The year 2024 was a year of political storms, weaponized misinformation and disinformation, and candidates and positions ranging the gamut from "fairly mainstream and in favor of incremental changes" to "destroy all public and governmental institutions and replace them with the whims of rapacious capitalists, headed by an autocrat." In charged and anodyne political atmospheres, the population turns to trustworthy organizations and sources to assist them in making political decisions and sorting wheat from chaff. Libraries generally remain highly trustworthy organizations, but on matters of civics and politics, there is a void in the spaces that plenty of our public would like us to fill.
Pew Research conducted research on the trustworthiness of libraries and librarians in 2016. They found "78% of people feel that public libraries help them find information that is trustworthy and reliable."1 While that data point is positive for libraries, it is also from eight years and two presidential administrations ago, which might as well be ancient history. Presumably, a large percentage of library users still trust the library in matters of civics and politics, even in a general environment where campaigns are being waged to defund, close, or impose restrictions on libraries because of some of the content they carry and the perceived social consequences that might result from access to that content or to programming. When EveryLibrary and Book Riot teamed up in 2023 to ask parents about whether they trust librarians to make good collection management decisions, 92% of parents, grandparents, and guardians said they trusted librarians to curate appropriate books and materials, and 91% of parents and guardians said that they trusted public librarians.2 This is an encouraging sign, but extrapolating from parents and guardians out to the public at large carries risks. Parents, grandparents, and guardians use the library more frequently and develop rapport with the library staff through regular association and requests to find appropriate material. Their opinions may not reflect the opinions of populations that don’t use the library as frequently. Even with those caveats, the strong showing of support from parents and guardians suggests the public still trusts that librarians know what they're doing and that they speak authoritatively on a wide range of topics. If, as Hannah Natanson suggested in a May 2023 Washington Post article, most of the book banning and challenge attempts nationwide are conducted by a severe minority,3 then it seems likely that, nationally, groups attempting to paint libraries as dens of iniquity and librarians as untrustworthy and agenda-driven have far less public support than they proclaim.
However, even in an environment that might generally support libraries and librarians to engage in civic discourse and to create materials in relation to politics and civics, the Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) in Washington State regulates conduct regarding elections and has published guidelines for local government agencies and election campaigns4 that severely curtail the ways in which local government agency staff, such as libraries, may speak in their official capacity about electoral matters. They draw their guidelines based on the language in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW), Title 42, Chapter 17A, Section 555 that prohibits use of "any of the facilities of a public office or agency, directly or indirectly, for the purpose of assisting a campaign for election of any person to any office or for the promotion of or opposition to any ballot proposition,"5 and specifically states that "use of employees of the office or agency during working hours" and "publications of the office or agency" are part of "facilities of a public office or agency."6 To their credit, the PDC acknowledges the squishiness of their guidelines and the inability to develop hard and fast rules about what is permitted and what is not.
Unfortunately, that inability to provide clear guidelines creates a lack of enthusiasm from libraries about providing information on elections, politics, and civic matters when that information isn't clearly nonpartisan or an example of "good government." Voter registration and/or ballot printing and replacement, having drop boxes for ballots available on library properties, providing additional copies of the Voters’ Guide, and making directories of elected officials such as the League of Women Voters' “They Represent You” directory available at library locations are common library options for promoting and easing civic engagement without arousing the ire of the PDC or anyone who would complain to them.7
Library engagement could go further, however. Staying firmly in the realm of "the library is a nonpartisan place," the PDC has promulgated an interpretation, PDC Interpretation No. 91-03, that allows public libraries to collect and display campaign materials, so long as they provide "equal opportunity to both proponents and opponents of any ballot measure or to all candidates" and, if they accept materials from one candidate or ballot issue stance, "make a good faith effort to obtain material from opposing or competing groups and make those materials available in library facilities."8 The Interpretation also states "There is no obligation on the part of libraries to serve as a distribution point for campaign materials."9 Thus, libraries have a way to avoid engaging with any campaign material by refusing to carry it.
