arXiv:2610.36187v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: 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.'' 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. 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. 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.'' 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.