Voting Technology, Democracy, and Propaganda: Ontological Considerations for the 2020 Presidential Election

Abstract

The 2020 United States Presidential election was considered one of the most tumultuous political contests in the 21st century. During an international pandemic, travel restrictions and social distancing requirements created uncertainty about whether to vote in person or via absentee-mail-in ballot. The present study sought to investigate how voters experience different technologies in the 2020 United States Presidential election. Selected concepts in media ecology supplemented Fox and Alldred’s (2013) framework for new materialist inquiry to explore the technical material characteristics of voting technology and the discursive elements of voter fraud propaganda. By tracing the history of voting technologies and voter fraud propaganda, the analysis argued that the vast array of technologies and experiences of voting in the 2020 election rendered the idea of an archetypal or monolithic voting method insufficient. Therefore, the present study suggests an ontological revision for the ways we conceptualize the relationship between voters, voting technologies, and democracy writ large.