With the presidential election less than two months away, civil rights organizations and democracy experts are waging a battle against hate speech and disinformation targeting immigrants and voters of color.
On Thursday, representatives from the Arab American Institute, Common Cause, and UnidosUS gathered for an online panel hosted by The Leadership Conference Education Fund to discuss ways to combat disinformation.
The convening comes just two days after this week’s presidential debate, where former President Donald Trump repeated a debunked claim about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.
“There is no way to have watched that debate without struggling with the level of disinformation that was shared, and specifically to think about the direct impact that it has on those communities,” said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute.
The morning after Trump’s racist and false remarks, The Haitian Times reported that some Haitian families kept their children home from school for their safety. Meanwhile, the parents of a child killed last year by a Haitian immigrant said politicians like Trump should stop using their child for political gain.
Berry said civil rights organizations must work toward forming a broader community of government response to prevent this kind of disinformation.
“The onus is upon all of us to try to formulate better responses. That is certainly required from our policymakers and social media platforms,” Berry said.
Ishan Mehta, of the watchdog group Common Cause, said he’s seeing disinformation spread in several ways.
One way he has seen false information spreading is when people and institutions make mistakes, then those errors are “spun into a narrative that gets picked up by malicious actors.”
For example, Mehta pointed to a ballot printing mishap in Maricopa, Arizona, caused — not by malicious intent — but by changes to the paper. According to the Associated Press, the error caused lines to back up at some Phoenix-area polling places.
As the AP reported, the issue did not affect the ballot count, but claims that it was proof of fraud were widespread among supporters of Trump, who narrowly lost in Arizona that year.
Mehta also noted the ways leaders are “institutionalizing the conspiracy that non-citizens are voting” in federal elections. In April, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared together at Mar-a-Lago in Florida to tout legislation to ban noncitizens from voting in federal elections, a practice that is already illegal. “We cannot wait for widespread fraud to occur,” Johnson.
There isn’t any indication that noncitizens are voting in federal elections in significant numbers, according to the AP. Some municipalities, however, do allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.
The way Mehta sees it, “If you are somebody on the outside [and] see a public official repeating what you have seen on dark corners of the internet, which reinforces the same false narrative, it cements non-fact as fact for these people.”
“The challenge is, how do you change a narrative when it is institutionalized by the people who are in place to protect the right to vote?” Mehta said.
Laura MacCleery, senior director of public policy at UnidosUS, said it’s no coincidence that as
the Latino electorate grows, so do voting restrictions.
MacCleery said voter ID requirements “create disproportional barriers for minority voters and are cropping up in states that happen to have burgeoning Latino populations of voters, like Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin and Florida.” She also said Latinos are more likely to be wrongfully removed from voter rolls in name purges and to have their ballots questioned on Election Day.
As a response, MacClreery said UnidosUS is focusing on registering eligible voters and encouraging turnout. The organization, she said, is also pushing to make Election Day a federal holiday and to expand same day mail-in and early voting, and automatically register voters at age 18.
MacCleery adds, “Americans should be mindful that false claims of widespread noncitizen voting are designed to sow distrust in our elections and to potentially serve as a pretext to undermine or challenge rightful results.”
