Chilling effect

That's faze.law/guardians.

[percussive music] We still hear the argument from time to time, particularly from government officials, that freedom of information legislation has had a chilling effect on government.

It discourages officials and politicians from discussing matters openly and frankly, and in particular from properly recording those decisions.

It encourages people to move to more informal channels.

Is there any evidence of this chilling effect?

I suppose in academic terms, I've got to say it's very hard to prove a chilling effect on decision-making 'cause you have to prove something that hasn't happened.

And I think there's often this idea that there used to be a golden age before freedom of information where everything was written down, and I don't think that's true either.

But I've got to say that there is some pretty clear evidence of records not being kept and avoidance of records in Scotland, where there was some ongoing controversy around special advisors interfering with freedom of information requests and also attached to that some worries that records weren't being kept around them.

IN FACT, THE HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY MARK WAYNE MULLEN HAS SAID THAT THERE ARE SOME CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH ICE AGENTS COULD POTENTIALLY BE SENT TO POLLING LOCATIONS, LIKE FOR EXAMPLE, IF THEY'RE SERVING A WARRANT FOR SOMEBODY THEY ARE LOOKING FOR, SOMEBODY WHO IS IN THE COUNTRY ILLEGALLY AND THAT PERSON GOES TO A POLLING LOCATION, OR IF THEY'RE RESPONDING TO A THREAT TO SUCH A SITE ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

But what they're arguing in this lawsuit, the plaintiffs, including the city of Denver and the advocacy groups that you mentioned, is that such a deployment would not only send a chilling effect that could potentially deter voters from casting their ballots, but also that it would violate a provision of federal law that actually makes it a crime.

for any federal official to oversee or to order the deployment of armed men, quote unquote, or troops to any polling location across the country, unless such deployment, Lindsay, importantly, is necessary to repel a foreign invasion, a military invasion by an enemy nation.

Obviously, that is not the context we're currently talking about.

Even American citizens could look at that and say, well, I guess I'm just going to stay home.

I'm not going to vote.

And that's the chilling effect that the argument here that these organizations are making, whether a court ultimately accepts the legal argument that is another question, but the fear itself could be difficult to understand.

If you're telling me that armed agents are going to be at the polling station i'm gonna most likely say i'm gonna stay home i'm gonna figure out a way that i can get my ballot sent to me and i can vote comfortably in my own home rather than going out and being intimidated by armed agents at the polling station

Sure.

'Cause you, you talk like chilling effects are, are bad.

Yeah.

The ideological use of speech is bad, but, you know, some other things you're not particularly worried about.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So I, I think chilling effects are one weighty, um, collateral damage.

So chilling effects refer to the, um, deterrence of permissible speech that sits at the borderline to impermissible speech, because speakers perhaps are unsure of what is or what isn't caught, or they're worried that judges or other decision-makers are gonna apply rules, um, imperfectly.

I was at the same conference you were at last week and you know, it's certainly heard from some of the political scientists on campuses that, you know, are paying attention to the work that their campus is doing either, you know, specifically or kind of tangentially as members of that campus.

And I certainly think there are and have been some chilling effects on what campuses are doing at the institutional level.

And I, you know, I certainly don't want to, you know, call anyone out by name or anything like that.

I do, however, think that one of the pluses of the work that All In and groups like the Andrew Goodman Foundation, the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, and others have been doing over the last decade has helped to kind of institutionalize some of this work more broadly, right? So I think we're still seeing different folks on campus do a lot of the work, both because there's some parts they realize are required.