“Trump, Repeating 2020 Election Lies, Will Not Commit to Accepting 2024 Results”

Stickyelection subversion risk

NYT:

Former President Donald J. Trump told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday that he would not commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election, as he again repeated his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Mr. Trump said, according to The Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

In an interview with Time magazine published on Tuesday, he also dismissed questions about political violence in November by suggesting that his victory was inevitable.

When pressed about what might happen should he lose, he said, “if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”

Mr. Trump’s insistent and fraudulent claims that the 2020 election was unfair were at the heart of his efforts to overturn his loss to President Biden, and to the violent storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of supporters who believed his claims. Mr. Trump now faces dozens of felony charges in connection with those events.

Mr. Trump’s vow to “fight for the right of the country” also echoes his speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, where he told his supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” before urging his supporters to march to the Capitol.

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“How a post falsely claiming migrants are registering to vote spread to millions in four weeks”

fraudulent fraud squad

NBC News:

The rumor started as a post on X. 

The post published in early April misrepresented federal data from the Social Security Administration to falsely suggest that hundreds of thousands of migrants may have registered to vote in Pennsylvania, Arizona and Texas. One hour later, the tweet got the rocket fuel it needed to take off: X owner Elon Musk reposted it with the comment, “extremely concerning.” 

In less than four days, the false narrative was widely shared on X, Facebook and Instagram. Donald Trump and Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene soon joined in, respectively proclaiming, “What is going on???” and “Are migrants registering to vote using SSN?” By the end of the month, the original tweet and Musk’s had generated more than 125 million views.

All the while, election officials in the three states publicly debunked the claims, and multiple news organizations and a news literacy nonprofit published fact-checking articles providing accurate context. Yet the rumors continued spreading — showing how virulent misinformation is and how casually it can spread on social media.

Under federal laws, only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, and states are required to regularly update their voter rolls, or voter registration lists, to remove anyone ineligible.

The X post that triggered this latest wave of migrant voting misinformation used publicly available federal data from the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) program, which shows the total number of times Texas, Pennsylvania and Arizona requested the Social Security Administration to verify a voter’s identity using their Social Security numbers.

While verification requests are not necessarily a one-to-one tally of people registering to vote, the X post falsely presented such numbers as if they were, suggesting that nearly 1.9 million individual voters registered in such states without a photo identification, only using the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

The post then states that people present in the U.S. illegally can get Social Security cards with a work authorization. That is not widely the case. In 2021, about 587,000 noncitizens, most of whom were  lawful permanent residents or were granted work permits, received a Social Security number. Noncitizens with Social Security numbers are still banned from voting. A study of the 2016 election conducted by the Brennan Center the following year found “that of 23.5 million votes cast, election officials only found about 30 cases of potential noncitizen voting,” according to The Associated Press. 

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, has researched the connections between false claims of noncitizen voting and “rigged election” allegations for the past several years. 

Bayar has found that falsehoods connected to these narratives often gain more traction when “there’s a real crisis behind it,” such as the increasing number of migrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. They also often include “misleading cuts of evidence to put [in] some sort of a grain of truth,” he said. 

X did not respond to a request for comment.

Once the falsehoods hit social media, moderators face a difficult game of Whac-A-Mole to keep up with the spread, even after a claim has been fact-checked….

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“Political Reforms to Combat Extremism”

Uncategorized

Rick Pildes here. A month after Jan. 6, 2021, I wrote an essay in the New York Times asserting that “every political reform proposal must [now] be judged by its ability to fuel or weaken extremist candidates.” I’ve now posted at SRRN a much fuller essay, entitled “Political Reforms to Combat Extremism,” which is forthcoming as a book chapter in a book out this fall entitled Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue (J. Zelizer and K. Greenberg eds).

Here is the link to that forthcoming article and the abstract:

This article first identifies different ways of defining political extremism. It then explores empirical perspectives on the extent to which current political extremism and affective polarization are driven from the top down (political elites) or the bottom up.

After addressing these issues, the article then turns to five areas of institutional reform that could help mitigate political extremism: (1) replacing the traditional party primary; (2) changes to the presidential nominations process; (3) the right reforms of campaign finance; (4) greater emphasis on competitive election districts; and (5) changes to voting systems.

There is no silver bullet or set of institutional reforms that can magically transform our political culture. But institutional reforms can at least mitigate to some extent the political extremism that currently characterizes American political culture and politics.

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