How To Be An Informed Voter for Libraries and Books: Book Censorship News, October 16, 2026

As we more on from last week’s Banned Books Week, here’s your reminder that a week of “celebrating” banned books isn’t enough. It’s essential to now take that passion for intellectual freedom, the rights of readers, the rights of authors, and the need to protect institutions of democracy further by taking direct action.

Libraries are on the ballot this November. Libraries have always been on the ballot, but with the continued rise of book censorship and attacks on these institutions of democracy, it is more crucial than ever to show up at the polls–and it’s also vital to tell everyone else who has an election to do the same. This year’s midterms are crucial, and it’s become clear just how crucial by the escalation of attacks on books by the authoritarian regime–see the calls for accelerated and proactive bans from the Texas Lieutenant Governor and those by the DeSantis-appointed Commissioner of Education in Florida.

Beyond the top-of-the-ballot offices, two main ballot matters relate to public libraries and schools this fall. First, there will be elections in several states and municipalities for school and library board members. Who sits on these boards matters tremendously. Folks who care about public libraries and schools will seek to improve these institutions and ensure that they represent the whole of a community. Folks who have an agenda seek these roles as an opportunity to push partisan agenda, including book bans, wholesale bans on topics available in the library, budget cuts, and more.

Second, there will be numerous elections related to library funding. As we move through an era where library budgets are being pilfered for police (see here, from July); where states are itching to cut property taxes as a means of defunding public libraries (see here); where local officials who have targeted libraries for years have proposed significant funding cuts to the library (see Saline County, Arkansas); and where partisan politicians are changing how states fund their libraries (see Ohio), voting to sustain or increase library budgets is crucial to their survival. Just as the costs for all of us have gone up on everything, the same is happening in libraries–especially as it relates to digital materials.

Here’s your reminder to get to know what is on your local ballot, how to determine the best candidate for office, and then what to do after you don your “I voted” sticker. The suggestions here will take some time, so carve out an hour or so before you go to vote. You can do these things all at once or break them up into chunks.

Find Out What’s On Your Ballot

Not every state is currently voting in elections for school boards or library boards. In some cases, this is because those are appointed rather than elected positions. The first thing to do is figure out how the process works in your community. Navigate to your local school board’s website and your local library’s website and find the page about their board. Information about the process should be readily available there, but if it is not, you may need to locate that information on your city or county’s web page. Regardless of whether these positions are up for vote this year, knowing how the process works in your community is important. View a sample ballot for your community. You can find these in many places, including your county clerk’s office website where they host information about elections. You may also be able to find information at VOTE411 or Ballotpedia. Go individual by individual on those sample ballots and look up the candidates. Some may have no web presence at all, which might be a red flag, but most will have at bare minimum a Facebook page. Your local newspaper, if you have one, may have interviews with each of the candidates (and if you’re paywalled from this, after you cuss a bit, see if you can access the unpaywalled version via your library). Red flags in candidates for school or library board will include language like “parental rights” or “school choice.” Red flags will be clear, too, if you are voting in nonpartisan board elections and you see clear partisanship in the candidate’s affiliations or endorsements. If you do not have board elections this year or your boards are appointed, find out who oversees those boards or departments. This could be the mayor in your community or any number of other elected city/county commissioners. Find out what their stance is on the democratic institutions of public libraries and schools. Vote accordingly. You want the person in charge of overseeing the people making library and school decisions to be someone who is a proponent of both. (This applies if your ballot includes all of these offices, too!) Research any library or school-related initiatives. You want to fund these institutions if those questions arise. Likewise, any initiatives that may expand the size of school or library boards are a good one. You want a wider variety of opinions in these spaces, not fewer. This is precisely how some boards have been overtaken—they’ve shrunk from 9 or 11 members to 5 or 7 and created voting blocks.

