Oct 22, 2026 · 59 min
AIPAC spending and India’s voter-roll crisis test democratic power
Democracy Now! 2026-10-22 Thursday
The episode links U.S. campaign finance, alleged foreign influence, and India’s electoral administration to broader questions about who controls democratic participation.
- 1AIPAC’s reported $9 million Michigan effort becomes a test of dark money, Islamophobia, and political influence.
- 2Night Flower examines former officials’ accounts of AIPAC’s ties to Israeli officials and the legal questions surrounding foreign-agent registration.
- 3Arundhati Roy connects India’s voter-roll deletions and youth protests to digitized control, AI mobilization, and digital repression.
Don't miss
Arundhati Roy explains how digitized voter rolls can erase political identities while the same technologies help young protesters organize and expose repression.
The brief
The episode opens with AIPAC’s reported $9 million effort in Michigan’s Senate race, where attacks on Abdul El-Sayed make campaign spending inseparable from Islamophobia.
Mehdi Hasan and filmmaker Dayan Nissenbaum examine Night Flower’s account of AIPAC’s political influence, secrecy, and alleged routine contact with Israeli officials.
The documentary’s sharpest tension is legal as well as political: shared U.S. and Israeli interests may be permissible, but coordination with a foreign government raises FARA questions.
Arundhati Roy describes mass voter-roll deletions in India, arguing that digitization and centralized control can turn electoral administration into a mechanism of exclusion.
Roy also traces how young protesters use satire, games, AI-generated videos, and social media while facing shutdowns, facial recognition, surveillance, and account suspensions.
Books & mentions
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