With less than a week to go, the only thing we can be sure of is that this Election Day will most likely look, feel, and be different than previous years. We are, after all, living through a pandemic, economic crisis, fight for racial justice, and an election season. 

If you haven’t planned how you are going to cast your vote or already voted this election, there’s still time. You can find more information here about how to make your voting plan, and learn about the specific guidelines in your state. If you plan to vote by mail, consider dropping off your ballot in-person at a drop box or election office. If you plan to vote in-person, make sure to check the location of your polling place or early vote center. You can also learn about your rights at the polls here. 

And just as we’ve been asking our supporters to make a plan to vote, we at the ACLU have been preparing for months and years for this Election Day: activating volunteers, motivating voters, and fighting for our rights across the country in courts, legislatures, and in the streets. 

The ACLU national office and our state affiliates and chapters have been working around the clock to protect and expand your access to the ballot this election season. Through litigation and advocacy, we’ve fought and scored 26 victories in 20 states and Puerto Rico to safeguard the right to vote. Together, these states are home to more than 154 million Americans and wield 247 votes in the Electoral College.

But our work doesn’t stop there. Our state offices are working with a network of election protection lawyers and volunteers on the ground to make sure every eligible American can exercise their constitutional right to vote and each and every vote is counted. The ACLU is at the ready to act swiftly and use all of the tools and resources at our disposal to protect the vote. If you have questions about casting your ballot or difficulty voting, remember you have the right to vote and help is a phone call away at 1-866-OUR-VOTE.
 
The ACLU doesn’t represent one party, person, or side. Our mission is to protect our democracy and realize its promise for all. This election, during a pandemic, is an all-hands-on-deck moment for our entire ACLU community. The ACLU was created in a time of deep crisis for our nation, and time and time again, we’ve been called on to defend freedom in the most difficult circumstances.   
 
For four years, people have counted on us to do everything we can to protect people’s rights and our democracy. We won’t back down. On behalf of every member of our ACLU staff, we will continue to defend our fundamental freedoms with all that it takes for as long as it takes. Even in the darkest periods in modern American history, the ACLU has never mourned the present.

Sarah Brannon, Managing Attorney, ACLU Voting Rights Project
& Molly McGrath, Voting Rights Campaign Strategist, ACLU

Tomorrow, the Senate Commerce Committee is holding a hearing entitled “Does Section 230 Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?” This is just the latest attempt by Congress and the Trump administration to amend, reinterpret, or eliminate Section 230, a key provision of federal law that generally ensures online platforms, including social media, can’t be held liable for the speech and content their users post on these platforms. This law means Yelp can’t be held legally responsible every time one of its users posts a false negative review. The Bed Bug Registry doesn’t have to visit every hotel with a magnifying glass to confirm reports from the public. And Facebook can offer a forum for billions of users to share their thoughts, pictures, memes, and videos freely without having to approve every post before they go up. 

Over the summer, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the Federal Communications Commission to commence a rulemaking to reinterpret Section 230 in ways entirely contrary to its purpose. Meanwhile, Congress has put forward numerous legislative proposals to amend 230. These efforts are confused at best. Many Republicans believe that the platforms at stake display an anti-conservative bias, disproportionately censoring and fact-checking conservative speakers. Many Democrats are concerned about censorship of communities of color, LGBTQ voices, and women and nonbinary people. Others are concerned that platforms promote disinformation, conspiracy theories, misinformation about voting, violence, and hate speech.

To sum up critics’ views: platforms are censoring people too much and not enough all at once. Somehow, policy makers think that the solution to these alleged problems is to expand the circumstances under which platforms can be liable for their users’ speech by amending Section 230. 

To be clear, amending this provision will not solve any of these concerns. In fact, many of the proposed changes would exacerbate over-censorship, and other proposals would promote the proliferation of misinformation about voting. Yet President Trump and Congress continue to advocate for changes to the law in an effort to encourage the censorship they like and discourage the censorship they don’t. 

Section 230, in addition to providing a shield against liability for users’ speech, enables online platforms to cultivate orderly, pleasant, and useful sites. While the biggest social media companies, responsible for hosting the speech of billions, should resist calls to censor lawful speech, Section 230 allows sites to delete abusive accounts, remove content that violates the site’s terms of service, or eliminate voter misinformation without risking liability for the speech that they do host.

Almost as important as what Section 230 protects is what it does not. Section 230 does not shield bad actors. If you harass or defame someone online, you are responsible for your illegal conduct. 

Moreover, platforms are liable for their own illegal conduct. They can be sued or prosecuted for the content they create and the conduct they engage in, or materially contribute to, that violates any law. That is why Illinois residents were able to sue Facebook under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act when the platform used facial recognition technology on them without their consent. And that’s why we were able to file charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to challenge Facebook’s targeting of employment ads to younger men only, excluding all women, non-binary people, and older men. 

