When I voted for the first time in 1988, I also seized an opportunity to volunteer at our local polling place to help count ballots. Living in a very small town that hadn’t yet purchased any kind of voting machine, we hand counted the ballots. Our Town Clerk viewed it as an outdated method, and she joked with me that, when I got older, I probably would be one of the few remaining people who could say I had hand counted votes. Of course, some polling locations still hand count votes today, but, at the time, her logic seemed plausible. It’s the only time I’ve volunteered to help at the poll, but the one thing that sticks with me to this day is how many checks and balances are built into the system. Two people counted every batch of votes, and their counts had to exactly match. If they didn’t match, two more people had to recount them. The total number of ballots counted had to match the number of people who checked in. I’m sure there were other measures I never saw that were taken to ensure the election was honest and safe.
As conspiracies about the integrity of 2020 elections sprouted up two years ago, I kept thinking that every person volunteer at least once to help at the polls so that they can see first-hand all of the measures put into place to verify the counts. It may be naïve to think that widespread volunteerism at the polls would prevent these conspiracy theories from forming, but I have to think it would convince a few people that well-established processes are in place to ensure the integrity of our elections.
This experience came to mind again yesterday as I watched CBS new correspondent Major Garrett praise election workers while kicking off the first session of the Knight Foundation’s virtual event, Informed: Conversations on Democracy in the Digital Age. He described election day as magical because it is quiet as candidates wait to hear the voice of the people. Garret has covered elections since 1990, but he said, until 2020, he had largely overlooked the role of election workers, something about which he now feels shame because they are so critically important to this process.
Over the next two days, leaders and experts will be discussing the intersection of technology, media, and democracy during this virtual event. I’ll be following along, most likely by watching the on-demand recordings, because these topics are also highly relevant to libraries, and I’m always interested in ways that libraries can continue their mission to fight misinformation and support the educated public that is necessary for democracy to thrive. As someone who studied journalism and worked a few years as a reporter at a small community newspaper before getting my MLS, I also see this event as a way to see how the Fourth Estate continues to evolve in the digital age.
The program kicked off late Monday afternoon with Garrett leading a discussion with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger about the 2020 and 2022 elections, information / disinformation, and the challenges facing us in 2024. He then facilitated a panel discussion with Renée DiResta of Standford Internet Observatory; Katie Harbath of Anchor Chicago; Christopher Krebs of Krebs Stamos Group and former director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; and Kate Starbird of the University of Washington.
A few of my takeaways from the panel discussion:
- Starbird, who studies online rumors, election misinformation, and its threat to democracy, noted that, when analyzing rumors around Maricopa county, it took 20 hours for claims of election maleficence to go viral in 2020; it took just 90 minutes for similar claims to go viral in 2022.
- Krebs, the cybersecurity expert, focused on the technology behind elections, noting that tech is key to getting more people to participate in democracy. The threat, he said, is not on the technology side. “The cybersecurity aspects of elections is an engineering problem,” he said, “you throw enough people, enough money at it you can zero out the risk almost.” The threat is in the influence operations that take advantage of people’s susceptibility to narratives. The narratives focusing on domestic fraud claims are the ones that seemed to gain the most traction and where he expects the focus will remain.
- In responding to a question about Twitter, Starbird brought up a concern regarding researchers’ use of Twitter. Her team had been overly reliant on Twitter because it has always been transparent, public, and a central place to get news. “So much of what we do in research is anchored on that one platform, and that’s going to be gone,” she said. “I don’t think we can count on being able to access that data anymore or especially at a price that we can afford…It’s going to be really disruptive.”
- Harbath has already noticed that her Twitter feed has become less useful. Her take: “Whether you’re talking about somebody like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or others…at the end of the day, we have a lot of uncomfortability with a single person at the top making decisions that has no way of being held accountable.”
- Starbird and Krebs praised the work of local journalists in their reporting of the 2020 election. “We have to figure out how to support local journalism,” Krebs said. I would love to hear more discussion on this topic. The continued decline of local journalism will make it more difficult for this type of reporting to happen in the future. Many cities are down to one large publication with no significant competition. Staffing at the newspapers that are left is so low that they can’t provide the same level of coverage that would have been done 20 to 30 years ago. When you consider small-town newspapers, the landscape is even worse. The town where I live has no local newspaper aside from a monthly publication, mostly containing press releases, that is mailed to every household. All of our news is found in community Facebook groups rife with misinformation. The newspaper where I worked nearly 30 years ago is still family owned and providing broad coverage for its communities, but this type of community newspaper is rare in today’s world.
- In response to a question regarding targeting of minority communities with disinformation, DiResta said that rather than providing fact checking at a national level, we need local and community-based information resiliency training. There is no one narrative being put out on all platforms. Instead, the narratives are targeted based on the audiences of those platforms. Instead of playing “whack-a-mole with specific claims”, we need to teach communities how to recognize certain language and emotional responses to the narratives being shared. From my perspective, this is where libraries have been and should continue playing a part: working within their own communities to build information literacy skills and to understand how propaganda works.