I’ve been vacuuming a lot of content into my brain as I think and report on disinformation. We are in a crisis of knowing.

There are many parts to this. But I read two pieces in the last 24 hours that talk about journalism, and both pieces said something similar, which I’ll quote from below.

First, this piece from Adam Gurri at Liberal Currents (which I’d never heard of) has this main point: “I do not believe there has ever been a media system that has performed better than ours in situations like this … The openness of our information sphere is its great strength, not its great weakness.”

But Gurri writes this:

“If there is a single general problem that cuts across media of all types—including social media and blogs—it is the urge to give a clear answer in an authoritative tone. In many cases the pieces were much better than their headlines or social media taglines. That is a valid excuse for the authors of the pieces, but not for the publications. The fact of the matter is that vastly more people will see the headlines and the tweets than will actually read the articles.The information conveyed by the one-liners will travel far and wide while the subtleties will be picked up by only a minority of those who even click the link. It is irresponsible behavior even when there is a business case for it, and that business case ultimately falls apart when your industry gets demolished by the subsequent fallout.”

And then Jeff Jarvis, in a column, writes something that connects to this.

” One more problem is the methodology of journalism, which is built to regurgitate events and opinions around those already in power without accountability for outcomes. Imagine — as one of my former students, Elisabetta Tola, is— journalism in the scientific method, beginning with a hypothesis, seeking data to test it, calling on experts to challenge it, and recognizing — as scientists do and journalists do not — that knowledge does not come in the form of a final word but instead as a process, a conversation.

It is no longer our job to tell finished stories.”

I hope that the approach described by Gurri and Jarvis is shaping the way I write about the triumvirate of voting rights, voter fraud, voter suppression. Let me know if you think I followed that model in the way I responded to someone on this topic on Facebook.

I could probably make a regular feature out of exchanges I have on Facebook, because I have found them of late to be useful spurs to think more carefully or deeply about one topic or another. And I’m genuinely worried about the pace at which disinformation and misinformation are spreading across social media, with real impacts on public health and our politics (societal health).

My most recent exchange came after I interviewed a Democratic lawyer who is the top guy for the party on voting rights cases. We talked for an hour on my podcast. I wrote about it here and the full conversation is here.

I posted the story to Facebook, and a guy commented: “most on the left want everyone, whether legally eligible to vote or not, to vote early and often. There is simply no justification for being against voter ID laws.”

Here’s my response:

“Thanks for taking an interest in this. But both those sentences are counterfactual. Nobody is openly pushing for non-citizens to vote, which I’m sure you know. Yet, if you were to look at what is actually happening, there is virtually zero evidence of non-citizens voting. There’s a long list of examples here.

The Brennan Center at NYU has done tons of work on this issue. They published a very thorough report 3 years ago about steps that can & should be taken to make our elections more secure. You can read that here.

The Brennan Center’s president, Michael Waldman, wrote a great piece on the history of election fraud and voter fraud, which are two different things. He explains the difference here:

“Of course American history offers ample evidence of election fraud — that is, misconduct organized by party officials or other political operatives designed to sway results. In the 19th Century they might have stuffed a ballot box; in the 20th Century there might have been an attempt to manipulate absentee ballots (for example, by filling them out for patients at a nursing home). Purportedly independent political committees with names that obscure funding sources also pose the risk of illegality. But voter fraud — especially impersonation at the polling place — remains exceedingly rare. After all, the candidate who benefits gains little from one more vote, but the costs to the voter, if caught, are high.”

When it comes to voter ID, a few things are clear: these laws are recent (no state required an ID to vote until 2006), and they benefit Republicans because it lowers turnout among poor voters, a group that in many states is comprised largely of minority voters.

So clearly there are partisan elements at play in the introduction of voter ID. You might say, ‘Well if people can’t get an ID that’s their problem.’

But if the incidence of voter impersonation is as low as the record demonstrates, and the risk also low once you really think about the logic of it, it calls into question why such laws are necessary. But, let’s say they are necessary, even vital. I understand that instinct. In Texas, there has been a long battle over this issue going back to 2011. The Republican legislature passed a bill then that was found to be discriminatory, and so it amended it until it could pass legal muster.

But the overall impact of the law seems to be to make it harder to vote, and the state does not appear to be pairing a zeal for election integrity with a similar passion to making sure that every citizen has equal access to the ballot. For example, in 2018, the Texas government had held “only one event where election officials have gone into communities to provide free photo IDs to voters that need them, despite a legal requirement that the state establish a program to do so.” The link to that report is here: https://www.tribtalk.org/2018/11/05/what-you-should-know-about-voter-id-in-texas/

And Texas has a long history of racially-based voter discrimination: its “use of all-white primaries from 1895–1944, literacy tests and secret ballots from 1905–1970, and poll taxes from 1902– 1966.”

Further, Brennan Center lawyer Max Feldman writes, “Texas put in place a version of its voter ID law in 2013, following dramatic increases in the state’s black and Latino populations during the previous decade.”

So, again, while I understand the instinct to support voter ID, and the logic behind it, to say there are no reasons to oppose it is white-washing the issue. It’s actually very complex. There are in fact reasons to question its use, and it’s overwhelmingly clear that the implementation of such laws deserves heavy scrutiny as a potentially partisan and discriminatory tactic.”