Yesterday I wrote a diary about this exchange I had via text with ???? (still unidentified person/persons). I wasn’t the only person to receive this message. There seem to have been thousands, judging by the explosion on Twitter. I was just one of the first ones. It came out beginning mid-afternoon the day before the election, leaving almost no time, literally not adequate time, to undo the misinformation.
I pursued every avenue I could think of to report it, including asking here for more ideas of where this information should go.
A number of us reached out to the Kansas Government Ethics Commission. Rather than try to paraphrase, here are the screenshots of their replies on Twitter.
The first question was about the sender refusing to identify.
So anonymity is allowed here, by omission, apparently.
On to the second question, the false and fraudulent nature of the text.
Well, golly dang, it seems that actual dishonesty and outright lying in the text is also allowed by omission.
Here’s a summary by another user.
They ended by saying, essentially, if you don’t like it, complain to the legislature, not us, and demand new laws. This is the state of Sam Brownback and Kris Kobach (who is on the ballot again as the R candidate for Secretary of State, to be in charge of elections). There’s a Republican supermajority in the legislature, so no chance of changing the laws after this.
At least one of the anonymous numbers was provided through Twilio. Twilio is collecting screenshots that include the numbers, so if you got one of these, save a screenshot and send it there. The text does violate their TOS, which forbids fraudulent information, and their fraud division has started an expedited investigation. Without the state laws backing them up, I’m not sure what Twilio can do, though. And the election is already underway. Pathetic, really, that Twilio is at least making more of an effort than the State of Kansas.
Yes, I know there has been a lot of publicity about this amendment. I’m not so arrogant that I think everyone should be aware, though. We on DK are paying attention to politics. Most people are busy just getting by. They’re overworked, they’re tired, they’re distracted. They may be like me, isolating still at home alone, with no television, and not out enough to pay attention to billboards and yard signs. This is aimed at those people, and there are a lot of them.
My daughter, living in Dallas but with many friends still in Kansas, put this message out on blast to her contacts, bless her. She got a response that’s . . . uhm, interesting? The people who voted early didn’t get the text, which means this was a pretty sophisticated operation, filtering out people with advance ballots, not just sending to all Democrats.
And just in case you want to know how confusing this is, here’s a sample ballot from my precinct:
See all those paragraphs in the right column? That’s the explanation for the amendment. You absolutely have to know ahead of time what you’re vote means because you aren’t going to figure it out in the voting booth. Democrats in the legislature tried to have it written more clearly; the Republican supermajority blocked it.
All I can do now is watch the returns and hope.