Whatever happens on November 3, many Americans will distrust the election results. They’ve been primed for it. Donald Trump sees himself both as a winner and a victim. Either way, he will spin the results both as a victory and an attack as he did in 2016, even if only he believes it.
Trump had plenty of help in 2016 from the Russians, the Republican Party apparatus, third-party activist groups, online fake-news entrepreneurs, and the right wing noise machine. With the bully pulpit and the levers of power at his disposal this year, he is actively working to rig the election in his favor in ways he could not have dreamed of four years ago.
The others will still play their parts.
ProPublica and First Draft, a firm that researches misinformation, posted a report last month on the viral quality of social media posts, particularly on Facebook, aimed at delegitimizing the upcoming election. (Read them yourself. No need to repeat them here.)
“We have a long history in this country of voter suppression that goes all the way back to our founding,” said Jessica Gonzalez, the co-CEO of Free Press, an advocacy group focused on media and technology. “This is a new way to suppress the vote, and I don’t know why Facebook wants any part of it.”
Facebook claims to be creating a Voting Information Center for connecting people to authoritative information and to have removed 100,000 pieces of voter disinformation between March and May.
ProPublica and First Draft tracked Facebook posts using voting-related keywords — including the terms “vote by mail,” “mail-in ballots,” “voter fraud” and “stolen elections” — since early April, when Trump began attacking voting by mail. Mentions of these voting-related terms nearly tripled on Facebook, with interest in the topic spiking after Twitter attached a fact-checking label to Trump’s false tweets and directed users to a fact-check page on May 26. Twitter’s intervention prompted Trump to claim that Twitter is “interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “stifling FREE SPEECH.” Facebook has refused to take down Trump’s false claims about voting by mail.
Facebook’s inaction on Trump’s posts spurred pushback over misinformation on the site. Gonzalez helped organize an advertising boycott of Facebook that now includes more than 1,000 companies and some of the platform’s biggest advertisers. Among other demands, they’re calling on Facebook to remove voting misinformation.
Breitbart, Fox News are still in the disinfo game along with conservative commentators, Trump surrogates, conspiracy sites, and some left-wing pages.
Most common are overinflated allegations of voter fraud:
Exaggerating the prevalence of voting fraud can backfire. In a study released in June, researchers showed respondents a series of tweets. Some were actual 2018 tweets by Trump, Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio that put forth unfounded claims of voter fraud; others were more generic “placebo” tweets. The false claims reduced confidence in elections for everyone, the researchers found, especially Republicans and those who approve of Trump. Those groups “reported significantly lower confidence in elections after exposure to a low dose of voter fraud allegations even when those claims were countered by fact-checks.”
As a result, Trump’s rhetoric may cause fewer Republicans to vote by mail than Democrats, said Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study and a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Still, Nyhan is worried about broader effects of misinformation. “The problem has clearly gotten worse in terms of elite rhetoric,” Nyhan said. “We’ve seen what happens in other countries when there isn’t a shared trust in the rules of the game in democracy and it’s not good.”
Realizing the damage his attacks on voting by mail have done to his own prospects, Trump last week tried reversing himself. He now claims voting by mail in Florida is “Safe and Secure, Tried and True” even as he sues Nevada for automatically sending voters mail ballots.
The pandemic has boards of elections across the country scrambling to retool procedures make voting as safe and secure for voters as possible. This means what you heard last week could be changed next week.
Here in North Carolina, Democrats have been in court challenging Republican voting changes since the GOP gained control of the legislature ahead of the last redistricting. Some of the voting changes the GOP implemented seemed designed not only to suppress the vote but to add to confusion. Others they passed only to have courts overturn them later. Voters here have been whipsawed for a decade.
Just last week, a federal district court in North Carolina ruled that due process demands that those who vote by mail must have the same chance to “cure” mistakes in their ballots that in-person voters receive:
GREENSBORO—Late today, a federal judge ruled in the League of Women Voters of North Carolina’s case that the North Carolina State Board of Elections must provide a notice and cure process for absentee ballots marked for rejection. As the number of voters choosing to cast ballots by mail is expected to surge due to the threat of COVID-19, the decision provides relief for tens of thousands of voters whose ballots would otherwise be rejected without recourse.
“The establishment of a notice and cure process for absentee ballots is a major victory for North Carolina voters,” said Jo Nicholas, president of the League of Women Voters of North Carolina. “Now, even amidst all the uncertainty that the pandemic brings, voters can have assurance that their safely cast ballots will be counted in November.”
Over 282,000 absentee ballots were rejected in North Carolina’s March primary election, 41% of which could have been cured if voters had been notified and given a chance to do so, according to data reviewed by Southern Coalition for Social Justice. The absence of a cure process in that election left 115,000 voters without a way to fix mistakes and ensure their ballots would be counted.
Now, the state Board of Elections must scramble once again to figure out how to implement the judge’s ruling before local boards begin evaluating early absentee ballots here at the end of September. The rest of us will have to help educate voters once the procedure is in place. So it goes.
For the rest of you, be sure you are extra careful when filling out your by-mail or absentee-by-mail ballots. Here is some quick video advice. Rejection rates are low, but you don’t want to get caught in that small percentage.
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