Educating Voters: Local Election Official Use of Social Media

• In Event: Local Election Administration and the Voter Experience

Abstract

As political campaigns and party organizations have made the use of social media in elections near-ubiquitous, local election officials in the United States have also started using these platforms to educate constituents about how to vote, and to combat misinformation about the election process. Given that Facebook and Twitter are the most commonly used by local election officials in an official voter education capacity, this paper uses a content analysis to examine how local election officials used these platforms to address misinformation and educate voters during the 2020 presidential election. For the two months leading up to the election, we examine the following these pages had, how often there were posts about different aspects of voting, including registration, sending in a mail ballot, identification needed, and casting a provisional ballot, and how active local election officials were in responding to voter questions and concerns posted in the comments section. We then consider whether there is a relationship between the quality of information provided on these pages and other jurisdiction characteristics, such as jurisdiction capacity and resources, partisan make up, and racial and age demographics. We find that jurisdictions with greater capacity and resources, and those that have younger, whiter populations are more likely to have consistent and detailed posts on both Twitter and Facebook. With its ability to quickly convey information on platforms that are widely available and consistent from user to user, we discuss the role of local election official use of social media for voter education, the gaps that exist in current practices, and the implications of uneven use across jurisdictions for voter education.

Authors

• Mara Suttmann-Lea, Connecticut College

• Thessalia Merivaki, Mississippi State University