#but each poll will be given 24 hours for voting time and the results here are not impacted at all by twitter | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

zombeebunnie · 5 months ago

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Trembling Essence:💙Ending progress + poll results💙

Hi again and welcome new followers, here's another progress update about the game! >;]

But before I write that out I just want to say a very big thank you to everyone that participated in the poll I did so far, The results and responses have been helping me for the final version. :,] If you still want to give your vote/opinion on the start of the game here's the poll from my tumblr! There's less than 24 hours to vote!

I took a small break to gather my thoughts before continuing from where I left off. I was brainstorming a lot about this because I didn't want the beginning of the game to be too long when it comes to figuring out how to get to Noah, but I do want the explorative side to give some lore.

Suddenly, an idea came to mind that'll help me solve this issue I've been having. :,]

Last week I mentioned the two endings you could get that are from the [Extended Demo]. I don't count this as spoilers but these endings will have their own separate choice to go down instead of it being in the same path. This replaces a section from the [Extended Demo] and lowers the amount of time it takes to figure out how to get to Noah, especially for those that are new to the game. Consider this a healthy quality of life change, only one ending has been put on the shelf that I didn't have a connection with so far! :] This also gave me a chance to go through both endings individually and give a deeper exploration into these areas as they do play a part in the game. I added a few choices to show the differences in the terrain and how the player(Y/N) reacts to it. You can get an alternate situation but it will still end the same. I also fixed up some errors I found through the alternate choices that I almost missed too. For right now I'd say this ending will be finished once my play testers look through them! They've given me pointers on the CG's and dialog but not everything else yet. x] Speaking of quality changes I also went back and adjusted some of the new CG's I've drawn. I had a habit of drawing the landscape too low so you couldn't see anything unless you toggled the text box away. :,,,] Luckily this was a quick and easy fix.

Here's the results:

Before:

After:

I'm very happy with how far I've come when I draw backgrounds now! It's been a interesting journey but overall I enjoy knowing everything is coming together no matter how long it might take. There was another one I wanted to share but this the second CG I tried posting gave me an error. Luckily I had everything saved so I don't have to rewrite anything! :,,]

It took some time but I went back and fixed one of the effects that happen when you lose HP. The old version lights up the edges of your screen but sometimes it can be hard to see if there's another effect happening. I went back and gave a small hue effect every time you lose HP instead.

Lastly in other news, I finally started work on Noah's reference sheets! >:]

There will be a total of three(?) which will have specific details for each one! It's took some time to create since I'm still learning how to do angled faces/poses but I've gotten time to practice so I'm ready. >:] I also want to state that Noah's sprites/side sprites in the [Extended Demo] are accurate to how he's suppose to look too. Since I've improved my style certain specifics of his appearance might be slightly different! :]

Almost there to the cabin section, yay! I just have a few more things to fix up. >:]

If you like what I create, please consider supporting what I do on kofi! All donations and tips help tremendously while I work on the game. Also a very huge thank you to those that have optionally bought the [Extended Demo] and the March 2023 demo on itch.io too, it really means a lot. :,]

Q&A / Ask box is open:

If you have any questions about Trembling Essence/Noah feel free to ask here or on itch.io please. This makes it easier for me to see and answer accordingly! I would really like to hear from you guys!

There were some other things I wanted to discuss but this post is getting too long so I'll save it for next week, thank you guys for all of the support, I appreciate it! :,,]

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letsplaydcttrpg · 3 months ago

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What Is This?

This is using Tumblr polls to crowdsource the decision-making in order to play through some of the solo adventures from Mayfair's 80's DC ttrpg! Vote in the polls to choose the characters and decide what to do and see what happens!

The solo modules are basically choose your own adventure stories where you read a segment of story, make a decision, occasionally roll some dice and check some matrices, and then go to the next story segment. There may be multiple paths to victory, but there are also multiple paths to FAILURE. Choose wisely! (Or don't! Up to you!)

How does this blog work?

Each decision point will have a poll in order to decide what happens next! Polls will be open for 24 hours (because there are a lot of decision points in a given module). Vote, spread propaganda for your choice, see how we do!

I'll share relevant character sheets with skills and equipment in the intro post for each module, and then add maps or other images as they come up. I'm transcribing the text directly from the physical books I own (as written, occasional weird grammar choices and all).

What if I missed the beginning?

Vote anyway! Join in at any time!

You can also catch up on what's happened so far. Each poll will have a link to the beginning of the game and the previous story segment, and a full list of the entries for the current module will be at the bottom of this pinned post. Modules are also tagged on the post with the title.

What on earth in this game?

This is the DC Heroes Role Playing Game from Mayfair Games! The first edition was released in 1985 (and as a result has some pre-Crisis canon for the characters, which is fun!), with two subsequent editions in 1989 and 1993, plus a TON of extra modules.

(By my count there are 62 additional modules/sourcebooks for this game. It's a lot! My goal is to collect all of them eventually, but so far I have 54, plus the first and second edition base game. Look, everybody needs a hobby.)

If you're curious about how the game works, Wikipedia has a decent summary of the game system, or you can look at a pdf copy of the 2nd edition game manual here. It involves rolling two d10s and then using matrices (plural!) to figure out if you succeed and how much of an effect you have. The second edition box comes with a fun little wheel to help with that.

I have a question about the blog or game system / I want to see my blorbo's character sheet from this game / I want to complain about how voting went

Feel free to submit an ask!

Previous modules:

Wheel of Destruction (Master Post)

Currently playing: "Strangers in Paradise" featuring Wonder Woman

Introduction

Character Sheet

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Part 13

Part 14

Part 15

Part 16

#dc ttrpg

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natromanxoff · 4 years ago

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Disc - May 24, 1975

(x)

QUEEN IN JAPAN

When this year's poll award results were announced, perhaps the greatest surprise came in the three group categories. For three at the top was a name that had never even appeared in the top 10 before — Queen.

"We were stunned. To win four categories, including all three group categories was quite amazing. Of course we didn't expect to win... although we didn't expect to lose if you see what I mean. With polls you just never know what will happen..."

That's Roger Taylor's summary of the group's reaction. "Obviously polls reflect the readership of a paper, and all I can say is that it's obvious Disc has a great type of reader!"

"They're so tasteful," Freddie agreed with a wry smile.

Brian's high placing in the Top Musician category gave everyone a great deal of pleasure, as did the realisation that both last year's albums appeared in the top 10 albums of '74.

"Now that was great. I think what gives us extra plesure is that it bears out something the sales have suggested that after buying 'Sheer Heart Attack' people were interested and impressed enough to go back and buy the previous two."

Brian has said to me on many occasions in the past that he thinks 'Queen II' was underrated at the tour, but that one day it may be looked upon as a definitive Queen album.

"In fact it was 'Queen II' which did us proud in Japan," Freddie explains. "On the strength of just that album, for they'd never seen us, we were voted number one group in the polls of one of their top papers."

"And while we're not knockng the British ones, out there they have about a quarter of a million voting each time."

Now those quotes from Freddie and Roger were just the first of many references to Japan, a country from which they've just returned, and incidentally one with which they fell in love.

"They practically had to handcuff me to my bodyguard and drag me home screaming," reminisces Freddie.

"For one thing they're so charming and polite," explains Roger. "That's why it's so horrible to be back! Everyone's so rude here."

Apart from the success of the trip, both socially and professionally, the combined American and Japanese tours served an important purpose for Queen.

"This was our first major world tour, and now we've come back we're able to assess things differently. Having been to the States and Japan we're able to assess our popularity from actually having seen it, not just from letters and reports. And we can look at everything in that context."

But as the purpose of this feature is more reflective, for now let's content ourselves with finding out whether anything else has changed.

Personal changes in them are more evident to an outsider. Roger seems to have become more extrovert given the confidence and status that success and money bring, while Brian seems to have withdrawn further into his music. Freddie is even more poised and able to indulge his whims more. But perhaps the biggest change has been wrought in John Deacon.

"I remember times when John would come along, stand at the (...) of the stage, play the whole set and go again without saying a word to anyone," Brian told me once while reminiscing. Now John moves around the stage, indulges his cocasionally caustic and often extrovert sense of humour more, and generally seems to enjoy everything very much.

"Have you seen his 'Image kit'?" Roger asked. "It consists of a white baseball hat and sunglasses. Once he'd bought them you hardly saw him without them."

However much sucess and money ("we've cerainly earned a lot of money" I'm told) may have changed the boys in some respects they still value their friends and their fans. What have they to say then to those in Britain who may think they've been neglected lately?

"Sorry! We work every hour of the day, and have been trying to take it in turns so that all our fans can see what we're doing. It now looks as if we won't be touring in Britain again until late in the year, but we hope to do one big gig somewhere in the summer to let the fans see what's happening. We don't know where yet, but we'll make sure it's good."

And of course there will, hopefully, be the new album.

"You don't write actual songs on the road, you just get little ideas. What we need is the pressure of being in the studio and then things start to happen. Sadly we don't know when it'll be finished and ready for release. Probably not until early autumn."

There may be a single though: "If I write something suitable," Freddie says pensively. "Wait until I get my baby grand..."

#queen #queen band #roger taylor #freddie mercury #brian may #john deacon #queen scans #disc may 1974

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dylanobrienisbatman · 6 years ago

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CHOPPED: THE 100 FANFIC CHALLENGE!

That’s right. A fan fiction challenge just for writers for The 100 fandom!! Heres how it works!

Help us come up with some tropes here!!!

The Challenge!

There will be four (4) rounds of this challenge. The first three rounds will be open to anyone, no sign up required. They will have a theme that you must comply with, and you will be given a ‘mystery basket’ of four (4) fic tropes that you must use in your fic! The tropes will be random, from the list above.

You will have five (5) days from when the tropes are released to write your fic, and submit to the AO3 anonymous challenge for that round! Voting will begin 24 hours after the submission deadline (so we can compile the fics into our poll), and you will have 48 hours to vote![All times are EST]

Round 1: Fluff Round!

