As voters ready for this year's elections, officials and voting rights advocates are bracing for a repeat of the misinformation that overwhelmed the 2020 election.
WASHINGTON — Beth Bowers grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with parents who marched in protests, wrote letters to members of Congress and voted in elections big and small.
As voters ready for hundreds of elections of local and national importance this year, officials and voting rights advocates are bracing for a repeat of the misinformation that overwhelmed the 2020 presidential race and seeded distrust about the legitimacy of Democrat Joe Biden's victory. It culminated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by angry supporters of then-President Donald Trump who believed his lies that the election was stolen from him.
National News Election 2022: Biden blasts GOP over fight with Disney; Republicans gain momentum with anti-LGBTQ legislation During the 2020 election, platforms applied fact checks, labeled or removed more than 300 pieces of popular, false content that Common Cause turned up. More recently, in Texas, more than 100 volunteers worked four-hour shifts to monitor false claims coming out of the state's primary election in March.
"Elections are all consuming and few have the time to monitor and counter misinformation," Schmidt said."A lot of them don't have the resources to do this, or the in-house capacity to do this by themselves — you're hit at the time you're most busy.
Staff in Arizona's Maricopa County, the target of many false claims about the vote, have used the county's official Twitter accounts to respond directly to misinformation, in both English and Spanish. The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder County Clerk's office responded publicly to the tweets, explaining that staffers had reached out to the voter directly to make sure he could cast a ballot."Some individuals will just quite candidly tell us, 'I never thought you would have responded,'" he said.
Still, the seat most likely to flip partisan control is the place where Democrats see the Supreme Court vacancy as having perhaps the biggest impact. That's not a new development: Pennsylvania has led the list since CNN started ranking the 2022 races nearly a year ago. But it speaks to the demographics Democrats need to turn out in the Keystone State -- their urban base and suburban voters.
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