Time September 21/September 28, 2020at Common Cause, testified to Congress
on Aug. 4. Gallup found last year that 59%
of Americans are not confident in the hon-
esty of the nation’s elections, third worst
among the world’s wealthy democracies.
While Trump and his allies have propa-
gated misinformation about voting, the
Gallup poll found that Trump’s critics are
most distrustful: 74% of those opposed
to the U.S. leadership reported a lack of
confidence in the honesty of American
elections. The Trump Administration’s
attacks on the Postal Service exacer-
bated the problem, raising the question
of whether the agency is capable of de-
livering ballots before state deadlines.
Even as officials scramble to fight back
by explaining that voting by mail is secure,
they worry about the stakes for the nation.
The prospect of misinformation drowning
out credible facts and eroding voters’ faith
in elections “keeps me up at night,” says
Corley, the Pasco County Republican. “It’s
tough to put the genie back in the bottle.”
The ThreaT is an order of magnitude
greater now than four years ago. In 2016,
a hostile foreign adversary tried to sway
Americans to vote for one candidate over
another; this year, that candidate is calling
into question the integrity of the vote itself.
Trump’s fearmongering about the need
to fight voter fraud has given new life to
decades-old tactics like voter-roll purges,
stringent voter-ID laws, “poll watchers”
who try to intimidate people from casting
ballots, and other measures that reduce
turnout. “2016 was the ‘fake news’ elec-
tion, but 2020 makes it look like noth-
ing in comparison,” says Samuel Woolley,
project director for propaganda research
at the Center for Media Engagement at
the University of Texas at Austin. “This
infrastructure that has been scaled up
since politicians started figuring out so-
cial media has now become concretized
under Donald Trump down to the state
level, the city level. It’s the democratiza-
tion of propaganda.”
Last month, former Nevada Republi-
can Senator Dean Heller claimed with-
out evidence that a new state law, which
would send every registered voter a ballot
in the mail, would allow Nevadans to vote
twice. “They’re going to allow anonymous
people to walk into any home, any facil-
ity, to help you fill out your ballot and takeit with them,” Heller said, echoing argu-
ments made by the Trump campaign in
a suit seeking to block the law. Heller’s
claims were repeated in television inter-
views and widely shared on social media,
even as the state’s Republican secretary of
state, Barbara Cegavske, tried to reassure
voters such claims weren’t true.
Trump’s rhetoric has also been ad-
opted by Republican candidates. “Elec-
tion fraud should concern each and every
voter in this country,” wrote Margaret
Streicker, a Republican running in Con-
necticut’s Third Congressional District,
in a post shared more than 100 times on
Facebook. Nicole Malliotakis, a Repub-
lican running in New York, took it up a
notch, paying for Facebook ads claiming
she had “stopped the liberal Democrats’
plan to automatically register illegal aliens
to vote in our elections.”
The purpose of such claims is hardly
subtle. In early April, Georgia state
speaker of the house David Ralston said
the quiet part out loud when he argued
that if the state allows mail-in ballots, it
“will be extremely devastating to Repub-
licans and conservatives” because it “will
certainly drive up turnout.”
This combination of disinformation,
uncertainty and valid concerns over theRoxanna Moritz, auditor,
Scott County, Iowa (Democrat)
‘THE WAY YOU DISENFRANCHISE
VOTERS IS BY CONFUSING THEM.’