Puzzles for Democracy

A few years back, Eric’s “Social Distancing Puzzles” was a great success, raising over $20,000 for Feeding America at the height of the pandemic. That set of puzzles had a fun hook: Solvers needed to work on them in teams of two or more, but they could do while remaining socially distanced — the set was designed to be tackled by Zoom.

Now, with voting rights and other democratic foundations under attack, the time seemed right for a new charity project. But what should its hook be?

The answer came quickly: There should be a puzzle for every state in the country.

This would be a very different project — the Social Distancing Puzzles, after all, contained just 11 puzzles. Fifty would be… a lot more.

Solution: Put together a team that includes some of the best puzzle constructors in the country. That’s what Eric did, and the result was Puzzles for Democracy, which raised almost $20,000 for Common Cause, a non-partisan organization fighting back against gerrymandering and all efforts to erode this country’s voting rights.