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Webinar rewind: Preparing for potential election crises

A pandemic. Battles over millions of mailed-in ballots. The Supreme Court deciding an Electoral College dispute. The accelerated undoing of democratic norms. Dozens of legal battles over election administration and voting rights. Each would be enough to create unprecedented challenges to an election. But all are present this year, positioning Election Day 2020 and the days after to face challenges rarely as intense before. As Nov. 3 approaches, voters, government officials, candidates and the media may become overwhelmed by the many storylines, the shifting landscape and the potential outcomes. Preparation needs to start now.

The Fulcrum convened an expert panel to discuss these issues and more on June 9. Editor-in-Chief David Hawkings moderated the webinar, which also included:


  • Bryan Monroe, associate professor of practice at Temple University's Klein College of Media and Communication. Before joining Temple, Bryan was editor of CNNPolitics and Washington opinion editor for CNN; president of the National Association of Black Journalists; and editor-in-chief of Ebony & Jet magazines.
  • Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center. Trevor is a past chairman of the Federal Election Commission and was general counsel to John McCain's 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

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Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

New Tool Reveals Which Americans Hold Outsized Voting Power

Here’s the scenario: You and four friends are deciding where to eat. Two want pizza. Two want sushi. Everyone turns to you. You have one vote, like everyone else, but yours decides dinner. Your vote has more power.

This fall, something like that is true for about 2.75% of eligible American voters. Just 7.3 million people out of 266 million eligible adults will have more power to decide the outcome of this year’s midterm elections than the rest of us. The difference from the friend group scenario is that these people with decisive power often don’t realize it. In fact, they may doubt whether they should even bother to vote.

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NewYorkTlan 2026, a vibrant transnational festival that celebrates the cultural contributions of indigenous immigrants and Native Americans in New York City.

Why Language Access Matters for Indigenous New Yorkers

What good are rights if the people who hold them cannot understand how to exercise them?

Imagine seeking refuge in a strange land, far from everything you know, and being handed papers in a language far from your own. State officials loom overhead as they urge you to sign your name on a dotted line. You can't quite make out what they’re saying, but you get the impression that signing your name will end this experience.

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Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico

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(Photo by Danielle Villasana/Getty Images)

Are Independent Voters About to Flip Texas?

Texas is in the middle of one of its most contentious and heated elections in modern history. The question that lingers in the national press is, will the state flip to Democrats in the major statewide contests for US Senate and governor?

But the voters who will decide this question aren’t Republicans. They aren’t Democrats. As previously predicted on IVN, it will most likely be independent voters—if they turn out.

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AI chatbots are always guessing, even when they sound sure. Experts and Claude itself explain the AI trust gap, bias and why to check sources.

Oscar Wong/Getty Images

AI’s Information Crisis: Why Trust Is Harder to Sustain Than Ever

In all the debates about human and machine intelligence, one thing has become clear: We humans love to talk about AI. We’ve speculated whether AI will create or eliminate jobs, revolutionize or destroy science, comfort or torment us, entertain us brilliantly or rot our brains, or some combination of all these things. But amid the noise, we may have paid too little attention to a subtler impact: how AI is disrupting our relationship to information and making it harder to know what to believe.

The problem isn’t just deepfakes, the malicious manipulation of images, video, and audio. Even benign, well-intentioned AI applications can be profoundly misleading. The nature of the large language models that power chatbots means that they are always guessing, however confident they seem. How can we use AI to produce reliable information that improves public discourse rather than distorting it?

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