It’s the evening of November 3rd. Election Day 2020. The polls have closed, and in-person vote totals are being reported, but millions of mail-in ballots, which skew heavily Democratic, won’t be counted for days or weeks. Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, doesn’t care to wait for that to happen. He’s leading the in-person vote in the decisive swing states. He takes to Facebook to declare premature victory and insist that ballots stop being counted.
This hypothetical chain of events has come up a lot recently, as an unprecedented number of Americans prepare to vote by mail. The Democratic data firm Hawkfish calls it the “red mirage:” an apparent Trump landslide on election night, leading to a fight over the millions of outstanding ballots that makes Bush v. Gore look like a tea party. Which raises an important question: How will the social media platforms where so many Americans get their news respond?
On Wednesday morning, we got some answers to that question. In a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s latest election-related policies, including its plan to deal with the possibility that a winner won’t be officially declared on Election Day. The company plans to use its new Voting Information Center “to prepare people for the possibility that it may take a while to get official results.” On Election Day, the information center will include authoritative information from Reuters and the National Election Pool. And i ..
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