Meeting with the Head of Ecuador’s National Electoral Council, Shiram Diana Atamaint Wamputsar

Dr. John Lott meeting with the head of Ecuador’s National Electoral Council, Shiram Diana Atamaint Wamputsar. The meeting was set up because of the large amount of research that Lott has done on rules to prevent vote fraud and measuring vote fraud (here and here). They discussed a wide range of issues, particularly the problems of disinformation in elections, and that drug cartels will launder money to help out particular candidates. The National Electoral Council had been in the process of setting up a board to monitor false information in campaigns, and Lott argued strongly against it, noting that what one person thinks is false another person thinks is accurate. Lott argued that the best approach would be to let sunlight help people judge for themselves the accuracy of the information that they are seeing. That a concern was social media censoring information and that it might be useful to expose the algorithms that different social media outlets are using to censor information. He also provided ideas on how to stop the drug cartels from funneling illegally obtained money to political candidates.

(Tuesday, February 20th, 2024)