Timeline: Round 1

Prompt released: 12:00am March 25

Submissions close at 11:59pm March 29

Voting begins 12:00am March 31

Voting ends 11:59pm April 1

Round 2: Angst Round!

Timeline: Round 2

Prompt released: 12:00am April 3

Submissions close at 11:59pm April 7

Voting begins 12:00am April 9

Voting ends 11:59pm April 10

Round 3: Canonverse Round!

Timeline: Round 3

Prompt released: 12:00am April 12

Submissions close at 11:59pm April 16

Voting begins 12:00am April 18

Voting ends 11:59pm April 19

After the first three rounds are over, and the voting has been completed, there will be a…

The 100 Chopped Challenge Championship Round!

The rules for this round are simple! First, Second, and Third place winners from rounds 1-3 will get a chance to compete in the championship round! (If someone wins more than once, we will choose from 4th place and beyond, to get a full 9 competitors!)

These nine (9) competitors will be given a ‘mystery basket’ of six (6) tropes, and will have five (5) days to write a fic! You must include all the tropes in your fic, but there is no theme or general plot you have to follow! After the week, there will be a 48 hour voting period, and the Chopped Champion will be announced!!

Timeline: Championship Round

Prompt released: 12:00am April 22

Submissions close at 11:59pm April 26

Voting begins 12:00am April 28

Voting ends 11:59 April 29

Voting

Each round will have its own typeform poll for voting. You may only vote once, and we will require URL’s in voting. Please don’t try and rig it! Each round will have a poll for:

Best use of each individual trope!

Best use of the overall theme!

Best use of all the tropes and the theme combined!

A bonus poll, with a different question for each round!

We will announce the winners for each question of the poll for each round, but only the top three from the category for best use of all tropes and the thee combined will move on to the final round. In the final round, we will announce the winners from each category!

Rules

The requirements for the fics entered into the competition will be:

Must be The 100

Must fit the theme of the round (for rounds 1-3)

Must use ALL of the tropes selected for each round. If you don’t use the tropes, it will result in disqualification!

All fics must be between 1,000 and 10,000 words!

Any rating is allowed, G through E, but please be aware that some smut fics may not be everyone’s thing! Please write what you like, but it the voting is public so just keep that in mind!

You will be disqualified if you include:

Rape!

Underage! (This means no high school AU with sex, no teacher/student if the student is underage, zero adult/under 18 relationships!)

Incest! (incest includes adopted siblings, parent/child, biological siblings, or any familial relationship, blood related or not!).

Negativity towards any character!

This challenge is open to any and all ships! As of now, we are not going to separate out the more popular ships from the smaller ships, we are going to trust that you guys will vote based on the story you read rather than the ship it comes from, but we understand why some of you are wary. If it becomes clear that the fics for ‘less popular’ ships are not being read as much as the others, we will figure out something. If you choose to vote, please try to read most of the fics, so that its fair to all the writers involved!

Please remember this is an anonymous competition!! Please dont post your fics on your own AO3 account or on tumblr until the voting for each round is over!

@thelittlefanpire and I are super excited to see what you guys write!!

#chopped: the 100 fanfic edition #the 100 #fanfiction #writing #fanfic challenge

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thelittlefanpire · 6 years ago

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CHOPPED: THE 100 FANFIC CHALLENGE!

Reposting without links so it will show up in the tags! Reblog to tell a friend!

That’s right. A Fanfiction Challenge just for the Fanfic Writers of The 100 Fandom! Inspired by a post by @chants-de-lune! Here’s how it works:

The Challenge!

There will be four (4) rounds for this challenge. The first three rounds will be open to anyone, no sign up required. They will have a theme that you must comply with, and you will be given a ‘mystery basket’ of four (4) fic tropes that you must use in your fic! The tropes will be random from the list we compile.

You will have five (5) days from when the tropes are released to write your fic, and submit to the AO3 Anonymous Challenge for that round! Voting will begin 24 hours after the submission deadline (so we can compile the fics into our poll), and you will have 48 hours to vote! [All times are EST]

Round 1: Fluff Round!

Timeline: Round 1

Prompt released: 12:00am March 24

Submissions close at 11:59pm March 29

Voting begins 12:00am March 31

Voting ends 11:59pm April 1

Round 2: Angst Round!

Timeline: Round 2

Prompt released: 12:00am April 3

Submissions close at 11:59pm April 7

Voting begins 12:00am April 9

Voting ends 11:59pm April 10

Round 3: Canonverse Round!

Timeline: Round 3

Prompt released: 12:00am April 12

Submissions close at 11:59pm April 16

Voting begins 12:00am April 18

Voting ends 11:59pm April 19

After the first three rounds are over, and the voting has been completed, there will be a…

The 100 Chopped Challenge Championship Round!

Timeline: Championship Round

Prompt released: 12:00am April 22

Submissions close at 11:59pm April 26

Voting begins 12:00am April 28

Voting ends 11:59 April 29

Voting

Each round will have its own typeform poll for voting. You may only vote once, and we will require URL’s in voting. Please don’t try and rig it! Each round will have a poll for:

Best use of each individual trope!

Best use of the overall theme!

Best use of all the tropes and the theme combined!

A bonus poll, with a different question for each round!

We will announce the winners for each question of the poll for each round, but only the top three from the category for best use of all tropes and the three combined will move on to the final round. In the final round, we will announce the winners from each category!

Rules

The requirements for the fics entered into the competition will be:

Must be The 100 Characters

Must fit the theme of the round (for rounds 1-3)

Must use ALL of the tropes selected for each round. If you don’t use the tropes, it will result in disqualification!

All fics must be between 1,000 and 10,000 words!

Any rating is allowed, G through E, but please be aware that some smut fics may not be everyone’s thing! Please write what you like, but it the voting is public so just keep that in mind!

You will be disqualified if you include:

Rape!

Underage! (This means no High School AU with sex, no teacher/student if the student is underage, zero adult/under 18 relationships!)

Incest! (incest includes adopted siblings, parent/child, biological siblings, step-siblings, or any familial relationship, blood related or not!).

Negativity towards any character! No negativity will include any sort of physical abuse perpetrated by a character to make them look bad, or perpetrated against another character to frame them as bad. This includes moments like we saw in s5 where Clarke hit Bellamy, and in s3 where Octavia hit Bellamy. Physical abuse, emotional abuse, or other types will not be tolerated.

This is meant to be a fun and positive experience for everyone. Fluff should be fluffy. Angst should be ‘angsty’ but not traumatic. Please try and write positive fics. We reserve the right to disqualify if we are reading and we think it violates the negativity requirement!

Reminders:

This challenge is open to any and all Ships of the 100! If you choose to vote, please try to read as many of the fics as you can, so that it is fair to all the writers involved!

Please remember this is an anonymous competition! Please use the anonymous feature when posting to the AO3 collection and refrain from posting it on your tumblr or other social media until the voting for each round is over! Once the winner is announced, we will lift the anon feature and your fic will appear on your AO3 profile.

Follow the Tag (or blacklist): #Chopped: The 100 Fanfic Challenge to keep up with all the latest information! We will try to place all of our links in the reblogs when necessary.

@dylanobrienisbatman and I are super excited to see what you guys write! Good Luck!

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zoraheading0-blog · 5 years ago

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ITunes Top a hundred Pop Songs 2019

Music actually began to split into completely different categories throughout the Modern era (1910-2000). But Nashville hasn't always been welcoming toward pop and digital music. Within the early 2000s, now-defunct file sellers Cat's Music made a killing off Drum Machines Have No Soul" bumper stickers, a rallying cry for Volvo-driving rockists throughout the Midstate. In 2008, when a particularly rowdy Lady Speak present at Cannery Ballroom ended with a busted stage and flooded places of work below, the venue's homeowners stepped away from reserving non-rock gigs. We are a rock 'n' roll venue, and we're going to play rock 'n' roll shows from here on out," Todd Ohlhauser told the since-folded local entertainment weekly All of the Rage on the time. 4. 42% of individuals polled on which decade has produced the worst pop music for the reason that 1970s voted for the 2010s. These folks were not from a specific getting old demographic at all - all age groups polled, together with 18-29 year olds, appear to really feel unanimously that the 2010s are when pop music turned worst. This may clarify a rising development of younger millennials, for example, digging round for now 15-30 yr-old music on YouTube frequently. It isn't just the older individuals who take heed to the Nineteen Eighties and 1990s on YouTube and different streaming providers it appears - much youthful individuals do it too. The strictly calculated music of Nomeda Valančiūtė (b.1961) is, nonetheless, absolutely not technological in its nature - her compositions are all based mostly on some not simply defined inventive impulses that are later matured by methodical work with sound materials and then given a precisely polished type. Valančiūtė's minimalist idiom is said to a point to the medieval isorhythmic methods. A more in-depth look to the composer's works and their conceptual stimuli reveals a steadiness of inside opposites: open emotion - and its suppression through uncompromisingly rigid structures; a crystal clarity - and the aware avoidance of 'magnificence' (the usage of sharp dissonances, intentional 'out of tune' sound of ready piano, and many others); the stance of a 'pure music' adept - and the multidimensional picturesqueness of her music, its oddly theatrical expression, and a certain 'bittersweet' glamour. Okay-pop has at all times been a strange hybrid of Korean and Western tradition. The music has drawn on US genres, however the excessive work ethic and bobserle3266.wikidot.com administration system are a product of Korean tradition and economy. The brand new management of Big Hit Entertainment appears to be an surprising swing in direction of extra US-type norms, which may unintentionally be helping BTS to break that market. The fact that they co-wrote the music would positively be a big issue within the US market, particularly for individuals who value ‘authenticity' in music and would not listen to K-pop out of disapproval," Kim argues. But I do not assume that was actually a deliberate plan by the corporate". Streaming has been a bit of a monkey wrench within the gears, as we saw a very explicit sort of hip-hop come to dominate the charts to a level that's almost excessive, and the charts still look like that now. The vast majority of songs on the Billboard charts now are that sort of hip-hop, as a result of the style dominates streaming. And while it was attention-grabbing to see the previous guard of pop this decade get uprooted, it isn't essentially the most interesting music to replace it. I wish to have some stage of musical diversity on the pop charts, and streaming tends to stagnate the charts a lot. This is the reason Drake breaks records every time he releases a brand new single, despite the fact that the songs are mediocre at greatest. Moreover, "Rockstar" by Submit Malone has been caught near the highest of the Spotify Top 50 for almost a year now.

