Voting Right News has news, updates, and action alerts about voter mobilization, voter suppression, and election defense in the 2026 US midterm elections. Our election defense feed on Blacksky (also available on Bluesky, Eurosky's mu.social, and Surf) has highlights from the ATmosphere.
We'll use this leaflet blog/newsletter for longer posts - for example, our writeup on custom feeds for election defense.
Custom feeds and election defense scenarios
Initial implementation and thoughts about future directions
If you're in the ActivityPub fediverses, we also have a Mastodon account @VotingRightsNews@indieweb.social.
Voter suppression, especially targeting Black, Indigenous, Spanish-speaking, younger, and/or disabled voters, has always been a huge problem in the US. This year, there's also a lot of concern about other threats to election integrity. Some important reading to understand the situation:
Freedom Trainers' Election Defense Scenarios is described as a "field guide for protecting democracy". It looks at 18 detailed scenarios — from voter roll purges and redistricting attacks to armed intimidation at polling places and post-election certification battles — and combines analysis with concrete, actionable responses grounded in law, history, and proven organizing strategy constantly asking “What would you do?”.
Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework also looks at the threats and responses. The blueprint for fighting Trump’s attempt to sabotage the election, drawn up in Minnesota has some background
With a few million active users in the US (and tens of millions of latent accounts that could potentially be reactivated), decentralized social networks like the ATmosphere and the fediverses are big enough to have an impact in several ways:
- 1.
Raising awareness about the situation and educating people about what they can do -- and helping people raise awareness and educate others.
- 2.
Encouraging people to volunteer for voting rights activities, including signing up as poll workers, be a bilingual hotline volunteer, help with nonpartisan phone or text banking, and dozens of other opportunities.
- 3.
Help raise funds for community-led on-the-ground organizations like Black Voters Matter, Four Directions Native Vote, and groups in Movement Voter Project.
- 4.
Leverage the combination of innovative technology and a developer ecosystems that understands the value of providing tools for organizers and communities to address problems that wouldn't otherwise be addressed.
Custom feeds are one good example of leveraging innovative technology. Especially once things heat up as we get closer to Election Day, these feeds can address the critical need for public disinfo-resistant channels to make sure accurate information gets widely distributed and people fighting disinformation are equipped with good framing, prebunking, and fact checking information. And you don't need an ATmosphere account to view custom feeds, so the information is also valuable for the vast majority of people who don't have ATmosphere or fediverse accounts yet. See Custom feeds and election defense scenarios for more discussion of this.
Custom feeds and election defense scenarios
Initial implementation and thoughts about future directions
More generally, the ATmosphere and fediverses are a good complement to techbro-owned centralized parasocial media like Instagram, Xitter, TikTok, etc (which have much larger audiences but are hostile territory, with algorithms and moderation designed to suppress dissent and reinforce authoritarianism). In 2016, Facebook embedded employees in the Trump campaign, and Twitter suspended the accounts of multiple Black women in the run up to the election; in 2020, Facebook gave free rein to groups organizing the January 6 coup attempt. This year, everybody's laid off their election integrity teams, Xitter and Grok are already spewing disinfo and propaganda, TikTok in the US is owned by Larry Ellison and Saudi Arablia, so who knows what else is in store. Organizing on platforms we control gives us a lot more flexibility -- and a much better fallback position if things get really dicey.