Fighting fire with fire

Maybe it's time we put out some disinformation of our own

You’ve probably seen photos or news footage a hundred times of firefighters lighting what are called “backfires” as a tactic in fighting raging forest fires.  Typically, they walk in a line igniting a fire through grasslands or low vegetation with a drip-torch, a cannister holding either diesel fuel or kerosene that drips flaming fuel onto the ground through a spout with a flaming wick.  Backfires are lit to fight forest fires for a couple of reasons:  they use controlled fires to burn off fuel in the path of a forest fire, or to ignite a backfire using prevailing winds that blow toward the advancing fire until the two lines of fire meet and the fire, deprived of fresh fuel, burns out.

Democrats should study how forest fires are fought, because that’s what they’re facing in the ongoing Republican campaign of disinformation surrounding voting rights.  Disinformation is the forest fire that burns truth rather than trees.  The way to fight it is to light backfires to consume the Republican campaign of disinformation as it spreads. 

That doesn’t mean fighting disinformation with facts.  We spent five years learning just how far that got us with Trump. A story in the New York Times today quoted Renee DiResta, a disinformation researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory on exactly this: “We’re not going to fact-check our way out of problems of trust,” she said.  “People believe these claims because they trust the people who are making these claims, and they’ve also been conditioned to believe that anyone not making these claims and anyone on the other side is inherently untrustworthy.”

The same Times story, however, quoted a Republican state representative from Iowa explaining why he was sponsoring a bill that would greatly restrict voting in his state:  “The ultimate voter suppression is a very large swath of the electorate not having faith in our election systems,” said Bobby Kaufmann.  “And for whatever reason, political or not, there are thousands upon thousands of Iowans that do not have faith in our election systems.”

He’s talking about Republicans here, believe it or not. Trump’s campaign of lies about how the election was stolen from him following his loss in 2020 didn’t succeed in overturning the election.  But his lies “gutted his supporters trust in the electoral system,” noted the Times. “Lawmakers in at least 33 states have cited low public confidence in election integrity in their public comments as a justification for bills to restrict voting, according to a tally by The New York Times.”

The fall in confidence, particularly among Republicans, is even stronger at least in part because of the massive disinformation campaign that Trump ran in November, December, and January.  Polling just published by the VOTER Study Group confirmed this trend.  More than 70 percent of Democrats were confident that their personal votes were counted accurately, and 60 percent were confident in the national vote.  But among Republicans, only 50 percent were confident that their own vote was counted accurately, and only 21 percent of them were confident in the accuracy of the national vote count.

The Times quoted Republican state representatives and senators from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina as well as Georgia about the lack of trust in elections in justifying the voter restriction bills they have put forth.  Judy Ward, a Republican state senator from Pennsylvania, told the Times that “confidence in our elections” needed to be restored, or “many people will walk away from the process because they no longer believe in the integrity of our election system.”

Her excuse for suppressing voting rights is bullshit, of course, but even bullshit can contain a germ of truth.  They claim they’re passing bills that won’t affect voters of one party more negatively than the other, but that’s not the way their bills are worded.  Most of the voter restrictions, experts agree, will affect likely Democratic voters.  Republicans have created this fantasy of fear about so-called “election integrity” in order to justify passing laws to restrict voting rights, thinking the only voters who will believe their bullshit are Democrats.  But Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice thinks they’re wrong. “It’s like a perpetual motion machine — you create the fear of fraud out of vapors and then cut down on people’s votes because of the fog you’ve created.”  That includes Republicans.

The Republican campaign to restrict voting rights is already working against them.  Several studies of the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia show this in spades.  Republicans created such a firestorm of paranoia about the way votes were counted in the November elections when Trump lost that a good number of Republicans did not bother to turn out for the runoff election for the two Senate seats in January.  Election experts attribute Democratic turn-out and Republican paranoia about whether their own votes would count for the victories of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

That’s one way to fight these laws, by informing Democratic voters of changes in the state laws and turning them out on election day.  The other way is to light backfires and use Republican lies against them. We know that confidence in elections tends to diminish among voters in the party that loses.  Republicans lost in 2020.  Why not lament about voting right along with them?  You don’t think your vote counted in the last election?  Gee, that occurred to me too.  Instead of attacking their voting restriction laws, work behind the scenes to make sure your own voters know the laws and how to comply with them, but publicly come out and complain like they do that voting has just become so hard, what are we going to do about it?  Make it seem like you’re throwing up your hands over the whole thing.  That’s exactly what Republican leaders are worried their voters will do, so give them a little push.  Put out some campaign literature that doesn’t have “Democrat” anywhere on it complaining about how difficult voting has become.  It is true that all of these new voting restrictions apply to everyone, so maybe some Republicans will agree that the whole thing has turned into a big mess and stay home.

Like the expert from Stanford said, we’re not going to fact-check our way into winning the disinformation war.  Maybe it’s time we put out a little of our own.