BuzzFeed: Six Republican Secretaries Of State Tried To Stop Facebook’s Effort To Register Millions Of Voters

BuzzFeed: Six Republican Secretaries Of State Tried To Stop Facebook’s Effort To Register Millions Of Voters

Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, called the effort by the secretaries of state a “remarkable” attempt to “strong-arm Facebook.” “It’s troubling to see those overseeing elections try to stop what appears to be a successful project to register voters,” he said.

On Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major milestone for what he called “the largest voting information campaign in US history.” Launched in August with the goal of registering 4 million Americans to vote, Facebook claimed the effort garnered an estimated 4.4 million registrations across the company’s social media platforms, based on conversion rates the company calculated from “a few states it had partnered with.”

“Voting is voice,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post to the company’s internal message board, specifically thanking Facebook’s civic engagement and civic integrity teams. What he didn’t mention, however, was the resistance the voting information campaign faced from Republican-led secretaries of state.

In September, Facebook received a strongly worded letter signed by the secretaries of state of Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia, asking the company to discontinue its Voting Information Center. It argued election officials alone are “legally and morally responsible to our citizens” and said Facebook has “no such accountability.”

“While such goals may be laudable on their face, the reality is that the administration of elections is best left to the states,” read the letter, which was addressed to Zuckerberg. “The Voting Information Center is redundant and duplicative of what we, as chief election officials, have been doing for decades.”

The six Republican secretaries of state warned that the voting information center could foster “misinformation and confusion.”

The letter, which was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Common Cause, a nonprofit government watchdog group, reveals the partisan hostility faced by the $800 billion company as it sought to provide people with what Zuckerberg previously called “the single most powerful expression of democracy.” Over the past year, Facebook has faced fierce criticism from both political parties, with Democrats arguing the social network hasn’t done enough to limit the spread of political misinformation and hate, while Republicans have argued — largely without evidence — that they’re victims of anti-conservative bias. …

Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause, called the effort by the secretaries of state a “remarkable” attempt to “strong-arm Facebook.”

“It’s troubling to see those overseeing elections try to stop what appears to be a successful project to register voters,” he said. …

The estimated 4.4 million people that Facebook said it registered more than doubled the number of people the company claimed to have registered for in the 2016 presidential election and 2018 midterms.

There’s a lot to be critical of Facebook for, said Common Cause’s Littlewood, noting that the company has a long way in terms of moderating organic electoral content and fixing algorithmic amplification of groups that violate its terms of service. On Tuesday, the company faced heat after incorrectly preventing candidate ads from running seven days before the Nov. 3 vote.

“This voter information center was supportive of democracy,” Littlewood said. “If those numbers are true and Facebook did register a large number of voters, it will be great to see some information about how many of those voters end up casting a ballot.”