Fifty-nine years ago, when I was a young reporter covering City Hall for The Baltimore Evening Sun, the Second City Council District contest was a vicious struggle for political power pitting an ascendant Black political organization against the dominant Czech machine.
It looked like time and demographics had run out for one incumbent, Clement J. Prucha, and an ally, Joseph V. Mach, in this East Baltimore district. But on Election Day 1967, the voters chose the two Czech American pols for four-year terms, alongside an African American candidate, Robert L. Douglass.
Months later, I ran into Prucha’s and Mach’s political boss and general consigliere, a judge who, let’s just say, did not like to be quoted by name.
Over drinks, I asked him how he pulled it off. With a strong note of pride, almost bragging, really, he described two crucial — and unreported — last-minute tactics.
The first was to hire deep-voiced Black men to operate a phone bank from midnight to 6 a.m. for the four nights before the election. According to the judge, they were given a phone list of the white liberals in the downtown section of the district — about 20 percent of the district’s voters, I estimated — and a script that more or less read:
You gotta vote for the Black ticket. We’re going to close that damn prison so all of us will be back on the streets. We’re gonna beat those white mothers so bad no white person is gonna feel safe, first in this district and then four years later in the whole city.
The prison was right in the heart of the district.
The second strategy: The judge hired a group of young Black men to smash the windows of Joe Mach’s bar on the Sunday night before the election and paint “Black Power” on the bricks.
The phone bank was intended to diminish turnout among white liberals who were more likely to vote for the Black slate, although Douglass did win one slot; the window-breaking mobilized Czech voters to vote to protect what they thought of as their neighborhood.
I went to my editor with what I had learned, but he told me not to pursue it any further because “no one cares about elections once they’re over.”
In the nearly 60 years since that 1967 election, the tools to manipulate outcomes have become technologically more sophisticated, more secretive and ever better at communicating false information from seemingly credible sources.
Campaign managers are now armed with artificial intelligence and have the ability to spread false information through sites that appear credible. Campaigns secretly pay influencers, PACs emerge seemingly to support a candidate when their real goal is to help the weakest general election opponent get nominated and microtargeting allows campaigns to send contradictory messages to different constituencies.
Is this better or worse than the grotesque tactics employed in Baltimore in 1967? How do today’s elections stand up to the past in terms of allowing an informed public to make thoughtful decisions?
This is not a simple question. Just as the tools of deception have reached new heights, the electorate is far better educated, television and other media have raised levels of political knowledge and both federal and state regulation of elections has grown stronger.
Which, then, is winning, growing voter sophistication or the masters of distortion?
The experts in corruption, voter manipulation, election law and political malfeasance I consulted were less interested in comparing today with the past than in showing the continuing weakening of free and fair elections.
Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., wrote by email: “The 1790s was one of the most savage eras of American politics. Elections were flooded with vicious lies, disinformation, rumors and conspiracymongering.”
Despite that, Pildes continued, “our era combines three features that make it as bad as any for the capacity of less transparent efforts.”
The first is that “the regulated system of required disclosure in close to real time of campaign funding has broken down.”
Since 2010, Pildes argued,
there’s been a dramatic increase in the role of outside groups funded by nondisclosed money — “dark money.” When the Supreme Court decided Citizens United, it clearly envisioned that the disclosure laws would be updated to capture newer sources of money. But that has not happened.
Second:
During the heyday of the major broadcast networks, there was at least a widely shared source of common information and facts. That provided a bulwark against the effectiveness of efforts to influence elections by manipulating information and views in less visible ways. With media fragmentation and the rise of first cable television, then social media, more people live in epistemic silos. The collapse of trusted sources of widely shared knowledge about facts, candidates and campaigns means that these dark-money efforts to propagate misleading information can be more effective.
Third:
The cost of reaching voters to influence public opinion has gone way down, while the number of wealthy individuals seeking to do so seems to be going up. In real dollar terms, campaign spending now is several times more than in the 1980s. Put that together with the limits on disclosure and the fragmented media environment, and I think we are probably at the lowest point since at least the 1960s in terms of the role that less transparent efforts to influence public opinion are playing.
Bob Bauer, a colleague of Pildes’s at N.Y.U., has a different but complementary list. Asked whether there is more secrecy and false information now than there was in the past, Bauer replied by email to make three points:
First, in a deeply polarized politics in which the opposition is more the dreaded enemy than just a political opponent, ethical or other limits that might constrain do-what-it-takes politics loosen considerably. Winning is always the urgent objective; in what is deemed an existential conflict, it assumes the character of a moral imperative. All sorts of excesses, like the worst, most brazen lying, become easier to justify if a loss is perceived as unbearable.
Second, the more effective the methods for putting one over on the voters, the more irresistible it is to resort to them to win. And this is all the more the case if the fear is that the opposition will do what you don’t. We should expect a race to the bottom in the competitive use of A.I. and other sophisticated techniques of deception.
Third, in a world of weaponized politics, when losing can lead to retribution, including criminal prosecution, there are powerful incentives to hide identities and funding sources.
In looking at the history of sleazy campaign tactics, one thing stands out: A significant share of them happened in South Carolina.
The Republican political mastermind Lee Atwater notoriously ran a push poll intended to attack an opponent as opposed to gain understanding of the electorate, while managing Carroll Campbell’s House campaign against Max Heller, the Jewish mayor of Greenville, S.C. In the overwhelmingly Christian Fourth District, Atwater’s poll asked: “Would you vote for a Jew who did not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?”
In 2000, when George W. Bush and John McCain were battling each other in the Republican primary, South Carolina voters received calls asking whether they would “be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if … he had fathered an illegitimate Black child?” Leaflets posing the same question began to appear on cars parked outside senior centers and debate venues.
