Oh, it’s rigged.

It’s time we had a serious conversation about it.

Part 2 of an ongoing series about how propaganda is seeping into our newsrooms.

Yesterday, after she lost the Democratic primaries, former California Senate candidate Katie Porter made big news by daring to use the word “rigged” when speaking about the elections. She immediately got backlash from political figures on all sides who seemed out of touch with how most of the electorate feels right now.

Last week, I released a post about how war propaganda was rampant from the New York Times to The Intercept and promised to continue the series. Ironically, I intended to point out the barriers from our newsrooms that lead to such rigging. I was going to get to the rigged component last after fully demonstrating all the ways that is rigged, but Porter’s remarks made me feel like they were more urgent to address now, so my entire series is going a little topsy-turvy.

Please note the messenger: My nuanced background differs slightly from most people. I spent two decades working in public relations and newsrooms, mainly in Washington, D.C., and I was trained to do political messaging by some of our country’s leading icons. Yet, I was the first in my family to go to college, born to working-class union autoworkers, and come from an area of non-politically active people in swing states.

I am not a marginalized, uneducated, disenfranchised, or disempowered woman. I am also not separated from my working-class roots. Twenty years doing this work has taught me one thing: It’s rigged, but not in the way that most people think.

In my work, I place political narratives in the press for social movements daily, including at Politico since the day they started. I have personally worked with and interacted with the reporters mentioned above many times before on different types of campaigns. In fact, I would describe them very specifically, through their narratives above, as part of the people contributing to the rigging, and I will lay that out more as time goes on.

Given the background above, I know what words do, when to use them, and when not to use them. As a result, I have advised numerous candidates who wanted to use the word “rigged” to avoid it in the past 2022 elections because we didn’t want to get labeled and branded in the election denier territory, as Katie Porter just did.

There is a difference between being a sophisticated public relations person for a candidate, advising them on words that work better for an electorate, and telling it like it is. We tell candidates to avoid certain words, not to censor them, but rather to warn them that sometimes certain words don’t have the effect you think they will have. A common rule in my work is that “It doesn’t matter what you say; it’s what people hear that is important.”

Next time, Carla Marinucci, featured above, should leave unsolicited public relations guidance up to the professionals who know what they are doing rather than continuing to do her role in perpetuing the rigging. Public relations professionals don’t draft messaging based on our own feelings, thoughts, and guts but rather on what our audience tells us and how they feel. I personally might feel it is rigged, but I wouldn’t advise a candidate to use that term unless I think their audience is ready to hear it.

How receptive people are to certain words evolves over time as well. In the 2024 election, I don’t think we should shy away from the word rigged. Otherwise, we let far right or left voices own that word and create chaos.

Over time, we have made a dent in perpetuating this word and shifting the narrative. We do not want all the people who are also frustrated and rightfully feel it is rigged to be driven to follow conspiracy theorists rather than address the systems in ways that are part of a healthy political process. We need to reclaim the support of most of the American people from the propagandists spreading disinformation.

To those who feel it is rigged, I hear you. I am personally waking up and going to bed in a rage over the level of rigging, and I know I am not the only one. I couldn’t bear to watch Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night. If I had to describe the current state of our union, I would say RIGGED.

Even worse, I am MORE ANGRY at those who are co-opting the rigging and leading people down a path of disinformation and confusion.

Spreading narratives that you can’t trust “the media,” or disinformation that people are illegally voting, saying some ballots went into the trash, alleging dead people cast their votes, election workers are frauds, and on and on and on — that is NOT how the system is rigged. That’s not what we mean.

It’s not rigged in the way that the far right or far left populists and scammers are telling us it is rigged. Most people either do not understand the systems or deliberately misrepresent them to scam us.

I am at the point I want to scream: Yes, I hear you, it’s rigged. But that’s not how it happened.

People know and feel it is rigged, but they can’t pinpoint exactly how, so someone comes in with a simple explanation that is easily believed and…that’s how conspiracy theories and cults work. As a result, solutions are prescribed that only exacerbate the problem rather than fix it. That’s how we historically end up with wars and genocides.

