Brewer and Fried featured in Maine Monitor report about voting misinformation
The Maine Monitor interviewed Mark Brewer and Amy Fried, University of Maine professors of political science, for an article about Maine’s efforts to combat voting misinformation. “The Republican base, which still adamantly supports Trump, eats that stuff up and they believe it. So if you’re a Republican running for office in 2022 and you want to appeal to the base of your party and these adamant Trump supporters, you have to pay lip service to fraud,” Brewer said. Fried told the Maine Monitor that skepticism about government is part of a healthy democracy, but it is corrosive when it is used to undermine systems and institutions. The Maine Monitor noted that Fried co-authored a paper in October 2020 predicting likely impacts if Trump persisted in “delegitimizing the election,” and correctly foresaw that “initial vote counts would favor Trump but would become increasingly pro-Biden as mailed ballots are counted,” and that Trump would use that as a reason to claim the election “was being rigged or stolen.” The paper also correctly predicted that, “there is potential for not only protracted legal challenges, but also social disruption” after the election and before the inauguration, which manifested during the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2022.