Students Receive Misleading Information on Election Day

E-mail Targets School Provost

Other schools, such as George Mason University in Virginia, have experienced similar cases of voter suppression, but on an even larger scale.

Early today, students received an e-mail supposedly from the school's provost, Peter N. Stearns, announcing that Election Day had been moved to Wednesday.

In a later e-mail, posted on the Web site Politico.com, another e-mail from Stearns went out to students: "It has come to my attention early this morning that a message was hacked into the system fraudulently stating that election day has been moved. I am sure everybody realizes this is a hoax, it is also a serious offense and we are looking into it."

Steve Orlando, UF's spokesman, said from the complaints coming in to the university and the supervisor of elections office, the texts being sent to UF students appear to be decentralized, and not the result of someone hacking into the UF database and getting numbers from students.

"It appears from what we can tell it's just sort of a viral chain text message," Orlando said.

Regardless of the scope, however, spreading any information that might dissuade voters from casting their ballots is illegal.

Mimicking Official Correspondence

UF Political Science professor Paul Ortiz, who researches presidential elections, said that since the 2000 election, similar efforts at voter suppression have resulted in people actually showing up to vote on the wrong day.

"How many votes does this take away from one candidate, I don't know," Ortiz said. "But it is serious, and if a person is caught doing this, it's considered a serious offense."

Ortiz said text messages spreading false election-day information appear to be a new phenomenon, particularly prevalent among increasingly wired college students.

He added that other forms of voter suppression have been striking the non-college voting public in different ways, such as automated phone calls, known as robocalls.

"The robocall people have been getting what sounds very official," Ortiz said. "The call seems to come from someone who's an election official. If you pay a lot of attention, you'd know right away it's probably not on the level. But you need to remember, people have differing levels of experience with voting."