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Two years ago, Marquita Smith missed her chance to vote in a local election. For many, missing a local election is common, but it was rare for Smith, a longtime political editor. In her eyes, it reflected the distance between the political process and the average citizen—an issue she set out to change.

“Even if I’d known about [the election], I wouldn’t have known anything about the candidates or the issues,” said Smith. “It hit me that, for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t vote. That’s where the passion for the [Democracy Dashboard] came from.”

The Democracy Dashboard is a new project within the University of Mississippi’s Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics. The Overby Center, founded in 2007 with a grant from the Freedom Forum, facilitates programs and publications that examine relationships between politics and the press, especially in the South.

Smith, an associate professor and associate dean of graduate programs in the university's School of Journalism and New Media, was named a fellow at the Overby Center in 2022. Her role at the center focuses on the development of the Democracy Dashboard, which will make data-driven information available to voters, allowing them to become more meaningfully engaged with the politics that impact them.

“We’re working on a ‘report card’ on how current representatives are voting on issues that residents are concerned with, to have a record of how they’re representing their constituents,” said Smith. “We recently did an article on a new legislative app, reviewing it and how it’s operating. We want to do more reviews of things that help people engage in the legislative process.” This app was the Electric Cooperatives of Mississippi Legislative Roster mobile application, which provides users with information about Mississippi’s state and federal representatives.

The universal decline in local news coverage has created a disconnect between voters and their representatives. Often, newsrooms which remain find themselves spread thin, unable to cover everything that may be relevant to their communities.

The goal of the Democracy Dashboard is to mitigate this issue by collecting relevant data and making it available to community members and news outlets alike. “Our hope is to help people engage in the [political] process, and to provide a tool that news organizations can engage with,” said Smith.

“At the forefront of the entire operation is being community-centered,” said Jaylin Smith, a second-year graduate student who works on the Democracy Dashboard. “I think that’s so important for people who haven’t always felt like their vote matters, or feel like they’re distanced from their representatives.”

Jaylin is a master’s student in the School of Journalism and New Media and works on the Democracy Dashboard as part of her graduate assistantship. She works alongside another graduate assistant to compile data about elected officials for the Dashboard.

One interesting project Jaylin worked on earlier in her assistantship was creating a database tracking how Mississippi representatives voted on five high-profile state bills concerning: teaching Critical Race Theory in Mississippi classrooms, the legal status of medical cannabis, a salary raise for educators, statewide redistricting, and criminal justice reform.

“What we’re trying to do now is put that information on the website so constituents can see how their representatives are voting,” she said. “Our overall mission is creating an information highway for people to constantly travel on and learn about what’s happening in Mississippi.”