Learning how it is really rigged, and aiming to fix it, is more complicated and takes a lot more work. That’s part of what keeps the rigging going. It’s going to take many conversations to explain it fully. I might mess it up the first, second, or third time I try to communicate to make it make sense. That’s why we need to have conversations that involve ongoing listening and talking, so I know I am carrying through.

The psychology of my field teaches me that people do not want complicated and nuanced conversations. They want simple solutions. However, if we do not get it right, we will have endless conspiracy theories emerging that will become dangerous regardless of who wins the election in 2024. I am begging everyone right now to help me stop it.

I would encourage anyone interested in weighing in on what I have to say or talking more about this — to email me at patricia@matchmapmedia.com, and we can talk. Follow me on Medium or Substack, and I will comment on those posts. I promise I am very responsive. We need a community of those who are on the same page and want to compare notes genuinely. Bad faith actors need not apply, but I will always at first assume good faith.

I will be very direct about one way I observe the rigging personally: I am ANGRY that since I do not live in a swing state, my vote in 2024 has been reduced to utterly pointless.

By default, I have essentially already voted for Joe Biden, and there is nothing I can do about it, and I have not even stepped into the voting booth. I have taken tremendous heat for saying this before, but it is true.

Like most people in America, I do not support Joe Biden; his policies don’t speak for me. I do not support bombing children. I can’t believe I have to say that, but that’s not a common sense American moral.

If you live in a swing state, PLEASE VOTE. If not, who cares? Our elected officials certainly do not. They thrive on the fact that most of us think we have a choice, and we feed our egos by walking in there and marking the tab. We get the sticker we voted for and then return to apathy when it ultimately makes no difference in most cases. That’s part of the rigging process, too. But it’s far deeper than that.

I do not have any power to influence the issues I care about by voting in 2024. Since the system is rigged, I do not intend to vote in the 2024 election.

I want to demonstrate the stark reality of this statement above: I used to be a fierce voting rights activist, even working on Supreme Court cases on the issue for racial justice organizations. I got press coverage walking the streets in a “Believe Survivors” shirt during the #metoo movement to get out the vote.

Organizations’ most significant concern should always be when their most passionate people become quiet, and I think voter apathy will be a real problem in 2024. The path to how I got here: I will lay it all out so no one can claim it is a mystery why that happened. If the political parties don’t want to listen to me, they’re on their own to fail.

In May 2020, I lived in New York to be closer to aging older relatives during the pandemic and registered to vote there. I was always mainly independent and had lived in open primary states before, so this was my first presidential election in a closed primary that took place very late.

Due to how systems operate, New York was going to cancel our primary election. That would mean, I would not get a chance to vote for the Presidential candidate I spent five years organizing on behalf of because he had dropped out during the pandemic. That was the entire reason I registered to vote in the Democratic Party in the first place. I am currently registered as no party preference because I am very upset with all the parties.

I furiously wrote an op-ed in my local paper.

We had to fight and sue to get the right to vote in the primary, which was delayed from April of 2020 in the prime of the pandemic to June 2020.

For those of us who did that, we checked a box that allowed us to get our ballot sent to our home (because of the pandemic). It was my understanding that I had checked the box to get it in both the general and primary elections, but I am relying on memory only. Done. I did that. I thought I had registered for my primary and general election ballot to be mailed.

Well…Gov. Cuomo had a good laugh because my understanding is that he ultimately changed the rules. You needed to file additional forms to get the ballot sent to you in the general election beyond what we filled out already in the primary. Having thought I already did that, I didn’t get a ballot mailed to my home in the general election during the pandemic. I will admit, it is possible that I checked the wrong box, and I don’t have any way of knowing. Regardless of what happened, the outcome was that I was confused, and I didn’t get my ballot sent to my home in the pandemic during the general election.

I am a highly educated and involved person who had been heavily volunteering for local candidates running for office, and even I was confused. In other words, I spent countless devoted and dedicated hours volunteering for campaigns, including a State Senate one, that I ultimately could not ever vote on because the ballot didn’t come, and I was afraid to go in person during a pandemic.