You can take your notes on how you plan to vote with you to the polls. I’ve both written notes out on paper to bring and have just jotted down my plans in my phone’s Notes App. Do not, however, take a photo of your ballot itself while there. This is illegal in many areas of the country and it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Identifying Strong Candidates

Look at the language used in campaigns, posts, and events used by candidates. Red flags include any array of buzz words that have proliferated over the last four years, including diversity equity and inclusion (“DEI”), critical race theory, comprehensive sexuality [sic] education, gender ideology, social-emotional learning, decreasing test scores in reading, grooming or indoctrination, liberty, book curation, vouchers, parental input/rights, and anything you may have once stumbled upon here. If you’re not quite finding anything with that language, you could always look up where these candidates stood on things like virtual school options for COVID (if they advocated “reopen the schools,” that’s a red flag, as the schools were never closed) or anti-masking/anti-vaccination debates between 2020-2022. This was particularly helpful in researching my own school board candidates, as one did not have a website or much information available at all, but I found a photo of her in the local newspaper with a giant “unmask the kids!” sign. Dig around to see where candidates may have received money. In states like Texas, Political Action Committees (PACs) from both within and beyond the state have been flooding local elections for schools with money. Candidates who take that money have an obligation and commitment to a cause that has nothing to do with serving their community and the students within it. They’re there for the group funding them. Here’s a list of currently registered PACs within Texas; if you see a candidate has an affiliation, see what that PAC does. As with so many other things on this list, you may need to look at any number of places to find the campaign finance information. Begin at the county clerk’s website for the election, then look to the state-level elections website. You could also try a Google search of the “candidate name” + “finance report” or something similar. See where candidates have spent their own money. The Federal Elections Committee requires that any candidate running for federal office submit information about where they’ve received contributions. You can look up any individual you’d like in this database and see if they’ve contributed to the campaigns of a particular party, candidate, or Political Action Committee (aka, the PACs). In the image below, you’ll see a pink arrow pointing to where you can look up the contributors. That’s where you’d put in the name of the candidate running for your local office. You can limit that search by city, or if you scroll down, you can limit by state (which might give you better information, as a candidate’s contributions may have happened when they lived in a different city). Then scroll down on the left panel to change the date range within which you search, or it defaults to very recent data. Be patient with this search tool, as it’s a massive database. It sometimes takes a minute to pull up information, if there’s any available. You can also look up where candidates have spent money at the state level. Find your state’s board of elections website and see if they have a campaign contribution database you can search. Here’s what Illinois’s looks like. Locate nonpartisan voting guides. There are many out there, and your community may have local-specific guides. Whether or not you do, the nonpartisan League of Women Voters offers guides in each state, even down to the county, where elections are taking place. Here’s an example of a nonpartisan voter guide put out by the The University of Arkansas Extension about state ballot initiatives. Two additional places to turn for information on candidates include partisan voter guides–even for nonpartisan races–and your state’s teachers union. Most of those unions publish a voting guide for pro-education candidates. You can look up your state and education association to find yours (i.e., Nebraska + “Education Association”)

You’ve Made Your Mind Up and/or You’ve Voted. Now What?

Consider building a voter guide for your local library- and school- related issues. Two helpful guides for doing this include Frank Strong’s on building school board voter guides in Texas and one I put together for Illinois public libraries. Utilize the ideas here to build voter guides in your community as they relate to libraries and public schools. You don’t need to go by them step by step. Rather, be inspired by where and how you can spend a few hours learning about local candidates, their stances on literature and public institutions, and sharing your findings with other people in your community. Share your work. Your neighbors and your friends trust you, and if you speak up about who you voted for—and yes, it can be as simple as “here’s who I voted for” without a why to it—you’re going to help other people make those decisions, too. Of course, if you want to share why, you do even more good. If you’re nervous or don’t believe it is important to share your decisions, I recommend listening to Eitan Hersh on Jon Favreau’s Offline podcast from a few years ago. The episode “Are You Treating Politics Like a Hobby?” is worth listening to all the way through, but if you want the meat and potatoes only, go to Minute 27-37, which focuses on local efforts to make change, and Minute 46-51, which focuses on building relationships. You’ll hear why one of the most effective means of getting people to vote and to understand the importance of that act is by talking about how and why you do it. Keep going. Whatever the outcome, the work is not done. Even if every pro-library and pro-school candidate wins, these institutions are still going to be under fire. The work has no end point—it’s a life long project. Take time to rest and hydrate so you can amplify the energy going into the next year . . . and realistically, the next several years. The damage being done to public institutions like schools and libraries is deep and repairing it will be a generation of work.

