elections

While the current infrastructure for deepfake detection is being pressure tested in India right now, the reporting strategies being carved out by journalists during the election offer a preview into the challenges that lie ahead for other newsrooms around the world.

If we assign disinformation such a high level of influence, we ultimately deny people’s agency in making free voting choices. And studies show that we are aware that manipulative methods are used on us. Still, we all judge that we can maintain an ability to make our own choice when voting.

It is important that groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, can go to court and litigate voting rights questions. Part of the reason is that the Department of Justice is a government office with limited resources and a finite capacity to assess all of the different jurisdictions where voting takes place.

That mystique -- and controversy -- still cling to the movie producer, investor, and political adviser. With his one-time employer Donald Trump now in the fight for his electoral life, and Bannon embroiled not only in a fraud case but the uproar of the discovery of a computer alleged to be Hunter Biden’s, now is an opportune time to revisit Bannon and look for that vital spark imparted on the 2016 Trump candidacy through the lens of Errol Morris's interview documentary American Dharma.

Too often lost in the furor, however, is the far more damaging TrikiLeaks – the tricks and laws used to suppress the vote by partisans, largely Republicans here at home. After the Supreme Court’s right-wing gang of five gutted key sections of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, Republican-controlled states immediately ramped up efforts to create obstacles for voting, particularly for people of color.

So could the president be charged with a crime? (Or, as was the case with President Richard Nixon in 1974, be named as an unindicted co-conspirator?) The official line of the Justice Department is that a sitting president cannot be charged. Many lawyers argue that the Constitution’s only relief is impeachment, a charge made by the U.S. House of Representatives which is followed by a trial in the U.S. Senate. Perhaps.

How do you grieve for something you’ve always known was there and is no longer.  For make no mistake.  In its place is something rank, rotten, and speaking with a seemingly forked, barely recognizable tongue.  It spews venom—the venom of divisiveness, homophobia, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia.  And, yes, ignorance.  It’s a voice that has forgotten or never learned the plain-spoken eloquence of what it means to be America the Beautiful, the land that we loved.

Trump, an unconventional candidate who was caught on tape boasting about accosting women, who advocated banning Muslims from the United States, who has championed mass deportations and building a wall (that Mexico would pay for) to keep out undocumented immigrants, is on the precipice of becoming the most powerful man in the world—backed by a Republican-controlled Congress.