Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008
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ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
Voter Suppression Hits The Web
E-Mails Sow Disinformation As Voting Groups Prepare To Monitor Polls With Web Apps, Twitter And Mobile Video
Voter suppression is moving off the streets and onto the Internet, but political operatives seeking to spread confusion on Election Day are being countered by tech-savvy voting rights groups employing new Web applications to debunk myths and police the polls.
Efforts to suppress voter turnout are a time-honored tradition in American politics, but until now they have been decidedly low-tech, usually taking the form of anonymous fliers with misleading information about eligibility or election dates. But some tricksters are moving to the Web this campaign season to capitalize on new technologies and take advantage of an electorate that increasingly consumes political news online.
Earlier this month, an e-mail began circulating in Texas instructing voters casting a straight-ticket Democratic ballot to also punch Obama's name -- a move that would invalidate their votes on eSlate brand voting machines. Another e-mail in Florida -- this one alleging that voters whose IDs don't match state records won't be able to vote -- has been making the rounds since late September.
"We're at the tip of the iceberg," said Jon Pincus, founder of the Voter Suppression Wiki, which tracks deceptive campaign practices. "I still don't think online voter suppression is nearly as severe as offline voter suppression, but it's only going to grow."
An Oct. 20 report [PDF] from the Electronic Privacy Information Center offered a laundry list of more advanced tactics operatives could use to dupe voters online: jamming phone bank lines with Internet-based telephones, using behavioral targeting software to hit certain demographics with misinformation and infiltrating political communities on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
"You take all the old playbook and move it online, and you add to that anything that has any viral potency," said Allen Raymond, author of "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." Raymond spent three months in federal prison for his role in an illegal phone jamming operation during the 2002 New Hampshire Senate race. Dirty tricks on the Internet can be cheap and relatively simple to deploy, he said, making online voter suppression attractive not only to professional operatives but also to "some kooky guy in a basement somewhere who thinks he's got the best plan."
But cyberspace presents malicious political operatives with plenty of obstacles as well, Raymond added. An e-mail is far more traceable than an anonymous flier, he said, and Web sites like Snopes.com can debunk voting myths as quickly as political operatives can concoct them.
Adding to the challenges for would-be online troublemakers, Web communities that might initially seem ripe for sabotage are often quite resilient. Take myBarackObama.com, the Democrat's online social networking site, which helps more than 1 million members make phone calls to undecided voters, meet other Obama supporters and blog about the race. Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, which runs "myBO," said that while there may be instances of saboteurs using the call lists to reach undecided voters and bash Obama, he isn't losing much sleep over it.
"We're making hundreds of thousands of phone calls," he said. "If a Republican goes in and makes some calls, the damage is not that great. You have to exchange a degree of unknown for the massive advantage that the risk brings."
Voting rights groups aren't taking any chances, however. Enter Election Protection, a nonpartisan coalition of more than 100 voting rights groups led by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. On Nov. 4, Election Protection will have 750 legal volunteers answering phones for its voter information hot line. Each phone banker will have been prepped on voting laws for the state he or she is fielding calls from. The hot line received 250,000 calls in the three weeks before the 2004 general election; with more than 50,000 calls already received since mid-September and the pace of calls accelerating rapidly, the coalition expects to eclipse that mark this year.
This year, Election Protection is plotting the calls it receives on an interactive online map to help identify in real time where problems are cropping up (more than 11,000 reports about early voting and registration problems are already posted). Armed with an evolving picture of the problems arising around the country on Nov. 4, Election Protection will be able to deploy an army of 10,000 on-the-ground volunteers from its Washington, D.C., command center.
"[The real-time map] is able to paint the most complete picture on Election Day of what's happening on the ground," said Eric Marshall, campaign manager for the National Campaign for Fair Elections, who is helping organize Election Protection's efforts on Nov. 4. "We can see patterns and try to respond on a higher level."
Through its partnership with Video the Vote, Election Protection will also dispatch teams of volunteer filmmakers to troubled polling sites to document long lines, voter intimidation and machine malfunctions. That footage will be distributed to media outlets and posted online, explained Ian Inaba, co-founder of Video the Vote, who said he has recruited more than 2,500 volunteers for Election Day.
And while the telephone hot line is still the group's main conduit of information about voting problems, Election Protection is also branching out into new media platforms. Twitter Vote Report, for example, is encouraging voters to use their smart phones to raise the alarm about polling problems on the micro-blogging network Twitter, information that will be forwarded along to Election Protection.
Of course, there's a limit to how technologically advanced voting rights groups can get, since their target audience -- low-information voters -- are often less tech-savvy than the rest of the population. The hot line has recently been fielding 4,000 calls a day, but just over 1,000 people have registered with Twitter Vote Report, and of those, just a handful have sent in "tweets" since early voting began. Eager to appeal to "more than Ivy League kids," Allison Fine, co-founder of Twitter Vote Report and senior editor of political blog techPresident, said her group will also let voters file dispatches via text message.
At the end of the day, large-scale voter outreach efforts -- and the voter suppression campaigns they aim to combat -- can only be as technologically advanced as their intended audiences, said Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections and one of the leaders of Election Protection.
"While we put a lot of effort into making our Web site as good as it can be, when it comes down to it, the majority of people will not be getting information through the Internet," he said. "They're people with phones with wires."