Before diving into this week’s news roundup–if you work at a library and this year’s Banned Books Week was censored in any capacity, I’d love to hear about it. This short survey asks for some insight into what was canceled or banned and why at libraries across the country during Banned Books Week in 2026. All responses are anonymous, and the survey will close October 24 or so.

You can read last year’s report on the banning of Banned Books Week, to give you an idea of what the goals are in collecting this (anonymous!) information.

Book Censorship News: October 16, 2026

One of the most important annual reads for people who care about democracy and government accountability is out. It’s the annual Medill State of Local News report–and it’s chilling how much local accountability and coverage has been lost not only in the last year, but over the last 20 years. Representative Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced a resolution in support of the freedom to read and access books in America. A new Jefferson County Schools (TN) board member began her term by making clear she wants 34 books banned from the district. The list is included here and according to her, it doesn’t matter where she found the titles. This is the slippery slope of “trust me, bro” banning that begins with 34 and ends with hundreds removed, as we’ve seen over and over again these last six years. Why are women overrepresented on the state-sanctioned list of 44 books banned in all Utah schools? This is a thing I tally every time I write about the bans–women’s voices are being silenced in Utah and there’s nothing secret about it. While we’re in Utah, here’s a good editorial about how the state’s book bans take away choices from parents and educators. Even as challenges and bans decrease in states like Connecticut, fear is still driving quiet censorship across libraries. Davidson County Schools (NC) are considering new book censorship policies, which would remove certain books from anyone under the age of 14 and require parental permission to access them. The Texas Freedom to Read Project just dropped a big report on the state of book bans in Texas. This comes in the wake of advocates for the freedom to read in the state attending a Senate Education Committee meeting last week. And speaking of that meeting, some Senators want to strengthen Texas’s SB 13, the bill allowing widespread and rampant book bans. They’re citing the nonsense podcast from the state’s Lieutenant governor with a conservative book banner in the state. Parental rights for who, you’ve got to ask. Texas legislators are–gasp!–realizing that their school voucher schemes aren’t working well. It’s for all of the reasons that everyone who said this is a bad idea has already laid out. York County Library (SC)–remember them?–just moved five books for children and young adults into the adult collection. It’s still censorship if it’s a relocation. Duval County School Board (FL) has banned the comic adaptation of 1984. Grand Prairie Independent School District (TX) has canceled their play of Little Shop of Horrors because the lead–which is typically played by a male actor–was cast as female. Apparently, a fictional story being cast differently is enough for the district to believe they’ll be in violation of the state’s anti-drag law. The biggest, heaviest eye roll here. They know that the bloodthirsty plant isn’t real, right? The latest tool that Moms For Liberty plans to employ to make hell for the lives of public school students and educators–not to mention their parents and taxpayers more broadly–is an AI bot that “monitors” districts for compliance with whatever their pet issue of the moment is. The right does not give one tiny shit if you’re a parent or taxpayer; they only care about their pet projects. These are not elected officials and yet, they’re playing that role in your local school, whether it’s there right this moment or not. Readington school board (NJ) has voted to reject the recommendation from the review committee that would keep The Perks of Being a Wallflower on shelves. This doesn’t mean it will be removed; they’ll make that official decision in November after they swear in a new board. Remember that New Jersey has an anti-book ban law. “The Utah State Board of Education has started a $60,000 effort to examine how school library books are chosen, stemming from questions about the influence of outside organizations and vendors. The review comes after seven new book titles met the threshold for removal last month, joining 37 other titles on Utah’s statewide removal list. None of these seven were available in elementary schools.” This isn’t new news–it was announced months ago–but the efforts are now going to ramp up. Expect more book bans out of Utah.

Let’s end with something a (little) lighter. There’s a scene in the new Carrie that pays homage to current book bans.