I could have raised a fight, gone in person, and risked COVID-19 death. But why would I do that?

If you understand how the general election works, you will know that I, living in a solid blue state, have zero power to change the outcome of a general election. I could vote for Donald Trump, and my vote still won’t benefit Donald Trump. I almost considered doing that to piss these people off and make a point because it would not make one bit of a difference.

P.S. I am very proud of my family members and friend in swing states, some of them who are elderly and immune compromised, some of them not even Democrats, who went in and voted simply to avoid Trump. I did my fair share of volunteering to get them and others out to vote, which is why this story below is even more delusional. If I still lived in a swing state, I might have been more persistent.

By default, I ultimately vote for Joe Biden in the outcome no matter what. Don’t get it twisted; the same thing is true, though, if you live in a red state — but in the opposite direction. You can vote for Biden, but it will still be Trump, in terms of the outcome of your vote.

I am sure there will be some uninformed person who will call me racist or sexist or whatever other name for choosing not to vote in 2024, as happened in the past. It’s part of the rigging.

Democrats, who used even to be people I considered friends, took my photo and blasted it everywhere — look at this sexist and racist woman (Bernie Bro) who is not voting for Biden in 2020. This action failed to recognize several issues at play that shaped why I didn’t vote and vastly overestimated my power in terms of just how much I could do to benefit the system.

Call me whatever you want. I don’t care. I am not going to be bullied by a mixture of ignorant people who don’t even know the rules of the electoral college and/or are disingenuous. My background speaks for itself, and I don’t need your performative shaming. We reduce racism by doing our work to prevent the systems from turning out this way, not attacking well-minded people who are ultimately powerless. I have spent plenty of my time addressing the systems, including this piece.

Forget the fact that I spent a long time doing public relations for the party of those who branded me as racist. Since that moment, I decided I was no longer going to do public relations, especially not volunteer or pro bono, for people who do not understand how our elections work. I am canceling myself from that. Unsubscribe.

Oh, but go vote for the local elections, they will tell me. Where I live, we all know who will win those local elections. There is not even anyone challenging it. I am aware that I was volunteering for a State Senate candidate at the time, but I knew that he was not going to win. He had no chance in running against systems that were clearly rigged against him. This is part of the reason why I know that my vote is useless when the systems won’t allow someone like that to win in the first place.

Plus, how condescending. Well, we can’t give you a choice on if we bomb children in Palestine, but how about if we fund the library or not?

The library will get financed here. It always does. I want you to stop bombing kids in Palestine and use my taxpayer money for healthcare and climate change. Don’t try to subside me with a seemingly empowered choice about library funding. If you can’t figure that out, maybe you are the one who needs more time at the library studying civics.

Part of the rigging is what we are doing to Katie Porter right now. I have been trying for a long time to bring up the systemic problems of candidates who lost and why that happened, if anything, to pass on knowledge to the next person. Invariably, that is looked on as being a sore loser. A whole funnel of narratives is part of the rigging process. It’s not about winning and losing to me. It’s about the systems that make it impossible to win by design. It’s exhausting.

There will not be any change made right now because those in power have rigged the system so much that they don’t care how we vote. And that is the truth. If all people are doing is showing up and voting, they are performatively making a choice that is ultimately not a choice.

In the meantime, war will be the casualty. If you want to do something, I beg you to pay attention to this and start working on the systems. It’s not glamorous, and it is not easy, but we need you.

Given my privilege in working in a field where most people do not have access to see what I see, I feel I have a moral obligation to write about what I have seen in my last twenty years in hopes to make change, so it is no longer rigged.

I would encourage anyone interested in weighing in on what I have to say or talking more about this — to email me at patricia@matchmapmedia.com, and we can talk. Follow me on Medium or Substack, and I will comment on those posts. I promise I am very responsive. We need a community of those who are on the same page and want to compare notes genuinely. Bad faith actors need not apply, but I will always assume that you are coming from good faith.