- Battles over
voting policy andelection misinformation are going local in 2021. - State legislators have filed hundreds of election administration-related bills.
- The fight against election conspiracies on social media will also continue at the micro level.
The contentious aftermath of the 2020 election is now fading into the rearview mirror. But battles over voting policy and the facts versus fiction about elections will continue to play out in state legislative hearings, town meetings, state and county parties, Facebook comment sections, and even living rooms throughout 2021.
Republican lawmakers across the country, and particularly in battleground states won by President Joe Biden, are on a renewed push to restrict voting at the state level after Biden retook the White House in November and Democrats recaptured the Senate.
According to a new analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice, legislators in 28 states have introduced over 100 bills seeking to restrict voting and registration, a three-fold increase over the number of restrictive voting bills filed at the same point in 2020. The majority of the bills aim to roll back mail voting, introduce new voter ID laws, and implement stricter regulations on voter registration.
Some of the proposed measures, particularly stricter voter ID requirements and states having more flexibility to purge voters from the rolls, could disproportionately affect the voters of color who propelled Biden to the White House.
Many of the bills will fail to gain any traction or end up getting vetoed by Democratic governors in states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, offices that are all up for election in 2022. But other states could reshape major voting policies by the time the next election rolls around.
Georgia hasn't completely flipped blue yet, and some lawmakers want to keep it that way
In Georgia, where some of the most contentious battles and rifts within the GOP over the presidential election results played out, Republicans control the entire state government.
After Biden and two Democratic Senators won the state, ending decades of Republican dominance, GOP lawmakers are now aiming to eliminate no-excuse absentee by-mail voting and automatic voter registration, ban ballot dropboxes, and require voters to submit a copy of a valid ID to request an absentee ballot by mail.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has argued that no-excuse mail voting is too costly for counties. But some officials say that more voters choosing to cast ballots by mail helped election offices save resources that would have gone to pay more poll workers and run in-person operations.
"We ended up in the presidential election having 88% of the voters vote before Election Day, and that was the key to our success. To have only 12% of the voters show up on Election Day made our processes run that much smoother," Rick Barron, the elections director in Fulton County, Georgia, told reporters on a call hosted by the National Vote At Home Institute. "I would not want to see anything rolled back for absentee by mail."
Eric Fey, Director of Elections for St. Louis County, Missouri noted on the call that tighter restrictions and regulations can only confuse voters without necessarily making elections more secure. Missouri requires most absentee voters to get their ballot envelopes notarized, with Arizona lawmakers proposing a similar requirement.
"A lot of people think that if we make people have the signature on their ballot return envelope notarized, that will increase security. But it's counterintuitive in that in Missouri, at least, anybody can sign up to be a notary," Fey said. "There's very little in the way of qualifications."
But efforts to change voting laws aren't all one-sided. At the same time, according to the Brennan Center, lawmakers in 35 states have introduced over 400 bills, nearly a quarter filed in New Jersey and New York, seeking to make pandemic-era voting expansions permanent and modernize the voting process.
And organizations like Run For Something, which recruits young progressives to run for down-ballot offices, believe there's no such thing as an off-election year. They and other groups on both sides of the aisle are recruiting candidates and vying for control of local election offices.
"It makes the difference between winning and losing for Democrats in a lot of cases, whether people can actually exercise their right to vote," Ross Morales Rocketto, Run for Something's co-founder and chief program and recruitment officer told Insider.
"In a lot of these positions, they don't control every aspect, but they do control huge parts of the voting infrastructure. By doing that, we can make a huge difference and counteract a lot of the Republican bills that have passed over the last decade," he added.
Groups like Run For Something are also recruiting candidates for county-level executive offices that can have massive discretion over budgeting for election departments.
"Legislators and folks at the county level often don't have a lot of sway over election laws or procedures, but they have an oversize influence on funding," Fey told Insider. "We run the state and federal elections, but we get almost no money from the state or federal government - close to 100% of our funding for elections in Missouri is from the county level."
The war against voting misinformation will continue on social media
In the wake of the January 6 insurrection on the US Capitol, social media platforms took long-awaited steps to curb the wildfire-like spread of misinformation and disinformation around the 2020 election.
Platforms like Twitter permanently suspended some of the most influential purveyors of election misinformation, including Trump, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, conspiracy-wielding lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, and purged thousands of accounts associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
While there is now far less misinformation coming from figures with big megaphones, there are still millions of Americans who believe there was widespread fraud or at the election was stolen, and are still on those social media platforms.
Twitter is now taking the fight against misinformation to the micro-level with Birdwatch, a new citizen content moderation feature that will function similarly to Wikipedia in enabling select users to fact-check their peers' tweets.
In addition to social media platforms combatting misinformation and being more transparent about their algorithmic practices, the solution to the current misinformation epidemic ultimately lies with individual people and their ability to critically judge information and shape balanced news diets instead of relying on social media.
"I do believe that, ultimately, people don't want to be duped. And I do think that fundamentally people would like to be better consumers of information," Helen Lee Bouygues, President of the Reboot Foundation, a nonprofit that conducts research and provides resources on critical thinking and misinformation, told Insider.
Election fraud and COVID-19 conspiracy theories have caused major rifts within families and communities, straining an already on-edge nation. And while social media companies and media organizations can be part of the solution, it'll come down to one individual at a time - starting with the next generation.
"Unfortunately, there's no short fix," Bouygues said of the Americans who still believe the 2020 election was rigged.
"I think what we need as a society is to help the general public really be much more educated on media literacy, and I believe that starts in school," she added. "When there's an enforcement of teaching of subjects like media literacy with children, it mirrors off of it for parents as well."