Leading election results provider Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) is pleased to announce the expansion of its Advisory Board with three trusted innovators at the intersection of technology, media, and elections:
Jon Cohen is the Founder and CEO of Truedot.ai, the professional-grade data collection platform. He is a senior technology executive, knowledge creator, and data scientist who is adept at cutting through noise as a content strategist and conference speaker, including in his TEDx talk “Curiosity is your Superpower.” In 2020, he was named “new-school pollster” by National Journal as one of the “50 People Changing the Game in Washington.”
Before founding Truedot.ai, Jon was Chief Research Officer and SVP of Strategic Partnerships at SurveyMonkey, where he ran technology and media partnerships, insights, and innovation teams. He also was the first Vice President of Research at the Pew Research Center and Director of Polling for The Washington Post. He is a 22-year member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and an affiliate of the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies.
Katie Harbath is the Chief Global Affairs Officer at Duco. A global leader at the intersection of policy, democracy, and technology, Katie’s career spans political campaigns, civil society, and technology. Prior to Duco, Katie spent 10 years at Facebook, where she built and led global teams that managed elections and helped government and political figures use the social network to connect with their constituents. Before Facebook, Katie held senior digital roles at the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the DCI Group, as well as multiple campaigns for office.
She is a board member at the National Conference on Citizenship, Democracy Works, R Street and the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Madison-Wisconsin. She writes Anchor Change, a weekly newsletter on Substack, and hosts the Impossible Tradeoffs podcast.
Molly Levinson is the founder and CEO of The Levinson Group (TLG), a strategic communications firm recognized as one of the top issues management advisory firms in the U.S. She is a strategic advisor to influential leaders, public and private businesses, and civic institutions on reputational and brand issues at the intersection of financial markets, policy, media, and the law.
Her experience includes decades serving as a senior executive on both sides of high-stakes news developing and leading hundreds of brand and industry-defining communications campaigns and serving as an Emmy-award winning producer and Political Director at CNN and CBS, where she directed all political reporting and the network decision desks, covering elections from 2002-2012.
Molly receives the highest ranking by Chambers & Partners for her work in Crisis and Issues Management and Litigation Support Communications. PR News named her a “Communicator of the Year” in 2022, one of the “top Women in PR” in 2021 and “Crisis Manager of the Year” in 2017. She serves on the Board of Advisors for the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation.
As advisors to DDHQ, Jon, Katie, and Molly join Elizabeth Wilner, currently Head of Stakeholder Insights at OpenAI, the AI research and deployment company that created ChatGPT, and previously Director of Corporate & Policy Communications at Airbnb, Political Director of NBC News and Managing Editor of The Cook Political Report (now The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter).
“Molly, Katie, and Jon all have deep experience and particular windows into what’s at stake on Election Day,” said Decision Desk HQ President Drew McCoy. “With political and technological developments contributing to an increasingly fraught election environment, we’re grateful to have their input while our team stays laser-focused on what they do best: calling races correctly and as quickly as possible to promote certainty in the outcomes and confidence in the system.”
About Decision Desk HQ
Decision Desk HQ is a leading provider of real-time election results, race calls, and related data, and the only provider to cover US elections from the presidency and Congress to the county and city level. Launched in 2012 on a hunch that we could use technology to improve the speed and lower the cost of collecting election returns, we were first to call the presidency for Donald Trump in 2016 and for Vice President Joe Biden in 2020. In 2022, we were first to call control of Congress and also covered 16,000 local races. We continue to innovate with new technologies to drive more efficient results reporting that prioritizes accuracy, supports local coverage, and strengthens trust in the democratic process.
Contact:
Drew McCoy