The identical factor is occurring in nation music. There have been by no means many minority singers however a number of girls. Up to now few years bro-nation has largely pushed ladies off nation radio and labels aren't offering a lot help to women. Feminine artists have gotten frustrated and it will not be to stunning if many can be women country singers switch to other genres. Bro-country is more widespread with men so nation might start to lose ladies as each listeners and http://www.magicaudiotools.com/ artists if the labels and country stations do not make an effort to encourage range.A few weeks in the past, Ted Gioia wrote a piece for The Day by day Beast taking trendy music criticism to job, specializing in his remark that folks who would have once written about a musician's sound and approach are now targeted on the star's way of life and fame. Then, this past weekend, the New York Occasions Magazine featured an essay by Saul Austerlitz about poptimism, " deriding the development of music critics agreeing too readily with the taste of 13-yr-olds." In their own methods, both essays make the purpose that at present's pop is getting a cross. In that narrative, there existed a superb-previous-days time when critics had been unswayed by the lure of pop. Immediately, they argue, quite a lot of factors — perhaps a desire to reclaim the concept of a mass tradition despite the fracturing affect of the Web; maybe the economics of getting the maximum number of clicks on an article — have conspired to let pop off that hook.The genere that influenced each standard genere after its growth, the one in have been virtually every artist participated is the Disco. It is a subgenere if R&B and pop, with roots in the soul and funk, that dominated the charts in the late 70s. And too, albums like Saturday Evening Fever, Random Access Memories, Brothers In Arms, Thriller, Like A Virgin, and a lot of "greatest hits" of bands like Pink Floyd (Another Brick In The Wall), Kiss (I Was Made For Loving You), and much more have been Disco, or have been influenced by Disco. It is probably not so beloved as othe generes, but this subgenere of Pop, is essentially the most succesful and one of the crucial influential of all time.If pop's sound is becoming blasé and in want of disruption, so is its subject matter. Nearly with out fail, the songs that dominated 2017 ignored the 12 months's dominant social and political themes in favor of zoned-out life-style music. Pop has at all times served an escapist function, but it surely has also been one of many simpler delivery strategies for significant content material. So at a time of extreme national turmoil, it was surprising to not hear a single protest tune amongst 2017's greatest hits (though bless her coronary heart, no less than Katy Perry tried). Nor had been there any large singles addressing gun violence or the opioid crisis, until you rely Publish Malone glamorizing drive-by shootings and popping pillies." Though pop stars aligned for a lot of charity concerts in response to terrorism, hurricanes, and lethal racist demonstrations, the music itself mostly sidestepped weighty subjects.BLACKPINK's DDU-DU DDU-DU" is the best-profile music video that went lacking from the video sharing website. It currently holds the title of essentially the most-considered music video by a K-pop woman group of all time at 604 million views. The video not too long ago broke the record for the quickest music video to achieve 600 million views - a number of days after BTS grew to become the first Korean group to achieve that view depend with DNA." For a while, DDU-DU DDU-DU" additionally staked its place as essentially the most-considered 24-hour debut from a Korean artist.

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dailynewswebsite · 4 years ago

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An embarrassing failure for election pollsters

Watching the presidential election returns on election night time in retirement neighborhood of The Villages, Florida. Ricardo Arduengo/AFP by way of Getty Photographs

Election polling is dealing with yet one more reckoning following its uneven-at-best efficiency on this yr’s voting.

Though the result within the 2020 presidential race remained unsure the subsequent day, it was evident that polls faltered, general, in offering Individuals with clear indications as to how the election would prove.

And that misstep guarantees to resonate via the sphere of survey analysis, which was battered 4 years in the past when Donald Trump carried states resembling Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the place polls indicated he had virtually no probability of successful. Distinguished, poll-based statistical forecasts additionally went off-target in 2016.

These failings deepened the embarrassment for a discipline that has suffered via – however has survived – a wide range of lapses and surprises for the reason that mid-1930s. Lots of these flubs and failings are described in my newest e-book, “Misplaced in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”

Criticism was intense in some quarters Wednesday. Politico’s broadly adopted “Playbook” e-newsletter was notably scathing. “The polling trade is a wreck,” it declared, “and ought to be blown up.”

Many surprises

Whereas that evaluation appears excessive, particularly given polling’s resiliency over the a long time, the poll-driven expectation that former Vice President Joe Biden would lead Democrats in a sweeping “blue wave” went unfulfilled. Biden should still win the presidency, nevertheless it won’t be in a landslide.

Biden’s general polling lead, as compiled by RealClearPolitics.com, stood at 7.2 share factors on the morning of Election Day. A bit of greater than 24 hours later, his lead within the nationwide common vote was virtually three share factors.

CNN posted nationwide polls on the presidential race, taken between 10/16/20 and 11/1/20. Screenshot, CNN, CC BY

Pollsters usually search consolation, and safety, from critics in asserting that pre-election surveys are usually not predictions. However the nearer they’re to the election, the extra dependable polls should be. And a lot of particular person pre-election polls have been embarrassingly extensive of the mark.

A notable instance was the ultimate Washington Submit/ABC Information ballot in Wisconsin, launched final week, which gave Biden a shocking 17-point lead. The end result there was nonetheless undecided Wednesday morning, however the margin absolutely won’t be near 17 factors.

Certainly, the polling surprises have been many and included Senate races resembling these in Maine, the place Republican Susan Collins seems to have fended off a well-financed challenger to win a fifth time period, and South Carolina, the place Republican Lindsey Graham somewhat simply received reelection regardless of polls that indicated a a lot nearer race. Graham declared after his victory turned clear, “To all of the pollsters on the market, you don’t have any concept what you’re doing.”

It seems that Republicans will preserve management of the U.S. Senate regardless of expectations, fueled by polls, that management of the higher home was prone to flip to the Democrats.

Polling issues not new

The 2020 election might symbolize one other chapter within the controversies which have periodically surrounded election polls since George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley initiated their pattern surveys through the 1936 presidential marketing campaign. Essentially the most dramatic polling failure in U.S. presidential elections got here in 1948, when President Harry S. Truman defied the pollsters, the pundits and the press to win reelection over the closely favored Republican nominee, Thomas E. Dewey.

The shock this yr is just not remotely akin to the epic polling failure of 1948. However it’s hanging how polling missteps are so assorted, and virtually by no means the identical – a lot as Leo Tolstoy stated of sad households: every “is sad in its personal method.”

Elements that gave rise to this yr’s embarrassment is probably not clear for weeks or months, however it’s no secret that election polling has been confronted with a number of challenges troublesome to resolve. Amongst them is the declining response charges to phone surveys carried out by operators utilizing random dialing strategies.

That approach was thought-about the gold customary of survey analysis. However response charges to telephone-based polls have been in decline for years, forcing polling organizations to look to, and experiment with, different sampling strategies, together with internet-based strategies. However none of them has emerged as polling’s new gold customary.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

One among polling’s most notable innovators was Warren Mitofsky, who years in the past reminded his counterparts that there’s “a variety of room for humility in polling. Each time you get cocky, you lose.”

Mitofsky died in 2006. His counsel rings true right this moment.

W. Joseph Campbell doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that will profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/an-embarrassing-failure-for-election-pollsters/ via https://growthnews.in

#Growth News

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khalilhumam · 4 years ago

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Is it time to get rid of election night?

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/is-it-time-to-get-rid-of-election-night/

Is it time to get rid of election night?

By Elaine Kamarck As election night stretches into election week, it’s time to consider the possibility that election night as we know it should become a thing of the past. The art of political forecasting, the speed of vote counting and tabulating, and the enormous resources news organizations pour into covering elections have spoiled us—we’ve become accustomed to instant gratification. But perhaps it is time to learn the virtue of patience and change the way we think about election night. Maybe we should let states count and report vote totals that are more meaningful. Instead of dribbling out the counts over hours and days, perhaps the states should get together and agree not to report anything until at least 50% of the vote is counted and the count includes all different types of voting. This could delay reporting results until at least the morning after Election Day and maybe even later. But when results do come in, the public will have a more accurate picture of what has gone on in any given state. There are several advantages to getting rid of election night. Let’s start with the fact that mail-in balloting and early voting, which were increasing steadily before the pandemic started, are most likely here to stay. A Pew poll from this year found that 40% of voters preferred to vote in person but 39% wanted to vote by mail and 18% wanted to vote early. Because of the pandemic, voters took to these methods enthusiastically. Early voting was vastly more popular this year than it was in 2016, even though with the precautions taken at polling places, voting in person was probably not much more dangerous than going to the supermarket. Even once the pandemic is passed, early voting will be here to stay for two reasons. First, early voting is convenient and prudent—if your kindergartener wakes up with a fever on Election Day you don’t have to worry about leaving her to find time to go and vote. Second, in a highly polarized country, millions of voters know well before Election Day who they will vote for, especially as presidential candidates grow ideologically more distant over successive cycles. And events, such as Trump’s disastrous first debate, don’t seem to have much impact on that polarized electorate. The problem with mail-in voting is that it involves opening millions of ballots, making sure they are legal (often via scanning a barcode and checking signatures), flattening the folded ballot, and then running them through scanners. As we’ve seen this week, the process is long and arduous. And as votes dribble in and one candidate leads and then another, the atmosphere is ripe for conspiracy theories that undermine trust in the system. As President Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia began to evaporate, he became convinced that something was wrong. And no doubt there are Democrats who share the same paranoia about the evaporation of Biden’s early leads in Ohio and Florida. Even if states increase their capacity to count mail-in ballots, the counting will still take longer. Besides the fact that it would be good to report all types of balloting at once, there are other reasons why getting rid of election night may be a good idea. As the 2020 presidential election showed, we are still a very polarized and divided nation and no party has a dominant position in the electorate. Biden’s (seemingly) narrow win in the Electoral College did not produce the expected increase in the Democratic House majority and appears not to have produced Democratic control of the Senate. To the extent that we are in for a period of very close elections, an increasing percentage of votes will need to be counted in a given state before the race in that state could be called for one candidate or the other. So, in that sense, more competitive elections—at the presidential level and other levels—should increase our desire to get rid of election night as we know it. Finally, we are in a period of massive distrust of institutions. The wild swings in the vote count that occur naturally as votes come in county by county breed paranoia and suspicion in a country that seems to have fallen in love with conspiracy theories. The most important thing states can do in the future is to do their job without highly caffeinated television personalities breathing down their necks for results. Waiting 12 or 24 hours before reporting any results will give citizens a clearer picture of what’s happening in each state and make it harder for either side to cook up conspiracies. The Trump era has inflicted much damage on American institutions, and in all areas of democracy, we need to rebuild trust. We can start with the election process.

