Every campaign we work with has a plan for reaching voters through Election Day. Planning for tomorrow, and the weeks and months ahead, is difficult, made even harder because a handful of Big Tech companies can decide on a whim whether campaigns can buy digital ads once the polls close. Switch those ads off, and the candidate goes dark for the days and weeks that could decide the election.
I’ve spent my career building technology that helps thousands of Democratic candidates and causes get their ads in front of the right voters each cycle. When campaigns are barred from this type of direct voter engagement, our democracy pays the price.
Picture the morning of November 4. Democrats had a good night, but a handful of Senate races and a dozen House seats are still being counted and remain too close to call. Trump administration lawyers have filed challenges. County offices are fighting over which ballots to count. And the candidates at the center of it are blocked from running a single ad on major online platforms millions of voters visit every day.
Contested elections are expensive. Recounts, canvassing board fights, and emergency court filings start within days, if not hours, and cost real money. Campaigns are built to spend most of what they raise by election night, so their ability to quickly replenish resources is incredibly important. Digital advertising is a primary way they raise money for the post-election fight as it unfolds. During an ad blackout, campaigns struggle to get their requests for financial support in front of the very people who might help pay for the lawyers.
Of course, money is only part of it. Voters whose ballots are challenged need to know whether they can still cure their ballots, and the clock runs out fast. For example, in Florida, home to several hotly contested races, the deadline is 5 p.m. two days after the election. Television is sold by media markets, which can span many congressional districts and millions of homes, so a TV spot reaches everyone watching whether their ballot is in question or not. If digital ads are allowed, the sophisticated technology behind them can help campaigns reach impacted communities and voters quickly and efficiently.
None of this is speculation. Much of it happened in 2020.
When the polls closed that November, Google and Facebook both shut off political advertising on their platforms with no firm end date. Google told advertisers to expect about a week. The ban ran five weeks, until December 10. Facebook’s ban held until mid-December in Georgia and into March everywhere else.
The two Senate runoffs in Georgia that decided party control of the chamber spent that window largely pushed onto broadcast. Advertisers told reporters at the time that the bans were keeping groups from raising money from supporters nationwide. I said that November that ad bans put a thumb on the scale against the Democrats in that runoff.
Blaming technical shortcomings, delayed results, and potential misinformation, the platforms were improvising in the middle of an election season that appeared to catch them flat-footed. Nothing about this November should surprise anyone. Among many other causes for concern, the president has said he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the last election he lost, and the Justice Department has written to election officials in all fifty states, threatening prosecutions.
They are telegraphing the coming chaos.
Results will be delayed, and misinformation will run rampant in 2026. Clamping down on digital ads that carry disclaimers naming their funder and sit in a searchable public archive only compounds the problem because the same big tech platforms allow unpaid social media posts spreading election misinformation and conspiracies about supposed election rigging to go viral with limited, if any, accountability.
Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program soon after Trump returned to the White House, prompting 19 members of Congress to warn the company that these rollbacks leave the midterms exposed. Without validated and already highly regulated digital ads, campaigns are hamstrung in their ability to respond to misinformation, which is now allowed to take root online faster than ever.
The platforms had all year to tell campaigns what will happen after the polls close. As of Monday, November 2, Meta, Google, and the other major platforms still haven’t publicly committed to maintaining access for compliant political advertisers through counting, certification, recounts, and election contests.
That’s a missed opportunity, and a disappointing one.
A rule set in advance would have been neutral because nobody knew which candidate, in which state, and from which party it would help. A carve-out granted five weeks late, like Georgia in 2020, is unacceptable.
These companies will be asked by this administration to intervene within hours of the polls closing. Any decision they make then, with control of the Senate potentially riding on a few thousand votes spread among a handful of states, will be judged by who it is perceived to help.
In December 2020, when Facebook finally allowed advertising in the Georgia runoffs, the company said it was “an important way for people to get information about these elections.” They were right. It is a lesson big tech, and our democracy, shouldn’t have to relearn in 2026. The platforms still have one more day to get this right. I hope they will.
By Mark Jablonowski, Chief Executive Officer of DSPolitical