), including the first usability requirements for voting systems. She also served on the U.S. Access Board’s advisory committee updating the Section 508 accessibility regulations.
Seventeen years later, she is still excited about the opportunities to approach democracy as a design problem and working with election offices around the country.
She is an authority on gathering the user insights needed to design products where people matter, expertise gained in her work with government, nonprofit, and tech companies. Whitney is the author of three books with practical advice in user experience: A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, Storytelling in User Experience, Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World.
Pari Sabety
Chair
Pari Sabety is a financial executive with experience in balancing budgets, credit markets, capital strategies and transformation of academic and government enterprises. Now a Senior Principal in Management Consulting, for Accenture, she served for over 25 years as CFO in government and higher education and has experience as a cabinet member and senior executive staff to two governors.
In her work, she provides thought leadership in using information to drive back-office transformation, operational excellence, and unbeatable citizen service. Her finance transformation and public administration work includes Emory University, the State of Illinois, San Francisco, Detroit, and the State of Washington. As the Director of the Office of Budget and Management of the State of Ohio, Pari led a statewide implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning system transforming finance and administrative functions. Ohio Shared Services, built to leverage the state’s ERP, remains the largest shared services initiative for back-office operations in US state government.
Other experience includes serving as Vice-Chancellor and CFO for Antioch University, Fellow and Founding Director of the Urban Markets Initiative of the Brookings Institution. She is a CPA and holds a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, an M.B.A. from Rutgers, and a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, specializing in Arab Studies.