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garancefranke-ruta · 7 years ago

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Resistance activists look past Trump’s State of the Union speech to November

Andra Day, and Common perform their Grammy and Oscar-nominated song “Stand Up for Something” from the movie Marshall. At “The People’s State Of The Union” at The Town Hall theater in New York City, NY, on Jan. 29, 2018. (Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto)

“Social justice cocktails! Ice-cold water! You can’t have revolution without cold water!”

Mike, a refreshments vendor at the Town Hall theater in midtown Manhattan who declined to give a last name, tailored his pitch to the crowd Monday evening as he hawked water at $5 a bottle.

It was 24 hours before President Trump’s first State of the Union speech in Washington, and a mixture of well-heeled New Yorkers, boldface names, service and domestic workers, college students and activists had come out on a cold night for an event billed as the People’s State of the Union. Trump’s impending speech was the nominal occasion, but the event — which drew 500,000 views on a Facebook live stream that evening — was also a way for resistance movement activists to recharge for the coming struggle.

A broad array of social justice groups, backed by celebrity star power, had come together for three hours of speeches and music, hoping to buck up their spirits after a rough and tiring year — and looking ahead to the challenge of organizing to capture a majority in the House of Representatives and hundreds or even 1,000 additional state legislative seats this year.

Actor John Leguizamo speaks during the “People’s State of the Union” event at The Town Hall, in New York City, Jan. 29, 2018. (Photo: Darren Ornitz/Reuters)

“In 2018, with so many races fast approaching, it is vital that we work to elect progressive, diverse candidates for Congress and state legislatures across this country. But it is not just about voting — not anymore. Given the current state of the Union, fighting for our democracy is going to require all of us, everyday people, to step up and take action,” said actress Cynthia Nixon, who spoke from the New York stage in a lineup that also featured John Leguizamo, Mark Ruffalo, Lee Daniels, Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, Kathy Najimy and Michael Moore, with musical appearances by Rufus Wainwright, Andra Day and Common.

“In 2018 each one of us has to do everything we can to reclaim our democracy from foreign and domestic threats that aim to imperil it. It is on us. There is no cavalry coming. We are the cavalry,” she continued, to applause.

More than anything new Trump said, or was likely to say, the State of the Union was for the resistance activist groups an opportunity to rally the troops, boost morale and point to the future. In Washington, Planned Parenthood and an array of women’s groups counterprogrammed against the president’s speech Tuesday night with a program of music and speeches at the National Press Club under the rubric “The State of Our Union.” It was the first time the organization hosted an event during a State of the Union, talking to supporters over the background distractions of the speech as it unfurled on social media. And there too the byword was 2018.

Mark Ruffalo speaks at “The People’s State Of The Union” at The Town Hall theater in New York City, NY, on Jan. 29, 2018. (Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto)

“We are laser-focused on winning a pro-women’s health majority in Congress. Laser-focused. I dream about it at night. I wake up thinking about it in the morning. I think about nothing else,” Deirdre Schifeling, executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Yahoo News. “And at state level. It’s long overdue, and 2018 is our chance to do it.”

From the very beginnings of the resistance movement, it has sought to unite many different streams into a common cause of fighting back against Trump and Republican control of Congress. But the events this week around the State of the Union, a cacophony of online resistance movement speeches and live streams, showcased the progress that has been made in forging a unified front.

Across a year of marches and protests and grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts, the leaders of different groups have gotten to know each other. There have been Slack channels and conference calls and after-action working groups, endless call-your-congressman drives and letter-writing campaigns and difficult conversations about whose voices should lead. Celebrities who once made star turns at activist events and did a little fundraising have become activists inside their own industries, backed by the support of the new women’s movement and using their stardom to spotlight it. Minority rights groups that existed before Trump was elected — groups fighting police violence against African-Americans, the deportation of undocumented Latin American immigrants brought to America as children, and for LGBTQ rights — have been become a key part of the larger movement that has sprung up since the election, merging with the growing river of women’s activist groups and newly formed efforts to defend refugees and religious minorities.

“I think the most powerful thing that’s come from all the attacks that many of our communities are under is the strong unity that I feel … in my bones today,” said Christina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, the immigrant youth network, from the stage in New York. “I know that the state of our union — this union — all of these social justice movements coming together — is stronger than ever. And that’s what scares them.”

“Are you ready to hit the polls?” she cried, to cheers.

Christina Jimenez (C), co-founder of United We Dream, raises her fist alongside other so-called Dreamers at the “People’s State of the Union” event one day ahead of President Trump’s State of The Union Speech to Congress, in New York City, Jan. 29, 2018. (Photo: Darren Ornitz/Reuters)

“There is no more important day this year” than Nov. 6, said filmmaker Moore in New York. “Not your birthday. Not your wedding anniversary. Not flag day. … My friends, as much as I tried to warn the country that Trump was going to win by winning those four states, I am here tonight to tell you that I believe that we can accomplish this by a tsunami of voters overwhelming the polling places on November 6 so that no poll will be able to close at its stated time.”

He offered four things to do in 2018 so that there is “a widespread massive removal of Republicans from the House and the Senate the likes of which this country has never seen.” The starting point: “Over the next 10 months, I want you to identify 20 people who did not vote in the 2016 election and get them all to vote on Election Day, November 6.” Also on the list: running for office, demanding that Democratic candidates weigh in on the impeachment of Trump and not worrying about Mike Pence.

“The purpose of the 2018 election is we are electing the jury for the trial of Donald J. Trump,” said Moore.

Getting an additional 2 million nonvoters to vote would also help, he said. Registering an additional 1 million voters from traditionally disenfranchised groups in critical states is the big 2018 goal for the Women’s March. “Our undocumented brothers and sisters cannot vote, so we must vote for them,” said Paula Mendoza, a leader of the March organization.

Michael Moore speaks during the “People’s State of the Union” event one day ahead of President Trump’s State of The Union Speech to Congress, in New York City, Jan. 29, 2018. (Photo: Darren Ornitz/Reuters)

In New York, there was little mincing of words and none of the soft, polished phrases favored by D.C. advocacy groups. No one was worried about being mocked by conservatives for a too-bald focus on diversity or shamed on Twitter as unserious for raising, as Leguizamo did, the specter of Nazi Germany.

Leaders of indigenous rights, labor, immigrant rights, social justice and environmental groups were all there “to start to lay out the path for a greater victory in 2018. Because we’re winning back Congress,” Ruffalo proclaimed.

The evening was raw, angry and historically aware of its place in the decades’ — or centuries’ — long struggle for civil rights that sometimes involves elected politicians and sometimes doesn’t, but always, always involves figures from American culture. Singer Andra Day, who performed alone and with rapper Common at the People’s State of the Union, just as she had the night before at the Grammy Awards, urged the audience to have the resilience “to continue the fight, to finish the fight. Because it’s worth it even if you don’t see the results in this lifetime.”

The women’s event in Washington was a bit more upbeat and cheerful, perhaps because Planned Parenthood has succeeded over the past year in fending off congressional efforts to defund the organization or repeal the Affordable Care Act wholesale, while at the same time seeing an enormous outpouring of grassroots support and donations.

The anger and despair of the immediate postelection period has given way to a new excitement as the resistance movement has proved not just durable but bigger and stronger than many observers expected. “We are in an amazing movement moment, more than I have ever seen,” Ben Halle, press secretary for Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Yahoo News about the new “united front” on the left. The “Our State of the Union” event came together in a week and a half.

FILE – In this Tuesday, July 26, 2016 file photo, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards waves after speaking during the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood who recently announced plans to retire, spoke as Trump’s remarks wound down. “It’s not that women haven’t been speaking. For centuries women have been speaking out, right? But now we have found a new frequency, and folks are finally listening,” she said, echoing the words of Tarana Burke, who a decade ago founded the anti-sexual violence group Me Too whose name has since become a hashtag.

“While so many women have been empowered to speak up in this last year, this is not just about us finding our voices. We have been raising our voices. I’m talking about issues that plague us in our communities for decades. The real difference is our renewed commitment to working collectively across industries and across issues, like we are seeing tonight,” said Burke at the event. “We have no choice but to lean into our collective power” and move out of issue silos, she said.

Amid the fatigue of ceaseless activism, the uniting of once separate movements into something larger is something for the activists to hang on to. “It’s inspiring to see so many organizations and activists from a broad cross-section of movements coming together to review the state of the resistance,” the Women’s March said in a statement after Trump’s speech. “It’s time that we channel the energy and activism into tangible strategies and concrete wins in 2018.”