Section 230 has permitted platforms to host all kinds of user content, and created space for social movements like #MeToo and content creators on sites like Instagram, TikTok and Twitch to flourish. It has also enabled platforms to host the speech of activists and those organizing protests, from the Arab Spring to today’s protests against police brutality. If it weren’t for Section 230, website owners would be far more reluctant to freely permit public posts knowing that the site could be investigated, shut down, sued, or charged with a felony over one user’s illegal tweet or post — including that of the President. And if that protection is unavailable only for a certain category of content, as some proposed reinterpretations of the law propose, the platforms will censor far more speech related to that category than they could constitutionally be liable for, simply to spare themselves the massive court costs they could face.

This is exactly what has happened in the past. Congress last amended Section 230 in 2018, through a law called SESTA/FOSTA. It was purportedly aimed only at creating platform liability for illegal sex trafficking. We warned at the time that rather than face liability, platforms would engage in excessive censorship that would harm the LGTBTQ and sex worker communities in particular. As predicted, after SESTA/FOSTA’s passage, entire websites that provided forums for sex workers to connect, share information to protect themselves, and build community disappeared. Speech suffered, and so did the health and safety of vulnerable communities. If the EARN IT Act, which is currently moving through the Senate, becomes law, it will create similar harm.

Amending 230 to narrow the scope of the editorial decisions platforms can make while still receiving 230’s immunity shield can also be dangerous. For example, the Online Content Policy Modernization Act, which the Senate Judiciary Committee is set to mark up this week, would create new liability risks for platforms that “editorialize” or make virtually any other changes to user-generated content. That means sites that label and flag misleading or incorrect user speech, or point users to trusted and fact-checked sources to counter falsehoods, could be exposed to greater liability risk. Such a change could discourage sites like Twitter from providing links to factual information about mail-in ballots under tweets that blatantly lie about voting by mail, not unlike the incident that sparked President Trump’s executive order.

The desire on the part of policy makers to do more to create platform accountability is understandable. The ACLU shares that goal, and has long advocated for strong consumer privacy protections at the federal and state level for that very reason. We have also pressed the platforms to provide transparency and meaningful review processes for their content moderation practices. However, we should be wary of proposals that risk harming online expression and be skeptical of focusing on Section 230 as a method of requiring platform accountability. 

Section 230 protects people’s ability to create, communicate, and build community online. The ACLU will remain vigilant in ensuring that the internet continues to be a place for self-expression and creation for all. We urge members of Congress to do the same, particularly as they examine proposals to amend Section 230.

Kate Ruane, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU

This post is originally published in Orlando Sentinel.

Florida law is abundantly clear: to vote, you must be an American citizen. Proposed Amendment 1 on this year’s general-election ballot, titled “Citizenship Requirement to Vote in Florida Elections,” is intended to deceive voters into thinking that this isn’t already the rule. It is a totally unnecessary change to the Constitution — our laws already provide that you need to be a citizen in order to vote.

But this measure is not just harmlessly redundant. If passed, proposed Amendment 1 could be used to keep otherwise eligible voters from casting their ballots. That’s why the ACLU of Florida urges all Florida voters to vote “No” on No. 1.

Florida’s Constitution currently provides that: “Every citizen of the United States who is eighteen years of age and who is a permanent resident of the state, if registered as provided by law, shall be an elector of the county where registered.”

The proposed amendment would change “Every citizen” to “Only a citizen.”

That may seem like a minor difference, but the change could embolden anti-voting rights elected officials to enact unnecessary and burdensome “papers please” voting requirements, laws that would have no purpose other than to make voting harder for Florida citizens. Any U.S. citizen without the resources to navigate new burdensome requirements could be kept from voting.

This proposed amendment amounts to thinly veiled anti-immigrant and vote suppression rhetoric. Voting by non-citizens is simply not a problem in Florida, and there’s been no effort to give non-citizens the right to vote in our state.

Instead, we’ve seen persistent efforts to suppress voter registration and voting. One of the primary routes such suppression has taken is through requiring increasingly costly verification requirements, such as burdensome voter ID laws.

Requirements like these can disenfranchise the many citizens who do not have ready access to paper documents, like birth certificates, decades-old marriage licenses, or passports that can cost hundreds of dollars.

All over the country, we are seeing officials try to make voting harder by eliminating polling places, cutting early voting days, purging voter rolls and adopting strict voter ID laws. Proposed Amendment 1 is yet another part of that attack on democracy.

Don’t be fooled by an anti-immigrant dog whistle. Don’t let yourself be manipulated by dirty tricks.

Rather than strengthen our democracy or protect our elections, this amendment could weaken citizens' right to vote.

Vote “no” on 1.