User:RiaVora/sandbox

Final Article Choice - Alt-Tech
I would like to add the civic technology perspective to this article, and contribute to evidence of political outlets through alt-tech being used in the US and across the world. I would specifically look into adding header descriptions, examples, and explanations of tech that fits both under alt-tech and civic technology (such as how fringe political groups use alt-tech to communicate).

Bibliography

Underneath the Alt-Tech Talk Page, under the header "Ria's Bibliography"

Article Evaluation - Postal voting in the United States
The article begins with defining how a voter receives the ballot and returns it. However, in the next paragraph, when it delves into the research behind mail-in voting, the article claims that "It has been argued that postal voting has a greater risk of fraud than in-person voting..." Considering the current president also made this claim, would it be worth mentioning his name/title (i.e. "including the President of the United States"). One thing that distracted me is the number of claims that are made (increasing voter turnout, saving money) but only saying "Research shows" or "One database". The verifiability of these sources is not clear in the paragraph, and it doesn't give me confidence whether to trust the information.

There also seems to be a level of bias against the President (although I agree with it). When noting that the President has indicated he will block necessary funding, the article did not give his viewpoint / reason, but stated the fact that these funds will prevent votes from being processed securely and on time. Although I do not dispute the accuracy of the fact, it is placed directly after his statement in a way that puts Trump in a bad light. If they had instead said he blocked funding to prevent mass fraud, as he stated, that would help counter the bias. Then, they could mention that a lack of funding could prevent the processing of mail-in ballots.

Another point that seems underrepresented is examples of fraud in elections. When I clicked on a source (#5) about mail-in voting being available in both Democratic and Republican states, I also found information about cases of fraud that did not seem to be mentioned in the article, and especially not in the header.

Some of the sources I clicked on seemed to be biased-leaning, but the information cited was not biased.

In the talk page, an editor had removed certain sources because he believed they didn't meet the guidelines, and mentioned that another editor had reverted his removal, demonstrating the difficulty in examining sources.

The article is rated as a Start-Class, and is part of the WikiProject Elections and Referendums and the WikiProject Politics, among other projects.

Although Wikipedia seems generally unbiased, the article reads much closer to the democrat-leaning article we read for homework vs. the republican-leaning article. There is an underlying bias in the tone and the arrangement of facts to support that mail-in voting has wrongfully been accused of being fraudulent, and that there is no dispute in the matter.

Contribution to Talk Page

My contribution to the Talk Page is at the bottom of the Talk Page, titled "Breakdown by State", and includes a proposal and a question with cited source.