There are practical reasons in addition to ideological ones to refuse campaign materials. Having enough space for campaign literature in the primary elections is potentially a daunting task, given how many candidates there usually are in primaries. Even in the general elections, there could still be enough federal candidacies and initiative materials to make it hard to find space to display them all. Plus, having to reach out to various campaigns could be burdensome to an organization already overworked and underfunded with tasks they might consider closer to their core mission.
On the side of engagement with political materials, even if it will involve additional effort, the library is uniquely situated to assist in providing more than just information, but context to that information that helps their users understand and interpret that information better. Most libraries think that instruction and support on the interpretation and greater understanding of data, narrative, and the contexts of data and narrative is part of their core mission. So it's likely that a display of campaign materials might find itself organized along some set of axes or cluster groupings. While some axes might be more obvious than others ("yes" and "no," "conservative" and "liberal"), there are plenty of other ways of classifying materials and candidate pronouncements. "Fact-based" and "feelings-based," "xenophobic" and "xenophilic," or, to use a Mark Twain quote for a three-dimensional display: "lies," "damned lies," and "statistics."10 Levity aside, one could imagine quite a few possibilities of libraries providing information about candidates and ballot measures that would stick closely to factual material and yet, might end up providing the appearance of supporting one candidate or side of an issue over another. The PDC says that the prohibition in the relevant RCW "does not prevent a public office or agency from . . . making an objective and fair presentation of facts relevant to a ballot proposition, if such action is part of the normal and regular conduct of the office or agency."11 Furthermore, when discussing what such communication may not do, the PDC says:
In addition, an "objective and fair presentation of the facts" must avoid the following:
Overtly promotional or oppositional content (including inflammatory or emotionally-driven language; check marks and other indications of support; and gratuitous photos that tend to provoke an emotional reaction—e.g. an image of a body on an EMT stretcher, or a house exploding in flames);
Statements that speculate about possible secondary or tertiary impacts of a ballot proposition;
Statements seeking to minimize the cost of a ballot proposition, e.g., through comparisons to small-ticket items such as coffee, pizza, or a magazine subscription;
Statements purporting to describe the sponsoring agency’s responsible fiscal management;
Detailed information about property tax exemptions; and
Detailed information about the conduct of elections (e.g. ballot drop-off locations), unless it is the normal and regular conduct of the agency to provide such information in the manner of the proposed publication.12
These guidelines remove a large amount of context from factual data in service of avoiding the appearance of advocacy for one position or candidate. Having nothing in these factual data sheets that might stir emotions, suggesting that the organization asking for money is good at managing their money, allowing a voter to make comparisons to common items in a voter's life and their costs, or otherwise contextualizing data to help the population make an informed decision makes it difficult for a library to do their work. Libraries that thrive on contextualization, information, interpretation, and helping people understand things in service of making a decision that is best for themselves are bereft of many useful tools when they can only repeat raw data.
Library workers also engage in professional judgment and evaluation of the credibility of sources, the amount of skew that may be present in data, and whether what the numbers say is what the narrative asserts they say. The Colbert Report's "Stephen Colbert" persona said in the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."13 If that is the case, then what appear to be neutral, nonpartisan, contextualizing activities from a library perspective may transform into partisan activities based on the skew of reality itself and the perspective of someone outside the library applying their own worldview to those activities. The PDC handles complaints of advocacy or partisanship from entities that are forbidden to do so, and the results of those complaints influence further what conduct is allowed or forbidden by the entities the PDC has jurisdiction over.
Library engagement in the political sphere is certainly discouraged when the PDC fines a library organization because the library used funds to boost a post thanking an editorial board for their endorsement of a library ballot proposition, as was the case for the Pierce County Library System.14 Despite endorsements of local papers and organizations informing voters about the reasons why they might take a similar position, the PCLS case suggests libraries may not use public resources to proactively put that information in front of more voters, if that information happens to have an opinion about a candidate or a ballot measure (as most endorsements do). If this is an example of the government "not do[ing] indirectly what they cannot do directly" (as suggested by the Municipal Research and Services Center of Washington),15 then there is a very wide swath of things that libraries take on as a core mission that they may not do when the information or the context has political dimensions.
