Ashley Quarcoo is the executive director of the Election Trust Initiative, a non-partisan funding collaborative seeking to strengthen the ecosystem of election administration.  She is also a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where her research has focused on threats to democracy, social and political polarization, and comparative approaches towards conducting elections and addressing human rights.  Prior to joining ETI, Ashley was senior director of democracy programs and pillars of More Perfect, where she led policy, programs, and coalition engagement.  She served as senior research manager with the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program, helping to incubate and launch “Who Is Us? A Project on American Identity.”

Quarcoo previously spent over a decade supporting peacebuilding and democratic development in post-conflict countries and countries transitioning out of authoritarianism. She worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) where she supported strategy, policy, and program development for a nearly $300 million democracy, human rights, and governance foreign assistance portfolio.  She has also served with the State Department, as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill, and as a Teach for America corps member in New York City.