“The one silver lining in Trump is that we have created the mother of all movements,” Ruffalo had said, opening the People’s State of the Union in Manhattan. “We have come together. It’s a transformational, international movement of decency. Our eyes wide open. We are wide awake. And we are looking around at each other for the first time in probably decades.”

A guest in the audience wears an “Impeach” jacket, at “The People’s State Of The Union” at The Town Hall theater in New York City, NY, on Jan. 29, 2018. (Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto)

Read more from Yahoo News:

Skullduggery Episode 3: Who did you vote for?

‘What will it change?’ Rural Iowa has better things to watch than a State of the Union

Trump’s 1st State of the Union vs. Obama’s: By the numbers

Military blames ‘human error’ for hidden Afghan war data

Photos: 2018 State of the Union

#_author:Garance Franke-Ruta #_lmsid:a077000000CFoGyAAL #sotu #_revsp:yahoo_news_photo_staff_536 #resistance #_uuid:3de20f7e-b111-394a-95bb-86c6ad8784c0

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canadianabroadvery · 4 years ago

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Canada's Conservatives are “completely clued out” about the unpopularity of hard-right social policies and are essentially “campaigning against themselves,” two leading political commentators argued in an online panel discussion last Monday.

Answering questions from Canada's National Observer editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood, columnists Bruce Livesey and Sandy Garossino spent an hour tackling wide-ranging questions about why today's Canadian conservative movement has moved so far to the right, its hopes for retaking power in the face of an increasingly progressive populace, and how evangelical Christians and Big Oil got a stranglehold on the right.

“The social conservative base is enormously powerful,” Livesey told Solomon Wood and the audience of 100 participants on the Zoom webinar, part of Conversations, sponsored by Canada's National Observer. “The reason (leadership rivals) Peter MacKay and Erin O'Toole have taken the positions they're doing — which are ludicrous in terms of ever trying to get elected — is because the base has this enormous social conservative element. In order to win the leadership, you've got to pander to them.”

But that's precisely what has lost them repeated elections, and will only worsen their chances over time, he said.

Livesey — an award-winning investigative journalist with experience on CBC's flagship shows The Fifth Estate and The National, Global News' 16×9, and PBS's Frontline — most recently did an analysis on the state of the Conservatives for the National Observer entitled, How Stephen Harper is destroying the Conservative party.

He said he interviewed between 25 and 30 sources for his story, and other than a couple political scientists as experts, focused almost entirely on hearing from Conservative members past and present.

“I tried to basically interview just Conservatives … people within the party, both from when they used to be called the PC (Progressive Conservative) party all the way up to the current generation,” Livesey said. “There's a lot of people who wouldn't talk to me … It was a big challenge; given that I was going to talk to them about Stephen Harper, there seemed to be a bit of a concern.”

But some did want to talk, and could be broadly lumped into two camps: the long-ousted progressive wing of the party, once nicknamed “Red Tories”; and the more recent alumni and strategists of the Harper era.

“If you talked to the sort of Red Tories — the 'liberal' wing of the party — there was no surprise there that they think the party's stuck in a ditch,” Livesey said. “The more interesting thing was finding the younger generation who were around Harper in some capacity, who are beginning to realize — having lost two back-to-back elections — that something was wrong.”

What exactly is wrong, however, he found divisive amongst loyalists. Some expressed hope to find a better leader than Andrew Scheer to save their flagging fortunes. But others, Livesey said, had started to see problems in the party's offerings to voters altogether.

“That's the contradiction the party's in at the moment,” Livesey, author of the book Thieves of Bay Street, said. “The base just thinks, 'We just need the next Stephen Harper to lead us back into power.'

“Abortion and gay marriage — those are the two issues that get social conservatives all agitated, and they want to have something done about them. Harper was brilliant at keeping that element under a lock and key. Scheer was not … nobody trusted him on those issues. The social conservative base is an enormous problem for that party.”

Whoever wins the leadership of the party, Livesey predicted, must “basically ignore what the base is” if they want to win enough seats outside Alberta, the Prairies and rural Ontario.

Hard Right

Garossino, meanwhile, agreed that infighting over who can be the most hardline on divisive issues such as LGBTQ rights and abortion is only hurting the party more with each utterance and campaign plank.

The popular longtime columnist with Canada's National Observer spent years previously as a Crown prosecutor and trial lawyer and Vancouver community advocate. She is also a keen observer of Canadian and American political trends, admitting Monday she's a big nerd for electoral data and crunching riding numbers. While she and Livesey admitted few Tories are likely paying heed to this publication, they ought to at least pay attention to the dismal electoral data.

When it comes to hard-right social issues, the numbers don't lie.

“They're actually campaigning against themselves the more they play to that,” Garossino said. “It doesn't play in any of the areas that the federal Conservatives need to take power. They have got to get into the 905 — the (Greater Toronto Area) — and they've got to get into Quebec.”

According to the most recent polls, the Conservatives are indeed trailing behind the Liberals — despite Scheer's repeated attempts to portray Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a reckless spendthrift, contemptuous of accountability and the rule of law.

A new poll released June 28 by respected pollster Léger Marketing placed Liberals at 40 per cent support, double-digits ahead of Conservatives in voter intentions compared to the Tories' 28 per cent. (The survey of 1,524 Canadians gave the NDP 17 per cent support, the Bloc Québecois seven per cent, and Greens one point behind; the online poll's margin of error could be considered equivalent to 2.5 per cent.) The results mirrored another opinion survey last week.

But yet another poll by Ekos Research found an even starker divide when it comes to gender last week, with Liberals leading among women with a staggering 24 per cent lead over the Tories, which held a slight lead over the Grits among men.

Multi-poll aggregator 338Canada, meanwhile, ran 250,000 statistical election simulations using recent polls and predicted a 189-seat Liberal seat majority if an election were held now, with the Tories trailing at 94 seats (a party needs a minimum 170 seats to win a majority government).

But both Livesey and Garossino reminded participants in the Zoom event that key to electoral victory in Canada is commanding broad support across the most vote-rich, densely populated urban centres — particularly the Greater Toronto Area suburbs, Montreal, and B.C.'s Lower Mainland. It was a lesson former Prime Minister Stephen Harper understood despite his past social-conservative, Reform Party roots.

That's something Livesey believes the Conservatives have lost sight of completely. He has little hope the once-moderate stalwarts of the party will regain control any time soon because of the need to survive the hard-right base that serves as a gauntlet for would-be leaders.

“They're not taking into consideration the electoral math that plays into this,” he explained. “The Tories' base gets them about 30 per cent of the vote, but to win a minority, you need around 35, a majority around 40.

“That means you've got to convince ... the very seat-rich urban hubs like Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal … that you represent their interests. That is the programmatic problem with the party now. They have completely clued out to the fact that those voters don't want to vote for that particular platform.”

Stuck on Harper

In his June 25 analysis, Livesey argued former prime minister Stephen Harper remains the most powerful force in today's party, but may be, in fact, undermining “the very thing he created” as his successor Scheer steers the party sharply towards the far right on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights.

It's something Tory supporters should be extremely wary of, particularly as the far-right administration in the pandemic-gutted United States faces “potential devastation of unbelievable proportions because of the failure of this one man,” Garossino said. But the roots of the crisis go back decades to Reagan-era right-wing neoliberal movements, she and Livesey agreed, as billionaires and corporations were effectively handed the keys to power in the U.S.

Today, with tens of millions of unemployed losing their private health benefits, the chickens are now coming home to roost in that country.

“If you look at the trajectory, this is the sum result of a program that began in the '70s and '80s to, in effect, ensure the state did nothing for the average American citizen,” Livesey said. “(It marked) the end of the so-called welfare state — the New Deal type of government — and the capture of the state by largely the billionaire class.”

But although the Tea Party hasn't taken hold to the same extent north of the 49th parallel, similar hardline right movements have found sympathy in many parts of Canada.

Canadians, and particularly those loyal to the Conservative party, ought to worry about similar political movements here gaining any more foothold than they have. But it was actually Canada's Reagan-era Conservative leader who garnered some positive attention in Monday's online discussion.

Faced with a stark ideological choice today, Tories might look for inspiration — and success — to former PM Brian Mulroney.

“The PCs recognized they had to be a centre party to win power. The person most genius at figuring that out was Mulroney, he won two solid majorities … and destroyed the Liberals in Quebec. They had the 'big tent' approach, that social conservatives, Red Tories, environmentalists, people from all walks of life, fiscal conservatives, could all be under the same umbrella." Livesey said.

“It worked until it didn't work.”

Mulroney was also considered a leader on environmental issues, and even stalwart Conservative architect Tom Flanagan told Livesey he hoped for some critical Tory reflection on their climate change and carbon pricing policies.

“There is increasing awareness they have to be better on that front,” Livesey said, “even if it is in a very cynical way.”

But it's not just the evangelicals trying to steer the Tory ship. Another powerful force in the country has leveraged influence extremely effectively. Livesey and Garossino said other than the Tories' social conservative base, the party also has been held “hostage” by the oil industry lobby and some of Harper's former entourage, such as Jason Kenney, now Alberta premier.

Garossino has frequently commented on the state of Canada's Conservatives, most recently in her May 27 column, Stephen Harper's power dissolves, in which she argued that Harper continues to “control his chastened party” from the sidelines, but as “the right’s energy and narrative has been seized by Trumpian ideologues,” the Canadian electoral as moved on and is no longer interested.

Canada's Conservatives ought to ponder those trends carefully before selecting their next leader, Garossino said, but she's not hopeful.

“To get to be a contender nationally, you have to get past the base, which is far more conservative than the Canadian public,” she said. “They're almost fighting against themselves.”

