The Town That QAnon Nearly Swallowed

CekFakta is a collaborative network that fights misinformation with around 6,000 fact-checkers from major Indonesian media organizations, citizens, and academics. The group holds training sessions to help journalists identify doctored images and misinformation, with the idea that participants will pass the skills on to their colleagues. CekFakta impacted 2019 presidential debates with large-scale, real-time, collaborative fact-checking that enabled a quick release of fact-checked information. The collaborative process is key to helping people find high-quality information amid so much online content.

Low voter turnouts, populists offering half-truths, corporate interests, and the blurring of facts in the media are signs that democracy around the world is in turmoil. Internationally, citizens have assembled different programs and initiatives that arm ordinary people with information about policy and their elected officials, as well as distinctive ways to reform the electoral system.

Ahead of the midterms, election officials ramped up their communication, outreach, and transparency efforts, setting up live cameras at ballot boxes and in counting rooms, offering special sealed ballots to voters who requested their ballot be hand-counted, and coordinating with organizations that trained volunteers to prevent voter intimidation at polling sites. Though a handful of election deniers continued to sow doubt in the system, experts and poll workers say the election generally ran smoothly and the majority of losing candidates have accepted the results of their races.

Governments, companies, and nonprofits are using a strategy called "pre-bunking" to teach people the tactics and strategies behind misinformation so that they can recognize and scrutinize it when they see it online. After Twitter released several dozen pre-bunks about elections in the United States and Brazil, about 39 percent of users they surveyed said they were more confident that there wouldn't be election fraud, and about half said they were able to pause and question what they saw in online posts.

Faith leaders from communities of color mobilized voters to support candidates and policies that empower Black and Brown people. Events such as “Souls to the Polls” and the coalition-run Black Church 75 initiative, registered new voters and urged them to the polls around issues such as police brutality and racial injustices. Support from Black church members is credited with helping elect Democratic candidates, including Democratic senators in Georgia, as well as passing ballot initiatives, such as Measure J in Los Angeles that would decrease police funding in favor of mental health and housing resources.

Voters Not Politicians (VPN) is a grassroots initiative that, with the help over 4,000 volunteers who knocked on 125,000 doors and canvassed at public events, collected the 400,000 signatures needed to get an anti-gerrymandering initiative on the statewide ballot. The initiative passed with 61% of the vote in 2018 and requires district boundaries be drawn by average citizens. The group’s founder also started The People, another group to help residents in other states apply VPNs model to stop gerrymandering. So far, residents in Florida, Virginia, and New Hampshire are at various stages of applying the model.

In a time of extreme division in American politics, one documentary is highlighting an issue both sides agree is an issue--gerrymandering. As contorted districts have made elections pointless in many Michigan elections, the grassroots group Voters Not Politicians, featured in a recent documentary Slay the Dragon, worked to establish an independent, public citizen's commission for redistricting.

In Michigan, a group of people decided they were done with gerrymandering: a political process in which district maps are redrawn to favor one party over another. They formed a group called “Voters Not Politicians,” and did what no one thought they would be able to do. “The crowdsourced campaign held 33 town-hall meetings in 33 days, wrote a ballot proposal to give redistricting powers to a citizens’ commission” and “collected 425,000 petition signatures in four months to secure a spot on Michigan’s ballot—a rare feat, usually accomplished only by hiring paid signature gatherers.”

In its efforts to oust authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Tisza Party established “Tisza Islands” across the country to recruit and engage volunteers, with more than 20,000 members as of January 2025. Through these outposts, the party was able to staff its campaign stalls with volunteers, distribute an independent newspaper highlighting information not reported in pro-Orbán media, and deploy election monitors to polling stations on election day. Tisza’s candidate, Péter Magyar, defeated Orbán with more than 53 percent of the vote.

After Michiganders approved a constitutional amendment allowing residents to vote early in federal and statewide elections, municipal clerks reported that the state’s first test of early voting in November 2023 was a success with nearly 4,600 people casting ballots.