EXAMPLE PAGE - SCHOOL BROCHURE - DEMOCRACY - Flipbook - Page 41
Tips to Make Sure Your
Information is Good
Follow your secretary of state. Or your election board, your county clerk’s
office — whoever is in charge of running elections in your state. Says Choate,
“Friend those organizations providing trusted info.”
Read from reliable sources. Choate cites a few examples like the New York
Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. “If you’re reading info you get on
Facebook or Twitter, and you’re reading things that don’t seem all that realistic
or don’t seem right, chances are that the information has no merit.”
Support local media. “I consider it almost charitable giving,” says Choate. “It’s
something that’s important for my community, so I’m willing to pay for subscriptions to those organizations to help them. We pay for the Denver Post, the
Colorado Sun, Colorado Politics, and 5280 magazine, because these news organizations hold my government — including my office — accountable.”
registration — and there are a number of things you can do
on the policy side to increase registration.
“The world has changed from the 1950s and 1960s when
we were a much more industrial economy. Today, we’re a
service economy. Your voters expect you to provide services.
They expect you to engage them. If you don’t, you’ll get
what you get — lower voter turnout, lack of confidence in
the election, and general election malaise.”
Colorado, he says, is one of about a dozen states that
actively engages its electorate.
“In September of this year, we’ll send a postcard to 800,000
Coloradans, and we’ll tell them, ‘Hey, you should register to
vote! Here’s how you do it.’ If you want an actively engaged
electorate, then give every opportunity to register.”
Foreign Interference in American Elections
In 2016, Choate was the incoming president of the
National Association of State Election Directors.
“I was the lucky one who got to be the lead director on
all the post-2016 Russian investigation and critical infrastructure changes,” says Choate. “I mean that flippantly,
but at the same time, I was really lucky. What that meant
was that Colorado was at the forefront of all the changes
PUR D U E A LU MN I . O RG
that happened as a consequence of Russian hacking and
disinformation attempts in 2016.
“We spent all of 2017 and much of 2018 mapping out a
good strategy, identifying who could help us accomplish
the goals we were laying out, and building the infrastructure needed.”
While Choate is concerned about foreign interference in
the 2020 election, his concerns aren’t necessarily that Russia
or another foreign actor will directly hack into voting systems or voter registration databases.
“Those are important things we work on, but frankly, we’ve
built up our security infrastructure so significantly over the
past decade that this is far less of a concern than it might
have been in 2016,” he says. “The thing that keeps me up at
night is the ability of one person or a well-organized team to
create misinformation and discord among my voters. Such
an attempt might be aimed at casting doubt on the validity
of an election or might try to convince people that the voting equipment is unreliable. More than that, they could try
to convince people that Election Day has been moved or that
a candidate believes or said something untrue.
“Voters need to listen to and believe in my office, not random people making provocative statements on social media..”
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