Could the Red Tories stage a Mulroney-inspired comeback — and retake the reins from today's increasingly unpalatable oil and religious party wings? That remains to be seen.

#canpoli #consernative party of canada

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polixy · 5 years ago

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What to know about the Iowa caucuses

What to know about the Iowa caucuses;

Workers take down the state flag after an Iowa campaign stop by presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

After months of campaigning, debating, polling, fundraising and eating fried food, Democratic presidential candidates face their first real-world test on Feb. 3, when Iowa voters have their say in the state’s caucuses. Here’s a rundown of important things to know about Iowa and its first-in-the-nation vote.

What is a caucus, and how is it different from a primary?

While primaries are run much like general elections – lots of polling places, a secret ballot, many hours to vote – Iowa’s caucuses are more like neighborhood meetings. Starting at 7 p.m. in each of the state’s 1,678 voting precincts (and, new this year, 99 satellite locations in Iowa, around the country and overseas), Democratic voters will gather, debate issues and candidates with each other, and eventually cluster in “preference groups” to elect delegates to their county conventions. The precinct caucuses kick off a process which, several months from now, will result in 41 delegates being chosen to represent Iowa at the Democratic National Convention. The whole caucus process, which can take more than an hour, is nicely illustrated here.

Iowa’s Democratic caucuses are open only to registered party members, not unaffiliated voters or those registered as Republicans or with other parties. However, people can register or change their party affiliation on caucus night if they want to participate.

How we did this

For this analysis, we gathered information from a variety of sources that track procedure, participation and outcomes for the Iowa caucuses. These include the Iowa Caucus Project of Drake University, the Iowa secretary of state’s office and various news reports. Demographic and employment data is drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau.

How many people turn out for the caucuses?

For a long time, that was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Until recently, the parties didn’t report attendance figures, only “state delegate equivalents,” using complex formulas to translate the caucus-night results into state convention delegates. Individual precincts didn’t always keep close counts of how many people caucused, or if anyone left early. Add in that 17-year-olds can caucus if they’ll turn 18 by Election Day, and the difficulties in reliably calculating turnout become clear.

Notwithstanding all that, the Iowa Caucus Project of Drake University estimated that in the 2004 Democratic caucuses and the 2008 and 2012 Republican caucuses, roughly 20% of registered party members participated. In the 2008 Democratic caucus, nearly 40% of eligible Democrats took part.

In 2016, 186,874 Iowans participated in the Republican caucus and 171,109 participated in the Democratic caucus, both held on Feb. 1. On that date, according to the Iowa secretary of state’s office, there were 586,835 active registered Democratic voters and 615,763 active Republican registered voters. That works out to 30.3% of eligible Republicans and 29.2% of eligible Democrats participating in the caucuses, or 18.5% of the state’s total 1,937,317 active registered voters. (By comparison, in 2016, turnout averaged 29.3% across all the Democratic and Republican primaries.)

As of Jan. 2, 2020, according to the secretary of state’s office, there were 2,017,205 active registered voters in Iowa. 614,519 (30.5%) were registered Democrats, 639,969 (31.7%) were registered Republicans, and the rest were independents or members of other parties.

How will we know who wins?

That can also be confusing. Consider the Republican caucuses, which historically have combined a nonbinding secret preference vote along with the delegate-selection process. In 2012, state GOP officials first declared Mitt Romney the winner of the preference vote by eight votes, then two weeks later said Rick Santorum had won by 34 votes. In the end, though, Ron Paul won a majority of Iowa’s national convention delegates, despite finishing third in the preference vote.

This year, the Iowa Democratic Party will report three sets of caucus results: the initial count of candidate support (called the “first alignment”), the final alignment (after backers of “nonviable” candidates have had a chance to shift their support to someone else), and state delegate equivalents. That means that theoretically, three different candidates may be able to plausibly claim to have “won” the caucus.

How reliably do the Iowa caucuses predict the ultimate nominee?

Like so much else with the caucuses, that depends on how you look at it. Since 1972, there have been 10 contested Democratic caucuses; in six of them, including the four most recent, the declared caucus winner ultimately was nominated. On the Republican side, there have been eight contested caucuses in that span, but in only three cases was the caucus winner ultimately the nominee.

For many years, there’s been a saying among caucus-watchers that “there are only three tickets out of Iowa.” That refers to the fact that since 1972 (and excluding years when incumbent presidents ran unopposed for renomination), the eventual nominee has nearly always been one of the top three finishers in the caucuses. The exceptions were Bill Clinton, who placed fourth in 1992, and John McCain, who came in fourth in 2008. Both of those were special cases, though: In 1992 Iowa’s own Sen. Tom Harkin was the overwhelming caucus favorite, so the other Democratic contenders mostly ignored the state. And McCain was just 424 votes behind third-place finisher Fred Thompson.

How many other states and territories use caucuses?

Not as many as used to. This year, besides Iowa, only two other states (Nevada and Wyoming) and four U.S. territories will pick their Democratic convention delegates through caucuses, 11 fewer states than in 2016. In 2018, the national Democratic Party adopted a package of changes to its nominating process, including a rule encouraging state parties to use government-run primaries whenever possible.

Caucuses have been on the decline for a long time. On the Democratic side in 1972, 33 states and territories used them to pick convention delegates, and, as late as 1984, 32 still did. By 2016, however, only 14 states and four territories were still using them. (As a side note, the Republican and Democratic parties in each state can, and often have, choose different methods to select their convention delegates, with one party holding a primary and the other a caucus. We’ve focused on the Democratic side in this post because that’s where the active nomination battle is.)

Why does Iowa vote first?

Caucuses have been features of Iowa politics since the 19th century, but, as one historian wrote, they attracted no national attention before 1972: “Generally, caucus attendance was poor, and often a handful of party regulars were the only persons present.”

That changed after the national Democratic Party revamped its nominating process in the wake of its chaotic 1968 convention. As a consequence of those changes, the Iowa party moved its precinct caucuses – which typically had been held in late March or early April – to Jan. 24, somewhat inadvertently making them the first step on the long road to the national convention. In 1972, George McGovern campaigned in Iowa to raise his profile ahead of the New Hampshire primary; even though McGovern came in third in Iowa, he ultimately won the nomination. In 1976, the Republican and Democratic parties agreed to hold their caucuses on the same day, and both attracted substantial attention from candidates and the media. Since then, the state has zealously defended its first-in-the-nation status.

But this status has not come without opposition. Among registered voters who identify as Democrats or as independents who lean toward the Democratic Party, 26% say it’s a bad thing that Iowa’s caucuses (and the New Hampshire primary) go before other states, versus 9% who say it’s a good thing, according to a new Pew Research Center report. (The majority say it’s neither a good nor bad thing.) Opposition was strongest among liberals and those who said they’ve thought a lot about the candidates.

How does Iowa compare demographically with the U.S. as a whole?

Many observers and pundits say that Iowa’s de facto gatekeeper role is unfair because it is in many ways so unlike the United States as a whole (although others argue that, depending on which metric you use, the state is more representative than it’s often given credit for being).

White adults account for a much larger share of Iowa’s population than is the case for the U.S. as a whole. Among Iowa’s 18-and-older population, 91.6% are white, versus 73.8% of all 18-and-older Americans, according to 2018 Census data. Black Americans make up 12.4% of the 18-and-older population but just 3.2% in Iowa; Hispanics, who can be of any race, are 16.2% of the U.S. 18-and-older population but only 4.8% in Iowa.

Despite the acres upon acres of corn and soybean fields you may have seen on TV, only 3.3% of employed Iowans work in agriculture and related industries. That’s still more than double the share among all Americans (1.3%). Around one-in-six employed Iowans (15.1%) work in manufacturing, compared with 10% in the nation as a whole. In 2018, 7.2% of Iowa families had incomes below the poverty level, versus 9.3% of all U.S. families.

Iowa is less urban than most states. The 2010 census found that 64% of Iowans live in urban areas, ranking it 39th out of the 50 states. (Nationwide, 80.7% of Americans live in urban areas.)

In terms of educational attainment, 29% of Iowans ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or more, compared with 32.6% among all Americans in that age range.

; Blog – Pew Research Center; https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/31/what-to-know-about-the-iowa-caucuses/; https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/FT_20.01.28_IowaExplainer_feature.jpg; January 31, 2020 at 12:54PM

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toldnews-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/nigeria-election-2019-who-benefits-from-poll-delay/

Nigeria election 2019: Who benefits from poll delay?

Image copyright AFP

Image caption “Ad hoc observers”, like these in Adamawa, will have to be in place for the rescheduled election

Nigeria is to hold a delayed presidential election this Saturday after the initial vote was rescheduled in a dramatic overnight press conference, five hours before polls were due to have opened.

The last-minute cancellation surprised the country and inconvenienced thousands of Nigerians who had travelled a long way to cast their votes. It has also cost the economy $1.5bn (£1.15bn), according to the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (Inec) has given several reasons for the delay, including attempted sabotage and logistical issues such as bad weather and problems with delivering the ballot papers.

Election in numbers

84 million registered voters

51% of the electorate under the age of 35

73 registered presidential candidates

120,000 polling stations

The governing All Progressives Congress (APC) and its main challenger, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), have both condemned the postponement and accused each other of trying to manipulate the vote.

So does the delay favour anyone?

In a statement issued on the day of the postponement, the APC alleged the PDP wanted to halt the momentum of its candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari. The PDP, whose presidential contender is Atiku Abubakar, on the other hand said Inec had delayed the election to create “the space to perfect their rigging plans”.

According to Idayat Hassan, from Abuja-based think tank, the Centre for Democracy and Development, the week-long extension is too brief to have a significant influence on the result of the presidential vote.

Image copyright Reuters

Image caption President Muhammadu Buhari (l) is expected to face a strong challenge from Atiku Abubakar (r)

She compares the latest postponement to the one in 2015, when the PDP – in government at the time – pushed the election back by six weeks, blaming the Boko Haram insurgency in the north-east. That postponement, she says, ended up favouring the APC because it cast the PDP in a negative light – as a party that would pursue “power at all costs”.

