Disinformation

“I think this is a perfect example of the real impact in peoples’ lives when we delay the certification of our vote because of misinformation,” said Katya Ehresman, voting rights program manager at Common Cause Texas.

Since 2020, voters in California and beyond have seen disinformation proliferate and poison our politics more than ever before. Generative artificial intelligence has the power to rapidly intensify this trend for the worse.

Five local voting rights advocacy groups, including Common Cause Pennsylvania and the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, called the incident "an unfortunate situation caused by human error," but said it did not amount to election fraud. "This is a programming error that is being weaponized for disinformation purposes," Philip Hensley-Robin, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, told PolitiFact.

"I get very worried. How do you have a democracy that is functional with so much misinformation?" Catherine Turcer, the executive director of government accountability group Common Cause Ohio, which endorsed Issue 1, told Salon. "Because we need good information to make decisions, and the misinformation doesn't just cloud the decision-making process, it doesn't just leave people with true misunderstandings. It can also completely turn off people so that they decide to opt out." Turcer said canvassers reported that constituents have expressed confusion about the moniker "Issue 1" in the Nov. 7 election, with many mistaking it for the ballot initiative of the same name in Ohio's Aug. 8 special election.  The League of Women Voters Ohio and Common Cause Ohio have worked to combat the misinformation given the high stakes surrounding abortion and reproductive care in the state. Turcer is hopeful that Ohioans will be able to "suss out the misinformation and the power grab" come Tuesday as they did in voting down August's Issue 1.  "One of the things that I think is gonna make a real difference is who shows up at the polls during early votes, who shows up at the polls on Election Day," Turcer told Salon. "I think at the end of the day, Issue 1 will be determined by who shows up to vote."

“It’s part of a pattern we’ve seen over the last decade: right-wing groups and people like Laura Pressley really just weaponizing poll watchers in some really alarming ways,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, a nonprofit that advocates for expanding voting rights. “They're making it harder for people to vote. They're making it harder for election workers to do their jobs.”

Today, Common Cause and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights filed comments with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in support of a petition for rulemaking filed by Public Citizen to amend its regulation on “fraudulent misrepresentation” to include “deliberately false Artificial Intelligence-generated content in campaign ads or other communications.”