Election season in the US has me focused on things that are not money, so this post is about voting, governance, mis/disinformation, and election security – coming to you from my perspective as a longtime digital security worker, specifically in that I am currently working with a team* on digital infrastructure that documents election interference. So read on if you’re interested in any of that.
I feel so tired, fired up, and high alert at the same time. Maybe you do too.
Primarily, the things I’m thinking about are:
- Who is served when people think participating in democracy is fundamentally a scam? [hint: it is not “the people” who stand to gain in this worldview]
- What is lost when we expect participatory processes to be perfect and we focus on “them” who are fucking it up for us [hint: self-governance is messy and we have to figure out how to do it if we want more inclusive, multiracial, progressive governance – in official government or in our movement organizing, arts crews, and whenever we’re getting people together to do stuff]
- What’s the role of information hygiene in an increasingly individualized, socially-engineered media landscape? [hint: not everything you see is there to help you]
- What immediate post-election community and self-care looks like, given that there will be disinformation, litigation, and likely a contested outcome. [hint: I am not preparing for months of unrest but I am preparing for days in which I’d prefer to hunker down and want to be able to have more people at my home]
- And of course…. Everything that’s on the ballot, more broadly which forthcoming scenario is the one in which we’ll be organizing for change in, and the absolute horror of the Project 2025 agenda that – I am sorry to say – will not magically disappear with a republican presidential loss.
Below are a few of the videos I’ve made this week – more ballot/voter education ones are happening on my instagram. And! if anyone or anything is interfering with you being able to vote, or if you just need to get information on how to get out there and cast your vote, or help someone else to do so, call or text 1-866-OUR-VOTE! There are people in every state who know how to help you.
Some of the places I’ve been getting information about the election are:
- The Oversight Project has a deep-dive into the playbook and objectives of disinformation
- 538 Politics podcast – if you are or want to be a polling data nerd, these folks are it; this episode has some insights on disinformation
- This podcast from GZero world with the US Federal Director of CISA [a federal election security] Jen Easterly clarifies the facts on US election security measures [tldr: it’s quite secure] and the threats of foreign interference
- Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha’s recent substack was substantive, especially in regards to considerations of community care and impacts to organizing: I especially appreciated the links out to Ejeris Dixon’s Fascism Barometer pod [start here] and Vision Change Win’s Electoral Safety Toolkit – plus Leah’s insight on getting ready for any post-e-day fuckery: “Preparation is anything around what you can control, in the face of what you can’t control.”
BEHAVIOR THEORY
Working with people on their money led me to deep dive into understanding behavior, specifically why we do or don’t make decisions. One thing that stands out today is confirmation bias aka the tendency to believe things that reinforce what we want to be true, otherwise known as magical thinking.
You can probably guess where this shows up with money – with electoral politics, this is showing up as an engineered outcome of a program meant to make elections look vulnerable based on people’s misunderstanding of systems and dissatisfaction with the status quo.
“When you come in with a conspiratorial mindset, and not a lot of knowledge about how things work, it’s very easy to misconstrue what’s going on and to act in bad faith,” election law expert Rick Hasen told Time in 2022. – The Oversight Project’s “Anti-Democracy Playbook”
In behavioral economics, a nudge encourages us to get to desired outcomes while a “sludge” makes it harder to act in our better interests [one-click checkout comes to mind here]. We can think of election interference and misinformation as a sludge designed to decrease the likelihood of democratic participation with the intended outcome of opening doors for nefarious players to be in positions of power.
As much as I want the US to change, seeding distrust in elections isn’t a recipe for changing for the better. In fact, getting people to feel like there’s no way for them to effect change is essentially the opposite of what we try to do with movement building, community organizing, people-powered activism, and bottom-up initiatives for change. This is another part of why the specific disinfo happening now is dangerous: it can lead us to believe there is no way to create fair systems of input, which is inaccurate.
SO WHAT CAN I DO?
This might be obvious, but: vote. And in the immediate term, have a plan for what your self- and community care will look like this week / over the next few weeks. This can be as simple as knowing who you’ll be with, to having some supplies on hand to lay low.
But — don’t stop there: in the longer term. learn better self-organizing and governance skills with friends and people you want to work together with. Facilitate, activate, organize. Top-down hierarchies are weak because they have bottlenecks.Top-down hierarchies are weak because they have bottlenecks: define decision-making methods and organizational resilience. Embrace opportunities to include, listen, and act, and remember that there’s a long road that does bend towards justice.