Frankly Speaking: The Company Election Integrity Keeps in Congressional Communication

Title: Frankly Speaking: The Company Election Integrity Keeps in Congressional Communication

标题：坦率地说：选举诚信在国会通讯中保持的伙伴关系

Election integrity is a shared commitment in American politics, but Democrats and Republicans in Congress increasingly mean different things by it. Analyzing 10,420 congressional e-newsletters sent from 2010 to 2025, we examine how the two parties invoke election terms such as integrity,'' security,” and “fraud.”

选举诚信是美国政治中的共同承诺，但国会中的民主党人和共和党人对其含义的理解日益分歧。通过分析2010年至2025年间发送的10,420份国会电子通讯，我们研究了这两个政党如何援引“诚信”、“安全”和“欺诈”等选举术语。

Using diachronic word embeddings, which track semantic change through how words are used in context, we measure how differently each party uses each term, how much each party shifts, and whether they share nearest semantic neighbors. We show that members of Congress do not need different words to tell different stories about elections. They need only place those same words in different company.

利用历时词嵌入技术（通过词汇在语境中的使用方式来追踪语义变化），我们衡量了各政党使用每个术语的差异程度、各自的偏移量，以及它们是否共享最近的语义邻居。我们表明，国会议员不需要用不同的词汇来讲述关于选举的不同故事，他们只需要将相同的词汇置于不同的语境（伙伴）中即可。

Across nearly every term and year, the two parties surround election-integrity vocabulary with entirely different words. That divergence is easy to miss, because most election vocabulary is no more divergent than other words used at roughly the same frequency, and neither party’s usage shifted more than the other’s.

在几乎每一个术语和年份中，两党在选举诚信词汇周围使用的词汇截然不同。这种分歧很容易被忽略，因为大多数选举词汇与其他使用频率大致相同的词汇相比，其分歧程度并无二致，且两党的使用习惯偏移程度也相差无几。

Only a subset of terms grew more divergent, most notably certification,'' while rigged” and stolen'' entered election discourse after 2020 and polarized there. By 2024, Democrats surround voter,” election,'' and integrity” with the language of access and administration. Republicans surround the same terms with citizenship verification,'' noncitizen voting,” and “border security.”

只有少数术语的分歧日益加剧，最显著的是“认证”（certification），而“操纵”（rigged）和“窃取”（stolen）在2020年后进入选举话语体系并呈现两极分化。到2024年，民主党人围绕“选民”、“选举”和“诚信”所使用的词汇多与准入和行政管理相关；而共和党人则围绕相同的术语使用“公民身份验证”、“非公民投票”和“边境安全”等词汇。

For one party, integrity means protecting eligible voters’ ability to cast a ballot. For the other, it means protecting the electoral process from illegitimate ballots. Election officials, who must administer a single system under both definitions, inherit this tension.

对于一个政党而言，诚信意味着保护合格选民的投票能力；对于另一个政党而言，它意味着保护选举过程免受非法选票的干扰。必须在两种定义下管理同一系统的选举官员，继承了这种紧张关系。