This maximalist-friendly interpretation of the prohibition throws long-reaching tendrils into public life and speech that swiftly go from the justifiable (you can make an argument that it's a bad idea to let the people who are going to be impacted by a ballot question speak from their official positions about whether they want it to happen or not) to the farcical. In past times, when media consensus was that book bans and protestations against library programs were the province of fringe elements that were not worthy of mainstream coverage, a library that chose not to engage with those elements appeared to be making wise choices. The operating maxim "don't feed the trolls" makes sense when acknowledging a fringe theory would lend it more credibility than it deserves. In our current times, we have political candidates repeating slanders about the aims of collection development, programming, and hiring in library systems, and at least some significant amount of the population either believes those slanders as true or is willing to go along with them to boost their own political agendas. In this environment, a library that says nothing, or, more accurately, is not allowed to say anything, is forced to cede defending themselves to other organizations. If they are also further enjoined from pointing out when someone is defending them, and have to sit by when their opponents fill the vacuum with whatever they like, regardless of how divorced it is from reality, the contextual space swiftly becomes one-sided.
To pluck an arbitrary example from our current times, if someone accuses library staff of or makes claims that library materials encourage sex crimes against children, then the library has to hope someone else will say "that's a lie, and you know it," and take on the burden of defending the library against such accusations. Choosing to defend the library will almost certainly result in that organization or person being slandered as someone who wants to protect pederasts, ephebophiles, and pornographers and allow them to continue committing sex crimes against children. It takes a person or organization with moral fortitude, supported by the knowledge of being objectively right, to be willing to subject themselves to those kinds of attacks on behalf of another person or organization. Any would-be defenders would also have to explain how a lack of communication from a library to defend themselves is necessary due to legal restrictions, and not a tacit admission of truth or reality to the accusations. Without an understanding of the situation, that silence might give the accusations credence in some circles. Surely an organization slandered so would defend themselves from lies, and yet, those organizations are forbidden to do so.
Libraries can talk about our policies, our methods, we can highlight that professional staff decide where materials go and what programming is selected, we can use circuitous methods to indicate that the person slandering the library is wrong and not stating the facts, but it seems like we can't say "this person is a liar," or even "this person's opinion on this matter is ignorant in a dangerous way, and they should not be listened to" because such things might be construed as advocacy for or against a candidate or a ballot measure. Additionally, it may not be possible to link or put someone else's factual takedown of such things in front of our users, either, for fear that doing so would also be construed as expressing support or opposition to a candidate or ballot issue.
Because of those prohibitions, one could logically assume that a library’s core mission could be impacted or even forbidden because there's too much politics around it. Library workers are not in the business of simply giving someone things that will confirm and reinforce their own biases and beliefs when those things are requested, but they do aspire to provide complete, accurate, credibly sourced, and factual information on the subject requested. When facts become politicized or weaponized, however, there's the possibility they may end up being forbidden because to do so would be unacceptably partisan. If a potential display uses attributed and properly-sourced quotations from the candidates themselves to show there is one candidate who is on the record against representative democracy and instead wishes to install authoritarian rule, and different candidate is on the record saying that representative democracy is actually really cool and worth fighting for, are those statements only factual? If those two statements are placed next to each other, even in the context of something like "how the candidates stand on important issues to voters," is such a juxtaposition partisan politics (and thus forbidden), because someone might be swayed into voting for the pro-democracy candidate after viewing those two statements in their context? Would that juxtaposition be forbidden because one of the candidates is being portrayed negatively, and the other is not, creating the impression that the library is endorsing or favoring the pro-democracy candidate? Would we have to find some other negative statement about the pro-democracy candidate, like how much they dislike apple pie, and put that next to the anti-democracy statement before it would be sufficiently non-partisan and non-influential? These are the spaces where not having hard and fast rules can lead to nonsensical situations. (In previous political contexts, these hypotheticals would have been dismissed as ridiculous and unserious, but in the last few decades, they have sprinted out of the realm of the hypothetical and into "topics that need to be considered in picking a political party and candidate.")
