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. 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:
Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework looks at the threats and responses. The blueprint for fighting Trump’s attempt to sabotage the election, drawn up in Minnesota has some background
Election Defense Scenarios goes into detail on specific scenarios.
With a few million active users in the US, decentralized social networks like the ATmosphere and the fediverses are big enough to have an impact - especially thanks to innovative technology and developer ecosystems that understands the value of providing tools for organizers and communities. Custom feeds are one good example of this; see Disinfo-resistant election defense custom feeds. 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.
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). From an organizing perspective, they're a great great complement to on-the-ground organizing for getting the word out quickly about calls to action and events, keeping people informed, recruiting and encouraging people to get involved, and raising money.