She believes this year’s delay could slightly benefit the APC as it would increase voter apathy in most areas except those with historically high turnouts – “the north-west and the north-east… both strongholds of President Muhammadu Buhari”.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption The postponement took the Nigerian press and public by surprise

Other analysts say the postponement is likely to harm both parties equally, as their supporters who had travelled home to vote last week will be unable to make another journey this weekend.

Another view holds that the delay will harm Mr Buhari’s chances, as the electoral commission’s un-readiness reflects poorly on him. The commission’s chief, Mahmood Yakubu, was appointed by Mr Buhari in 2015.

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Will the election definitely take place this Saturday?

Inec says there will be no further delays, but some observers have questioned whether the elections will go ahead on 23 February. Festus Mogae, a former president of Botswana, told the BBC’s Newsday programme that he was doubtful that all the preparations would be completed.

“It’s a great deal of work yet to be done,” the head of the international election observation mission said.

“I don’t know whether that can be managed or not, I am not in a position to judge but it makes me apprehensive.”

Image copyright AFP

Image caption It is unclear if the delay will help or hinder Mr Buhari’s chances

And the former vice-president of The Gambia, Fatoumata Tambajang, said she too had doubts about whether Inec could meet its new deadline.

“One has to be realistic given the enormity of the activities that are supposed to be taken care of,” she said.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption The PDP’s Atiku Abubakar has complained about the delayed vote – as has his rival

As well as overcoming logistical hurdles, she said popular enthusiasm for the electoral process would have to be restored to where it was until last week’s cancellation.

Five things about Nigeria: The superpower with no power

Nigeria in nine maps and charts

What does the election commission say?

For Inec, keeping to the new date is central to maintaining the public’s trust. Alhaji Yahaya Bello, the resident electoral commissioner for the capital, Abuja, told the BBC there would be “pandemonium” if election materials were not deployed in time.

“People will just think that Inec has hidden them deliberately, so we can dock some of the results,” he said.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Voters here discussed the election last week, but will they be as excited about the rescheduled vote?

The business community has also stressed the importance of avoiding further delays, with the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry warning that economic activity would not pick up until the election had been held.

Does Nigeria’s ‘generation democracy’ want to vote?

The passion and fashion of Nigeria’s vote

What happens next?

The first task is to reconfigure some 180,000 card readers that are being used to validate voters’ identity cards and check their biometric details. The dates on the readers need to be changed to the new election date.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption The dates on the card-reading machines in these boxes need to be changed

In a statement, Inec said this process would take five to six days, and is due to be completed by Thursday 21 February.

Some sensitive election materials, including ballot papers, have been returned to the Central Bank of Nigeria for safekeeping. These are scheduled to be deployed around the country by Friday 22 February, at the latest.

Election staff, including an estimated one million so-called ad-hoc staff, will also be travelling then. It is unclear what happened to the staff and volunteers, including members of the country’s youth corps, that had already been deployed last Friday.

By law, all campaigning must end 24 hours before polling stations open. After initially saying that the ban imposed last week would remain in force, Inec went back on its decision on Monday, allowing political parties to resume campaigning this week.

Do Nigeria’s campaign promises stack up?

As Nigerians vote, false information spreads

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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The Way to Prevent a Recount Disaster Is Sitting Right in Front of Us

On the night of November 9, 2018, three days after the midterm elections, a group of protesters gathered outside the Supervisor of Elections office in Broward, Florida’s second-largest county and one of its most Democratic-leaning. The night before, a video had been posted to Twitter allegedly showing ballots being transported in private cars, and each time a truck pulled into the parking bay attached to the SOE’s office, the crowd took it as further proof that the election was being stolen.

For some, the fraud was so obvious and brazen that it almost defied logic. “The Democrats had their ace here with these 68,000 votes,” said a woman with a five-foot American flag, referring to the constantly updating vote total released by the SOE. “Miraculously! Today’s Friday. The election was Tuesday.”

The stakes felt especially high, with the margins for three statewide races (U.S. senator, governor, and agricultural commissioner) all below .5 percent. According to Florida’s mandatory recount law, similar to the ones in 19 other states, these margins would automatically trigger the first full, statewide recount in history, and the protesters were there to stop what they saw as an influx of fraudulent ballots being snuck in during the recount.

The only problem was that the recount hadn’t even begun. Broward was still receiving overseas, provisional, and absentee ballots, of which it had a backlog of at least 70,000, and its unofficial results weren’t due until the following day. But the Supervisor of Elections hadn’t publicized the most basic information about what was happening, and in this vacuum of official information, propaganda spread quickly (created and amplified, without evidence, by Republican politicians).

As the week wore on, the situation in Florida went from bad to worse. During the two weeks from Election Day until when the vote was certified, rejected ballots were confused with accepted ones, vote-counting machines malfunctioned, and at least six federal lawsuits were filed, with one county missing the state-mandated recount deadline altogether.

This November, given the stakes of the election and the number of competitive races across the country, a similar election nightmare is almost guaranteed. Though the presidential race currently looks like a blowout, it could easily tighten in key swing states during the next few months. And even if Joe Biden scores a decisive win, control of the Senate could be determined by a few thousand votes in Maine, Arizona, or Colorado. There are also roughly 28 House races that the Cook Political Report rates as toss-ups, not to mention elections for state legislatures, which will be in charge of drawing new electoral districts based off the results of this year’s Census.

Every cycle, there are close races (in 2018, nine House seats were decided by a margin of less than 1 percent), but they often go unnoticed. The election is over, and voters want to move on. That’s unlikely to be the case this time around. Not only is the country exceptionally polarized, but the coronavirus has created chaos over who can vote and how. Already, pandemic-related voting rights issues in at least three states—Alabama, Wisconsin, and Texas—have made their way to the Supreme Court, and that was just for the primaries. For the general, Republicans are aiming to deploy 50,000 “poll monitors,” while the Democrats plan to have 600 lawyers on-hand.

With states already seeing record numbers of absentee ballots, which are especially prone to being thrown out, it’s almost inevitable that the results will be disputed, However, even under the best of circumstances, recounts are divisive, expensive, laborious, and rarely change the outcome of an election.

Take Florida in 2018. That year, after the recounted races went to machine re-tabulation, where all the ballots were fed through the scanners again, three still had a margin below .25 percent, triggering a manual recount of undervotes, overvotes, and write-ins. However, after officials discovered that they had misplaced 2,335 ballots, Broward submitted its original results anyway.

Another county, Palm Beach, didn’t have voting machines capable of running multiple recounts simultaneously. Even working 24/7 for five days, there wasn’t enough time to re-tabulate the 585,117 votes for all three statewide races, let alone for a state representative race, whose margin was 37 votes. Here, a recount may have actually changed the outcome, but the other elections were given priority. Ultimately, though, the point became moot when the county’s 11-year-old machines overheated on day five, invalidating the recount results of roughly 174,000 ballots.

In the end, the greatest vote swing was in the Senate race, where Democrat Bill Nelson gained 274 votes. By the standards of a recount, this was a dramatic change. FairVote, a nonpartisan nonprofit advocating electoral reforms, analyzed 15 statewide recounts between 2000 and 2015 and found that the median shift was 219 votes. Still, Nelson lost by a margin of over 10,000.

Verifying the integrity of an election doesn’t have to be this fraught and time-consuming. Unlike the sloppy, exhausting drama of a recount, risk-limiting audits offer a way to resolve election disputes that’s cheaper, more efficient, and less likely to lead to the meltdowns and conspiracy theories that plagued the 2018 Florida recount. And though they’re technical and unsexy, they’re one of the most effective and bipartisan election reforms available.

A risk-limiting audit (RLA) randomly selects a sub-sample of ballots and verifies that what is marked on the paper actually matches the result that was recorded for that ballot. The closer the race, the more votes are recounted, and the process continues until there’s a “high statistical degree of certainty” that the original results are correct. In small races with tight margins, the sample size may include every vote, but it’s typically much smaller than a full recount.

In a video produced by the Colorado Secretary of State, which began conducting mandatory statewide RLAs in 2017, a professor compares the process to tasting a tablespoon of soup to see if it is too salty. “A tablespoon is enough,” he said, “and it doesn’t matter if it’s a one-quart sauce pan or a 50-gallon cauldron of soup.”

It’s a clever idea, but is it too clever? Recounts are elegant in the simplicity of their design: you take every ballot and count it again. Especially in the heat of an election dispute, when voters are more likely to believe the system is fair only if their candidate won, are administrators really able to offer reassurances by randomly pulling ballots and claiming a “high statistical degree of certainty?”

It depends on the election administrator. Elections in Colorado, like in most states, are run by the Secretary of State, a position currently held by Jena Griswold, who was elected in 2019. She’s made transparency a priority, starting with a public dice roll to determine the 20-digit number used to randomly select ballots. Her office also posts the technical details of the RLA on its website and trains local media members in how the process operates. “Risk-limiting audits are on the news here,” said Griswold.

In addition, some election administrators, like Amber McReynolds, the Director of Elections for Denver from 2011 to 2018, also give tours to candidates, who are able to request recounts after the election if they dispute the result. “They’d all be able to come watch,” she said, “and see that there was a clear process, it worked, and there wasn’t a need to go further.”

Ironically, auditing a sample of ballots can also be more inclusive and accurate than recounting the whole batch.

Would that every state were Colorado. In Broward County in 2018, by the time the recount started, the well was already poisoned.

