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The future of political dirty tricks and deception online

By Julian Sanchez | Published: May 22, 2008 - 07:30PM CT

Make sure your driving record is clear, citizen. See that you've paid off your parking tickets and paid up your child support, and remembered to bring two forms of ID before showing up to the polls on Thursday. That's the preposterous, predictable refrain of the voter "information" flyers and robocalls that crop up like clockwork—usually in minority neighborhoods—during election season, touting ersatz endorsements, fictitious voting requirements, and precisely-wrong times, dates, and places at which to make your voice heard in the democratic process. With old-fashioned smear campaigns already proving disturbingly effective in digital form, civil rights activists worry that it's only a matter of time before voter suppression tactics make the leap to the Internet. Earlier this week, at the annual Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, they braced for the inevitable.

As NAACP attorney Jenigh Garrett explained, traditional vote-suppression campaigns often targeted African-American communities. African-American voters have for decades supported Democrats by huge margins, making race a reasonable proxy for partisanship, while geographic clustering makes it possible to contain the misinformation. The best lies often contain some small kernel of truth, making them seem more plausible to their intended audience. So often, Garrett noted, voter suppression fliers capitalize on the combination of aggressive policing practices and high incarceration rates in urban black neighborhoods, as well as the fact that many states do disenfranchise felons, to attempt to persuade potential votes that any interaction with the law renders them ineligible.MORE