In September, my wife and I walked down the street at lunchtime to the local library to cast our votes in the primary election for the State of Rhode Island. When we arrived at the polling place, my wife was turned away, even though she was registered and presented a current photo ID.
Why? A new voter ID law in our state requires that photo IDs be either a state-issued vehicle operator’s license or newly created special “voter IDs.” Having recently moved to Rhode Island, my wife’s license was state-issued, just from the wrong state. So, she went home and returned a few hours later with a U.S. passport, and after a brief discussion among poll workers about whether that was an acceptable form of ID (it is, according to the secretary of state’s website), she was allowed to vote.
Often, many voters only have a limited amount of time to go to the polls — a mix-up like an unacceptable form of identification, an ill-informed poll worker or incorrect polling location information could cause them to become disenfranchised.
New photo ID laws, proof of citizenship laws and laws shortening the time early and absentee voting is available could disenfranchise as many as 5 million Americans in 2012.
To be clear, had my wife not be able to vote, it would be hard to argue that her vote had been suppressed through anyone’s fault but her own. She’s a teacher and gets election day off from work; we have adequate transportation to and from the polling place; we enjoy enough leisure time to regularly watch the local news and read the newspaper; and we have access to the Internet from a myriad of devices. There’s no reason we shouldn’t have been prepared to bring the required form of ID to the polls.
However, newly enacted photo ID laws, proof of citizenship laws and laws shortening the time early and absentee voting is available could disenfranchise as many as 5 million Americans in 2012, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Another study, this one from the non-profit Black Youth Project, finds that up to 700,000 young minority voters could be barred from voting in November.
Supporters of these laws say they are necessary due to individual voter fraud. According to experts, however, individual voter fraud is extremely rare, and most reported instances are later proven false.
More likely, these changes to voting laws are politically or racially motivated. In Rhode Island, for example, the voter ID law was written by Democratic secretary of state Ralph Mollis to “address the perception of voter fraud,” even though allegations of individual voter impersonation have never been proven in the state. So why pass a law that will only serve to disenfranchise some voters if there is no solid evidence that fraud is taking place? An examination of the law and who pushed it through the legislature by The New Republic notes that itseems to have an anti-immigrant tone.
Regardless of whether you believe that voter ID laws, voter roll purges or other changes to the nation’s voting laws are intentionally designed to block some people from voting, or are intended to legitimately protect the integrity of the vote, it is still likely that thousands of people will be disenfranchised in November. And that includes more benign reasons, such as poorly trained poll workers or the unintentional spread of misinformation over social media.
“The risk and the danger in the proliferation of social media … is either intentional misinformation or unintentional misinformation,” says Eric Marshall, the manager of legal mobilization for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the co-leader of Election Protection, a nationwide coalition of organizations offering voter support and the creators of the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline.
Yet social media also significantly motivates voter education efforts designed to increase the number of people casting votes in the upcoming election.
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“Social media is key to voter education,” says Faye Anderson, chief evangelist for the Cost of Freedom Project and project manager for Yo! Philly Votes, a citizen-led initiative to crowdsource election protection. “The voter suppression schemes will have a disproportionate impact on young and minority voters. Well, they’re active on social networks. To be effective, we have to reach voters where they are.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Marshall, who says that mobile phones are increasingly important for getting information to voters, as well. That’s why mobile apps are central to the plans of both Election Protection and Cost of Freedom. Both organizations have designed and deployed mobile applications that offer accurate information about local voting laws.
The United Steelworkers Union is also utilizing social media in a big way this year to augment its traditional voter education efforts. The union is using its vast social media network — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. — to share voter information with its members.
Mobile phones are increasingly important for getting information to voters.
“We are fighting like hell to make sure that our right to vote is protected in this country, and that any American who has the legal right to vote is not denied that right,” says Connie Mabin, director of new media for theUnited Steelworkers International Union. “Social media is a big part of that effort.”
In addition to voter education, USW will utilize social media on Election Day “to help us quickly share crucial information on an issue that could literally change the future of our country. The tools will also help us work together with allies, regardless of physical location. We won’t necessarily have to rely on traditional news media to report problems or concerns — we’ll be able to get this info out in real time, unedited.”
Marshall says that while social media has the potential to spread damaging information, Election Protection also recognizes the power of online media for disseminating accurate information to voters. The group is already using Twitter and Facebook to put out stories and articles about voting, to correct misinformation that may go viral around the web and to answer questions from followers. Election Protection is ensuring that all of the information it collects via social media and the 866-OUR-VOTE hotline becomes available, in an anonymized fashion, on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Our Vote Live website. The coalition also plans to collect information about voting issues as they happen on Election Day and make that information available in real time.
According to Marshall, there are vote fraud problems in this country, but it’s not the alleged voter impersonations that have lead to restrictive laws. Instead, fraud manifests itself in things like vote buying, malfeasance by government officials or absentee ballot fraud, for which the solution is not creating barriers for people to vote. Part of the reason Election Protection plans to release all the information it collects about problems at the polls, is that it wants to shift the conversation to the actual reasons that make it difficult for people to vote.
“We want to use Our Vote Live to say, ‘These are the real problems. You’re not talking about the real problems. Let’s be honest with the American people,’” says Marshall. “We think it’s important to be transparent about what voters are really facing, because part of this whole vote suppression and restrictive voting campaign is manufactured problems with solutions that only limit the ability of responsible, eligible Americans to vote.”
Groups will be able to closely monitor activity at the polls this year by using new tool Ushahidi, a collaborative mapping and information swapping mobile platform originally developed to map violence following the 2008 Kenyan elections. Election Protection teamed with the New Organizing Institute to develop an app utilizing the Ushahidi platform to track problems at the polls on Election Day.
“We saw the potential for the system to engage potential voters who may feel more comfortable reporting incidents via text message, mobile app or browser,” says Jared Marcotte, a senior engineer at New Organizing Institute. “We also wanted to visualize the data so the general public would be able to understand the magnitude of the Election Protection Coalition’s work.”
The Yo! Philly Votes app is also Ushahidi-based. “Yo! Philly Votes will aggregate and visualize multiple sources of real-time Election Day incident reports so that problems can be corrected in real time before the polls close,” according to Anderson, who says the app is designed to “empower ordinary citizens to help protect the right to vote.”
Each of these efforts has one main theme in common: The most effective way social media can help protect the vote is by spreading accurate information.
“At the end of the day, if you’re an eligible voter, regardless of whom you vote for, in the United States of America, you should be able to freely cast that vote and have it properly counted,” says Mabin. Social media can help ensure that happens for everyone in America.
Illustration by Bob Al-Greene
