The Free Press is proud to announce that Project Censored recognized our work exposing election rigging with their 2015-2016 (academic year) Project Censored award for the 4th most censored story in the world. Project Censored cited Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman’s Free Press article “Is the 2016 Election Already being Stripped & Flipped?” posted on freepress.org March 31, 2016 and Wasserman’s appearance on “Democracy Now!” with Amy Goodman broadcast February 23, 2016 where he discussed the book he and Fitrakis released this year: “The Strip and Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows and Electronic Election Theft.”

The prestigious award, shared with three other reporters/news outlets is summarized by Project Censored in its forthcoming Censored 2017 anthology under the title “Search Engine Algorithms and Electronic Voting Machines Could Swing 2016 Election.” The Free Press had received the Project Censored award for the 2004-2005 academic year for our coverage of election irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election for the third most censored story of the year. The Free Press had uncovered the extensive removal of electronic voting machines in Columbus; inner cities causing voters to wait in lines up to seven hours in 42 primarily black precincts. This can be found in the Censored 2006 anthology with the title “Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage.”

Project Censored chooses stories that appear in independent news outlets that are censored by the mainstream media. Their website explains their process: “The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2015-2016 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. During this year’s cycle, Project Censored reviewed 235 Validated Independent News stories (VINs) representing the collective efforts of 221 college students and 33 professors from 18 college and university campuses that participate in our affiliate program.”

The list of the Top 25 Most Censored Stories:

1. US Military Forces Deployed in Seventy Percent of World’s Nations

2. Crisis in Evidence-Based Medicine

3. Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Threaten to Permanently Disrupt Vital Ocean Bacteria

*4. Search Engine Algorithms and Electronic Voting Machines Could Swing 2016 Election

From search engine algorithms to electronic voting machines, technology provides opportunities for manipulation of voters and their votes in ways that could profoundly affect the results of the 2016 election. In the US, the 2012 presidential election was won by a margin of just 3.9 percent; and, historically, half of US presidential elections have been won by margins under 7.6 percent. These narrow but consequential victory margins underscore the importance of understanding how secret, proprietary technologies—whether they are newly developing or increasingly outdated—potentially swing election results.

Mark Frary, in Index on Censorship, describes the latest research by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology on what they call the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME). Their research focuses on the powerful role played by the secret algorithms (including Google’s PageRank and Facebook’s EdgeRank) that determine the contents of our Internet search results and social media news feeds.

Epstein and Robertson studied over 4,500 undecided voters in the US and India, using randomized, controlled, double-blind methods, with research subjects who matched as closely as possible each country’s electorate. “The results,” Frary reported, “were shocking.” Epstein and Robertson showed that biased search rankings “could shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more.” The effect could be greater than 20 percent in some demographic groups, and—perhaps most significantly—this search-ranking bias “could be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation.”

In an earlier article for Politico, Epstein wrote that the Search Engine Manipulation Effect “turns out to be one of the largest behavioral effects ever discovered … We believe SEME is a serious threat to the democratic system of government.”

Epstein described how the study’s measures—including research subjects’ trust, liking, and voting preferences—“all shifted predictably” based on information provided by a Google-like search engine that he and Robertson created, which they called Kadoodle. In one of the experiments, Epstein and Robertson documented SEME with real voters during an actual election campaign: In a study involving 2,000 eligible undecided voters in India’s 2014 Lok Sabha election, they found that “search engine rankings could boost the proportion of people favoring any candidate by more than 20 percent—more than 60 percent in some demographic groups.”

Predictably, Google challenged these findings. As Frary reported, a senior vice president at Google, Amit Singhal, responded in Politico, “There is absolutely no truth to Epstein’s hypothesis that Google could work secretly to influence election outcomes. Google has never ever re-ranked search results on any topic (including elections) to manipulate user sentiment.” However, as Frary duly noted, “Singhal specifically says ‘re-ranked’ rather than ‘ranked.’ What he means by this is that the algorithm decides on the ranking of search results and that no one goes in and manipulates them afterwards. Google’s stated mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ should perhaps have a caveat—‘as long as our algorithm decides you should see it.’”

Hidden algorithms shape online content in significantly different ways from more widely recognized concerns about editorial censorship on television and in print. On TV and in print, Frary observed, “there is a person at the heart of the decision process … We can imagine how commissioning editors think, but the algorithms behind Facebook and Google are opaque.” This concern has led Emily Bell, a journalism professor at Columbia University, to observe, “If there is a free press, journalists are no longer in charge of it. Engineers who rarely think about journalism or cultural impact or democratic responsibility are making decisions every day that shape how news is created and disseminated.”

When filtering is financially motivated, secret, and beyond our control, Robert Epstein told Index on Censorship, “we should be extremely concerned.” Online filtering on massive platforms such as Google and Facebook, he warned, is “rapidly becoming the most powerful form of mind control that has ever existed.”

More than 75 percent of online searches in the US are conducted on Google—in other countries Google’s share of Internet searches is as high as 90 percent; some 1.5 billion individuals, political parties, businesses, and other organizations now use Facebook. Epstein and Robertson are now researching how to counter SEME. “We found the monster; now we’re trying to figure out how to kill it,” Epstein wrote in his Politicoarticle. These efforts hinge in part on eroding public trust in Google, including our willingness to accept whatever our search results present to us as fact.