In fact, McCain and his wife had adopted a girl, then a young child, from Bangladesh.
David Pozen, a Columbia law professor, has his own list of three key points:
First is the so-called dark-money problem, where the sources of campaign spending are hidden from the public. The bulk of this secretive spending now flows through 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations, which do not have to disclose their donors, and through super PACs, which do have to disclose their donors but may solicit funds from shell companies or other opaque entities.
Second is the misinformation problem, where voters are exposed to false or inaccurate claims. The rise of the internet, social media and now A.I. has made it far easier to produce deceptive content and to distribute it at scale. This problem, too, is arguably worse than ever, but there is no legislative fix in sight.
Third is the problem of money in politics, where wealthy actors spend enormous sums to influence elections. The Supreme Court has enabled this problem through a series of decisions striking down state and federal campaign finance limits under the First Amendment.
The money problem, Pozen contended,
is also arguably worse than ever — and is, in some ways, the most fundamental and frustrating of the three. It is fundamental because multimillion-dollar election expenditures turn politics into a gift economy and corrupt the entire system of representative government.
One of the fastest-growing industries in politics now is the deployment of paid “influencers” with large social media followings or high credibility, or both, in key constituencies, such as Latino voters, MAGA voters, liberals, African Americans and rural voters.
Statista, a market analysis firm, estimates that the influencer market, both political and commercial, grew 13-fold between 2016 and 2025 $32.55 billion from $2.3 billion.
My Times colleague Ken Bensinger described how the process works in an illuminating article on May 16, “Political Money Is Flowing to Influencers. But From Whom?”:
Last month, Carlos Eduardo Espina, a progressive influencer, revealed a surprising endorsement to his 14.5 million followers on TikTok: He would support Tom Steyer, the billionaire running for California governor as a Democrat.
“I really believe Tom Steyer is different,” Mr. Espina said in a speech that he posted on social media. “He could be traveling around the world or doing whatever he wants, but he wants to serve the people of this state.”
Unmentioned in Mr. Espina’s post: Mr. Steyer’s campaign was paying him $100,000 to help win the election.
The $100,000 fee, buried in campaign finance records, Bensinger wrote, “is described as a payment for ‘strategic advice and campaign surrogacy.’ The money went to a limited liability company in Texas.”
The arrangement, Bensinger continued, “provides a rare glimpse into the world of pay-for-play social media, where content creators and marketing firms are increasingly compensated to promote candidates or points of view and where there are few requirements for disclosure.”
Oguzhan Dincer, a professor of economics and the director of the Institute for Corruption Studies at the Illinois State University, was especially critical of influencers in an email responding to my queries:
Political campaigning using influencers works by borrowing trust. The people running these campaigns aren’t starting from scratch — they’re tapping into relationships that content creators already spent years building with their followers.
Someone who follows a creator doesn’t receive their political commentary the way they’d receive a campaign ad. They receive it the way they’d receive some advice from a friend.
Dincer cited a study that found political campaigns are increasingly shifting
from purely automated bots and fake accounts toward “semi-organic” campaigns. These campaigns combine influencers, coordinated accounts, bots, meme pages, private groups and ordinary users. The purpose is to make political messaging appear natural, spontaneous and grass roots.
Paid influencers certainly qualify as tools to distort election outcomes by presenting voters with seemingly authentic endorsements from favored celebrities who are, in fact, bought and paid for.
Let’s get back to the basic question: Is the conduct of elections worse today than in the past?
Mark Fenster, a professor of law at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, provided a nuanced response by email to my queries.
“Much of this is a matter of degree,” Fenster wrote. “Lying and concerns about lying aren’t new at all; governments, leaders and those vying for power have been less than truthful about what they’ve done and what they’re planning to do since the beginning of politics.” But, he continued, “the falsity of information seems more difficult to discern today, especially when it is plausible and ‘looks’ true to the observer.”
Is there more secrecy and false information now than in the past?
Fenster:
The easy answer is yes, but I’m not sure how we would be able to respond with an authoritative, quantitative answer to that question. But several developments and current conditions justifiably heighten concerns about secrecy and falsity.
Fenster’s basic points:
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The amount of information from a vastly increased number of channels without gatekeepers dwarfs the past.
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The organized engagement by third parties, either unaffiliated or secretly affiliated with political candidates and parties, has also increased in scope and visibility. Seemingly independent voices are visible as such, but their identities and aims are often hidden.
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Increased partisanship and the presumed stakes of elections have encouraged these kinds of behaviors, especially as engagement is easier, technologically enhanced and more widespread.
A clear difference with the past, Fenster argued,
is the visibility of the mechanics and sheer volume of false or misleading information, as well as discussion, complaints and hand-wringing about it. We talk about it more because we can more easily see it or consume and engage in discourse about it every time we open social media or a news website or an email newsletter.
Fenster’s last point provides a crucial insight.
While it is difficult to compare past elections conducted under very different circumstances with a very different electorate to elections today with vastly superior technologies, communication systems and more intense partisanship, there is one clear difference: Voters today are more insistent that elections be uncorrupted, that they are conducted fairly without misconduct or falsified results. This heightened sensitivity has, in turn, raised the level of public discomfort with the distortions of technology: fake voices, influencers and seemingly legitimate publications spreading false information.
That discombobulation may serve as a beneficial vaccine against lies, but it’s not going to stop the development of increasingly devious and increasingly subtle means of impressing “fake news” on the minds of the vulnerable.
After all, as two of America’s greatest football coaches, Red Sanders and Vince Lombardi, liked to say, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”
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