Waiting Games
It’s Sunday evening, November 13th, and I live in a state where the winner of the governor’s race is… well, we still don’t know. In the November 11th episode of “America This Week,” Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn discuss how these types of delays further erode confidence in the electoral process.
Those of us old enough to have experience working as librarians have already lived through three hotly contested Presidential elections- 2000, 2016, and 2020. Perhaps the time has come to approach yet another third rail topic— election integrity— in a library book club.
Some relatively recent, non-partisan titles on the topic include:
Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States
Why American Elections Are Flawed (And How to Fix Them)
Electoral Integrity in America: Securing Democracy
Securing American Elections: How Data-Driven Election Monitoring Can Improve Our Democracy
As a show of democracy in action, let your book club vote on the title they prefer!
Image: Polling booth Linwood Library 671.JPG/ Wikimedia Commons
And we have a wonderful library (Carter Presidential) devoted to election integrity which soldiers on...trying.
https://electionstandards.cartercenter.org/our-mission/
https://eos.cartercenter.org/
This links to a larger point: conspiracy theories and misinformation. When things LOOK "funny" and there is a long silence or indignant insistences by power players that things actually do NOT look "funny" and that those who think they DO look funny are dumb or acting in bad faith, it's yet another blow to trust and social cohesion. The process seems to be designed to encourage already-paranoid people to become even more paranoid. Paranoid people talk to other paranoid people and....voila...https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/news/peace_publications/democracy/the-big-lie-and-big-tech.pdf