As Frary reported, Facebook, Google, and others are “highly secretive about how their algorithms work.” Electronic voting machines present similar challenges, as Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis document in their book, The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft. “Electronic voting machines are owned by private corporations … And the courts have ruled that the source code on these electronic voting machines is proprietary,” Wasserman told Amy Goodman ofDemocracy Now! in February 2016.

In 2016, about 80 percent of the US electorate will vote using outdated electronic voting machines that rely on proprietary software from private corporations, according to a September 2015 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. Forty-three states are using machines that will be at least ten years old in 2016; in fourteen states, machines will be fifteen or more years old. The Brennan Center study identified “increased failures and crashes, which can lead to long lines and lost votes” as the “biggest risk” of outdated voting equipment, while noting that older machines also have “serious security and reliability flaws that are unacceptable today.”

“From a security perspective,” Jeremy Epstein of the National Science Foundation noted, “old software is riskier, because new methods of attack are constantly being developed, and older software is likely to be vulnerable.” Virginia recently decertified an electronic voting system used in twenty-four of its precincts after finding that an external party could access the machine’s wireless features to “record voting data or inject malicious data”. The investigation also raised concerns over the AccuVote-TSx machine, which is used in over twenty states. In 2014, voters in Virginia Beach observed that when they selected one candidate, the machine would register their selection for a different candidate, due to an “alignment problem.”

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! asked Wasserman how voters using electronic voting machines could be sure that their votes are counted. He told her, “They can’t be. You cannot verify an electronic voting machine … The proprietary software prevents the public from getting access to the actual vote count.” In a March 2016 article on theFree Press website, Fitrakis and Wasserman wrote that the “veracity of outcomes” in electoral races for the offices of president, US Congress, governorships, state legislatures, county commissioners, and others “will vary from state to state based on the whims and interest of those in charge of the electronic tallies.”

On Democracy Now! and elsewhere, Wasserman and Fitrakis have advocated universal, hand-counted paper ballots and automatic voter registration as part of their “Ohio Plan” to prevent stripping and flipping in US elections.

Corporate media outlets including CNNMoney, Fortune, and the Washington Postprovided some coverage of Epstein and Robertson’s research. In May 2016, theHuffington Post published an article by actor and activist Tim Robbins, titled “We Need to Fix Our Broken Election System.” “Every broken machine, every disenfranchised voter, every discrepancy between the exit polls and the final results,” Robbins wrote, suggests “malfeasance” and “leads to more and more disillusionment that results in less and less voters.”

Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico, August 19, 2015http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548.

Mark Frary, “Whose World are You Watching? The Secret Algorithms Controlling the News We See,” Index on Censorship 44, no. 4 (December 2015), 69–73. (Extract available via: http://ioc.sagepub.com/content/44/4/69.extract)

Lawrence Norden and Christopher Famighetti, “America’s Voting Machines at Risk,” Brennan Center for Justice (New York University School of Law), September 15, 2015,https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/americas-voting-machines-risk.

Harvey Wasserman, interview by Amy Goodman, “Could the 2016 Election be Stolen with Help from Electronic Voting Machines?” Democracy Now!, broadcast February 23, 2016, transcript,http://www.democracynow.org/2016/2/23/could_the_2016_election_be_stolen.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “Is the 2016 Election Already being Stripped & Flipped?,” Free Press, March 31, 2016, http://freepress.org/article/2016-election-already-being-stripped-flipped.

Student Researchers: Brandy Miceli (San Francisco State University) and Amanda Woodward (University of Vermont)

Faculty Evaluators: Kenn Burrows (San Francisco State University) and Rob Williams (University of Vermont)

5. Corporate Exploitation of Global Refugee Crisis Masked as Humanitarianism

6. Over 1.5 Million American Families Live on Two Dollars Per Person Per Day

7. No End in Sight for Fukushima Disaster

8. Syria’s War Spurred by Contest for Gas Delivery to Europe, Not Muslim Sectarianism

9. Big Pharma Political Lobbying Not Limited to Presidential Campaigns

10. CISA: The Internet Surveillance Act No One is Discussing

11. CIA Warned Bush Administration of Terrorist Attack Prior to 9/11

12. Why Our Lives Depend on Keeping 80 Percent of Fossil Fuels in the Ground

13. US “Vaccine Court” Has Paid over Three Billion Dollars to Vaccine-Injured Families

14. FBI’s New Plan to Spy on High School Students across the Country

15. Understanding Climate Change and Gender Inequality

16. Over Three-Quarters of Freedom of Information Act Requests Not Fully Answered

17. Deadly Medical Neglect for Immigrants in Privatized US Jails

18. Women’s Movements Offer Global Paradigm Shift toward Social Justice

19. Global Epidemic of Electronic Waste

20. The Walmarting of American Education

21. Little Guantanamos: Secretive “Communication Management Units” in the US

22. Department of Education Cooperates with ALEC to Privatize Education

23. Modern-Day Child Slavery: Sex Trafficking of Underage Girls in the US

24. India’s Solar Plans Blocked by US Interests, WTO

25. NYPD Editing Wikipedia on Police Brutality

The Free Press encourages our readers to read up on the top 25 censored stories at projectcensored.org.