Election Protection

With The Facebook Papers adding daily to the evidence of the inability and unwillingness of social media giants to combat disinformation and other harmful content, Common Cause today released an extensive report on election disinformation, including a comprehensive set of reforms needed to curb this huge and growing problem and protect our right to vote in elections next week, next year, and beyond. Based on more than 15,000 hours monitoring social media in the 2020 election cycle, together with legal and policy expertise, “As a Matter of Fact: The Harms Caused by Election Disinformation” details the seriousness and scale of the threat, current applicable state and federal laws, and the woefully inadequate and inconsistent civic integrity policies of the social media giants. The report concludes with a sweeping series of reform recommendations to better enable us to fight back against election disinformation.

Senate Republicans used a loophole in the Senate’s rules—the filibuster —to block even holding a debate on the Freedom to Vote Act. It’s the third time they’ve stopped their colleagues from debating voting rights legislation this year. Senators now face a choice: protect the freedom to vote and find a way to send this bill to President Biden’s desk, or let it die due to Republican obstruction and abuse of internal Senate rules.

The Cyber Ninjas report, itself, showed that Joe Biden won the presidential election in Maricopa County; that determination came after a chaotic hand-count of more than 2 million paper ballots, and closely paralleled official election results. But the central result was cloaked in other allegations intended to create new doubts about the 2020 election. 

Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, a nonpartisan, liberal-leaning political advocacy organization, told ABC News that such claims should be expected. "There will inevitably be claims that the election is rigged because the purveyors of the 'big lie' need these local and state elections in between the major national elections to keep up their momentum; but all of their allegations in the November 2020 election fell flat," Stein said. "There's nothing new under the sun here. And we assume that there will be lawsuits filed after the recall and they will be treated the same way as the lawsuits in the 2020 election." Stein said misinformation in the recall could also undermine and limit turnout among the voters that those who are sowing the misinformation are trying to reach. But such misinformation, he said, has "no basis in the realities of California's election administration, which has been stress-tested repeatedly and proven to be some of the most secure, most reliable elections in the nation."

Say the legislation “is the bold, comprehensive bill we need because the threats to our democracy are deep, systemic, and wide-ranging”