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Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Warning: astroturf groups pushing voting disinformation

Every election cycle, there’s disinformation put out to suppress the vote or turn a percentage point or two against a certain candidate. These efforts are usually done by shady political operatives or outfits so that politicians can have plausible deniability.

But this year is different. This presidential election, the disinformation is coming from within the White House overtly and consistently, as President Trump, his political appointees throughout the executive branch, and his allies scream about widespread mail-in ballot fraud (UNTRUE!), “deep-state” sedition (ALSO UNTRUE!) and advocating martial law if Trump loses the 2020 election (SO VERY DANGEROUS!).

I know many librarians who are putting together voter guides for their communities (check out this one from the Government Documents Round Table (GODORT)). This is a non-partisan way that libraries have always participated and helped their communities to register to vote.

Given that, I thought our readers would be interested in this anecdote from a friend and fellow government information librarian. She, like so many others, has put together a libguide on voting. She was contacted by this innocuous-sounding group called National Council for Safety, Protection and Wellness (NCSPW) (I won’t link to them since that’s exactly what they want, but you can google them) about adding their page on voting for seniors to her guide. Evidently, the group had also reached out to several faculty at her university in an effort to pressure her to add the link.

I did a little digging and found that this is a nasty astroturf group (I did a whois lookup and their domain was registered by “Domains by proxy LLC” rather than a real person or organization) pushing misinformation about voting and especially vote-by-mail and registration. Just for fun, I looked at their seniors’ guide for CA elections. The NCSPW site states that CA’s absentee ballot request deadline is Oct 27. THIS IS FALSE! The CA secretary of state site says that registration must be post-marked Oct 19 but that you can provisionally register on election day. This site is clearly meant to confuse would-be voters, and even worse, is targeted at seniors who may not have the ability to evaluate or check the information against trusted sources.

So, just a word to the wise. Check any voter information site you’re thinking of linking to in your libguide. Only link to sites from trusted organizations like your state’s secretary of state’s office or the League of Women Voters. Don’t take ANY site at face value. Use your librarian information literacy skills to help everyone in your community vote this November.

John Oliver analyzes Gerrymandering. Hilarious and disturbing

John Oliver is at it again, deeply analyzing a boring political concept in a smart, interesting — and funny — way. This time, he explains Gerrymandering, the nefarious practice of manipulating district boundaries for political advantage, named after Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry. If anyone is interested in delving deeper, you can read the new book by David Daley called “Ratf**ked: the true story behind the secret plan to steal America’s democracy.”


A website that tracks promises in race for California Governor

While government information specialists mostly focus on information by the government, our users also want and need information about the government and the political process. Here is an interesting case of a website that tracks the political promises of those running for governor in California.

  • Politics Verbatim collects and categorizes the promises, proposals, arguments and attacks made by the two major-party candidates for governor in California, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown. The site allows voters to drill down on issues and hold the candidates accountable.
  • California Watch launches Politics Verbatim, by Mark Katches, California Watch blog (June 21, 2010)

    “Check out the search tool that Davis created. It allows readers to sort candidate statements by nine different categories – including promises, attacks, and vague policy points. If they dodge an issue or a subject, there’s a search category for that, too. Readers can also sort by geography, to see where the candidates have been appearing – and what parts of the state they’ve been ignoring….

    “The candidates’ statements are sorted by 26 topics — from abortion to welfare.”

Won’t get Fooled Again: Day 16

I think the Obama honeymoon is over. The withdrawl of nominees due to failure to pay taxes, sharp rebukes from House and Senate republicans over the economic stimulus package, That is not say his influence as a change agent is curtailed. You don’t live and survive brutal Chicago politics for very long if you fall to the ground in a faint after your opponents deliver a quick partisan jab to the ribs (or even more painfully, sometimes by your supporters.)

It would be a mistake to assume any sense of goodwill and comity will overwhelm the toxic partisanship that has flooded our political swamplands over so many decades. It is going to take a few more hits, losses, and diversions to reverse such a trend. In this way, supporters of free and open government information ought to take the long view and realize that it will take at least eight more years to undo the damage done by the Bush administrations to the nation’s robust exchange of public and civic information. As I said in an earlier blog post, if Obama is still President for those two terms, we at least have an executive officer who shares our rhetoric of democratic access to government information. Whether he will be able to hold fast against the entrenched institutional interests that resist this kind of free flow of information (too expensive, to hard, too threatening, too much a security risk) remains to be seen.

To this end, any of the near future plans from our various professional association discussions and study efforts must rise above the politcal tides that flow through the civic structures every two and four years. Just as there is a concepts of a “deep environment” argues for a perspective and planning structure that anticipates long term effects and relationships, so too there could be a concept of “deep civic information” that transcends the political life cycles of our national and state elections. This lesson was brought home again here in Illinois when our barely week old new Governor, and the newly elected leadership of the General Assembly, woke up to realize that they must now deal with a 9 billion dollar budget shortfall, state institutions that are either broken, obscure, or corrupted by indifference or political influence.

If librarians are going to salvage anything from this political train wreck, it will be a way to connect the governors and those they serve with those flows of public information that matter more than the politics.

See you on Day 17.

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