To even ask these questions about hypothetical displays and programs firmly places our current reality much more in the realm of the farcical, but depending on how the PDC would interpret such displays or programming, there are real questions about whether they would be permitted or forbidden. It is unlikely that a library forging ahead with displays or programs would know about their status until after a member of the public complained and the PDC investigated the matter. Library administrations, of course, are famed for their willingness and encouragement of their workers to undertake projects that might eventually result in fines or penalties levied against the organization for violations of law.
The net result of these restrictions has two components. The first is, as Mr. Swift put it in 1710,
Besides, as the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…16
While there are numerous fact-checking entities and the journalistic profession is supposed to verify the facts of anything they report as news, there are still multitudes of people who would dismiss those places for "obvious" bias and then go to their public library and ask us to help them sort out what's true, what's conspiracy theory, and where on that n-dimensional polygon the person wants to sit in comfort. Pointing out rhetorical tricks, elisions, nonexistent papers or authors of supposed citations, and other common tactics is an important part of imparting an ability to read/watch/listen critically to an advertisement/flier/book/other medium to a user and let them draw conclusions from there. If providing information literacy instruction to others, or helping them work through understanding what they see, is curtailed or restricted by rules saying that we cannot give the appearance of support or opposition to any one position or candidate, then we may as well try to shatter concrete blocks with an inflatable squeaky hammer.
Another result of restriction—one that can cover a large amount of possible space and whose actual space is determined after a complaint and a proceeding—is one that's more familiar to library workers. There is a widespread term in use for what happens when broad yet vague regulations are promulgated and an entity is given broad enforcement authority over them: a chilling effect. The current environment puts libraries and the material they house under siege from entities making baseless claims for politics and profit in the hope that a funding authority or the voting public will refuse support to their library. It takes an organization with bravery (or good lawyers on retainer) to produce a program or display that might be the subject of a complaint where the complaint doesn't go to the board of the library system, but to another entity that admits they don't have many hard guidelines for what's allowed and what isn't and is still allowed to sit in judgment. The safest course of action—one that would give no user cause for complaint—is to provide a cushion around anything construed as having an opinion on a topic on which the library is officially forbidden from having an opinion. To sift through the enforcement decisions to try and determine precedent to defend your decisions, you’ll need a law degree (or a good lawyer on retainer). The subjectiveness of bias and the need to interpret law combine to create a constantly-shifting landscape underneath any potential programs, materials, or displays. That instability results in a large swath of potentially acceptable displays, materials, and programs never existing.
What to do about this situation? What can be done, outside of doing displays and programs about information literacy and political advertisements and accepting that sometimes it means being taken to task in an unpleasant and potentially financially damaging way? I posed this question at a WLA Social Responsibilities Round Table meeting in relation to topics regarding the election and what libraries were doing. One of the suggestions from other attendees was to engage with or form a partnership with a local college’s and/or university’s political science programs to bring guest lecturers who could speak on topics and historical perspectives that might be too risky to present using current examples. A second suggestion was to invite a lobbyist to speak at the library about effective political messaging and campaigning, and how to convince your representatives and/or your neighbors that your position is the one they want to support. In that same vein, it might be fruitful to ask an elected representative directly to bring their perspective and speak about how they craft their messages and what they try to accomplish in a campaign flier. An advocacy and/or lobbying group could be invited to speak on similar subjects. For any of these program ideas, the library would need to proceed with great care and effort so none of the material was credibly perceived as advocacy for a certain viewpoint.
These are all excellent suggestions. They all still feel like nibbling around the edges of something that both library staff and library users would like us to explore more thoroughly. It makes sense to avoid engaging in partisan politics or advocacy for specific candidates or issues, even if I experience great frustration because the library is not able to officially advocate for its own funding on ballot measures. There should be some way, however, of threading the needle of providing our users with facts, reality checks, and peering under the hood at the ways that ballot measures and candidates attempt to convey their information without tipping over into advocacy or partisanship. Even if reality itself has a bias.
Alex is a Youth Services Librarian with the Pierce County Library System in Western Washington. When not indulging their polymath tendencies, they’re usually engaging children with the world of stories, rhymes, and activities, through recommendations, programming, and deliberately looking silly in front of them and their grownups. Spot them on Mastodon at [email protected]
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