But the difference between Colorado and Florida isn’t just one of communication. Colorado citizens are automatically registered to vote, and before each election, the state mails everyone on the rolls a ballot, which can be turned in and counted well before Election Day. As a result, voters never experience the chaos endemic to elections elsewhere. “They don’t wait in line for five hours,” said McReynolds. “They don’t have a machine break in front of them. Those are really the things, I think, that destroy voter confidence.” Plus, Griswold said, Colorado doesn’t audit only the top-ballot races. It can also verify elections that are particularly close or contested, which further reassure voters that the outcome is legitimate.

Ironically, auditing a sample of ballots can also be more inclusive and accurate than recounting the whole batch. “When you do a recount, there are miscounts just because of human error,” Griswold said. In addition, audits include ballots that a recount may exclude. For example, under Michigan law, a box of ballots won’t be recounted if the seal is broken or if the number of ballots inside doesn’t exactly match what was recorded.

This provision is well-intentioned but doesn’t necessarily combat the problem effectively, said Ginny Vander Roest, a former elections administrator in Michigan and a Senior Election Implementation Manager at Voting Works, a non-partisan non-profit aiming to make voting more secure and affordable. “If someone tampered with that ballot container, then why would you recount it? Of course, you’d want to figure out if that actually happened, but that’s something [the law] doesn’t provide for,” she said.

As a result, ballots can be disqualified en masse, like in the 2016 presidential race, when votes in 60 percent of the precincts in Detroit were thrown out. “This is not unique to Michigan,” added Monica Childers, a technologist at Voting Works. “All states have these sorts of carve-outs and caveats.”

Increasingly, though, states are following the audit path that Colorado has forged. Political parties in Kansas, Wyoming, and Alaska all hired McReynolds to oversee their primaries. “They said, ‘We want the best of the best election processes,’” she said. “And I said, ‘Okay, well that includes an RLA.’”

RLAs or RLA pilots are now required or provided for by state laws in Nevada, Virginia, Georgia, Indiana, California, Ohio, Oregon, Washington, Rhode Island (which audited its recent presidential primary in three hours) and Michigan, which, in May, conducted an RLA with 277 jurisdictions despite having to train all of the election administrators remotely.

However, barriers still exist. Because an RLA checks the physical ballot against the record of the ballot that was counted, it can only be implemented in states with a paper trail. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan law and public policy institute, that requirement excludes at least some jurisdictions in eight states this November: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Indiana.

Moreover, just because audits have been proven to work doesn’t mean they’ll be adopted. For example, between 2011 and 2013, California conducted a RLA pilot program. The subsequent report called it a success, as opposed to the manual recount, which “provided little statistical evidence that the election outcomes were correctly tallied by the voting system, despite requiring substantially more ballots to be hand-counted and examined."

Still, RLAs in California are only recommended, not required. “It’s a proven process, but it’s not proven in the fact that legislators understand it,” said Vander Roest. “They’re used to their recount rules.”

Even when politicians are on board the RLA train, it’s not always a smooth ride. Recently, the Florida House and Senate unanimously passed a law allowing counties to conduct recounts using the same equipment that they use for audits. Afterward, Verified Voting, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to election security, wrote an open letter to the governor urging him to veto the legislation.

Not only are the sanctioned machines not properly certified, the authors argued, but “this bill does not require that recounts look at the actual paper ballots—the legal ballots of record. Rather it relies on hackable retabulation and digital images because the sanctioned machines aren’t secure.” The letter was signed by two former secretaries of state, a former ambassador, and academics from Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and MIT. Still, the governor signed the bill.

This episode emphasizes that there’s no easy fix to an election system. Risk-limiting audits are an effective way to reform—or even replace—traditional recounts, but only if they’re implemented carefully. This new law in Florida is scheduled to take effect after the presidential election, on January 1, 2021, meaning that, should the state undertake a recount in November, it will probably go as smoothly as it did in 2018. “Florida has had more than its share of election recount problems in the past,” reads the Verified Voting letter. “Please don’t expose the state to new problems on your watch.”

Follow Spenser Mestel on Twitter.

The Way to Prevent a Recount Disaster Is Sitting Right in Front of Us syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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khalilhumam · 4 years ago

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It’s time to fix Democrats’ Iowa and New Hampshire problem

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/its-time-to-fix-democrats-iowa-and-new-hampshire-problem/

It’s time to fix Democrats’ Iowa and New Hampshire problem

By Morley Winograd As the Democratic nominating process ends with a whimper, not a bang, Democrats need to take steps to finally get rid of Iowa and New Hampshire’s protected status as the first two contests. With their presumptive nominee, Joe Biden, not beholden to voters in either of those two states for his sweeping victory, the August convention can finally get rid of traditions that no longer reflect the realities of today’s Democratic Party. As Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party said of the current primary calendar, “It is bizarre. It makes absolutely no sense except for tradition, and sometimes tradition doesn’t get us anywhere.” The party’s freedom to upend this particular tradition has been circumscribed in the recent past by the influence of nominees who owed their national success to their showing in the early primary contests, which are conducted almost entirely among white, rural and small-town voters, a group that no longer reflects the composition of today’s Democratic Party. [1] The two states’ demographically distorted electorates would be reason enough for Democrats to take away their special status in the nominating process. But their unique status also goes against the Democratic Party’s commitment to participation and transparency. As Sean McElwee, a dyed-in-the-wool Bernie Sanders supporter and founder of the polling and policy group Data for Progress, pointed out after this year’s contests were over, “the early states were disproportionately caucus states and disproportionately white, which papered over some worrying political weaknesses for progressives.” Iowa’s complex caucus process is notoriously opaque and difficult for all but an inner circle of initiates to navigate. The rules changes the Democratic National Committee instituted this year, at the urging of Sanders supporters, ended up making matters worse. Forced by the new rules to report three different types of results from more than 1000 caucus sites, the party found itself without the technology to do so. This simultaneously ruined the state Democratic Party’s reputation, caused the media to dismiss the results as unknowable and possibly suspect, and denied the surprising winner, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, much of the momentum from what turned out to be his only win (or maybe tie) in the entire nominating process. New Hampshire’s delegate selection process is at least a primary with results that are known on Election Day. However, it takes openness to an extreme, allowing not only independent voters but registered Republicans to vote on which candidate the Democratic Party should nominate for president. And it can hardly claim that those who do participate have any unique insight on who the Democrats should nominate to win the presidency, since it has been over forty years since the winner of any contested New Hampshire Democratic primary (Jimmy Carter in 1976) has been elected president. Incumbent presidents have felt obligated to defend keeping Iowa and New Hampshire first in the nominating process as a way of saying thank you to the voters in those states who provided them a successful launching pad. In addition, incumbent presidents have been hesitant to challenge the “first in the nation” status of Iowa and New Hampshire to make sure no one from those states organized an early challenge to their renomination out of parochial concerns about a possible loss of that status. For example, when I was Chairman of the DNC’s Commission on Presidential Primaries and Delegate selection, often referred to as the Winograd Commission, any hint of a rules change that would keep Iowa from being the first contest in the process was quickly shot down by President Jimmy Carter’s supporters on the Commission—at the instruction of the White House. President Bill Clinton, whose second-place finish in New Hampshire in 1992 gave him his “comeback kid” reputation, made sure that no one at the DNC ever hinted at taking away that state’s legislative mandate that its primary take place at least one week earlier than any other. President Barack Obama, who emerged from obscurity to win Iowa in 2008, was equally uninterested in changing that state’s status for 2012. These political considerations are likely no longer operative. Joe Biden lost both Iowa and New Hampshire. For the first time in decades, the underlying weaknesses of the nature of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests will make it much more difficult for those states to retain their current role once a fairer, more representative alternative is presented and implemented. What is the alternative? Democrats should use this unique opportunity to create a national Democratic Primary to be held the week after Easter every four years, starting in 2024. There are two standard arguments against such an arrangement, but only one of them still carries any weight. Traditionalists argue that party insiders’ knowledge of the potential candidates can play an important role in selecting a winning nominee. But the inability of party leaders to impact the nominating process has already been tacitly acknowledged by the DNC rules change on super delegate voting at this year’s convention.[2] This year they were banned from voting on the first ballot, while keeping their theoretical ability to resolve any convention deadlock on the second ballot. Because no Democratic convention has gone beyond the first ballot since national conventions have been televised, the need to find a way to protect the influence of party leaders on the final outcome by not moving to a national primary hardly qualifies as a realistic argument against the idea, even if it remains the favorite hobby-horse of party elites. The real problem a national primary presents is the difficulty it theoretically creates for a candidate with minimal name recognition to mount a winning nationwide campaign against candidates who are already well-known to the electorate. If Democrats, it is argued, were to eliminate the ability to campaign early in small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, they would still need to create some kind of initial campaign test that doesn’t require an underdog to launch a national campaign from a standing start. The argument is a valid one, but it can easily be incorporated into a scheme for a national primary that simultaneously preserves the role of the current earliest four states to help the rest of the country focus in on a potential winning candidate. Here’s how: First, the DNC should finish the job it started in 2020 and completely abolish the ability of any state to determine the preferences of its Democratic voters by holding a poorly attended and very unrepresentative caucus gathering. Outside of Iowa, no state should object. This year three key, big states—Colorado, Washington and Minnesota—took the party’s hint and converted their caucuses to primaries. This left only Iowa, Nevada and four small states with caucuses. Only Iowa and Nevada, because of their early positions, were the ones that theoretically could have an impact on the nomination. To their credit, Nevada Democratic Party leaders have already signaled their dissatisfaction with their caucus’s process (not outcome) and are ready to use their newfound domination of the state’s government to enact a primary for 2024, leaving only Iowa to defend its parochial interests in preserving its traditional role. Once that first step is taken, it is easy to finish the makeover of the Democratic nomination process by creating a primary process more suited to today’s 24-hour cable news and social media era. To make sure initial debates about policy include the concerns of key Democratic constituencies—such as Hispanics in Nevada and African-Americans in South Carolina—while respecting the contribution voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have made in the past, all four of the current early states should be given the opportunity by the rules committee of this year’s Democratic National Convention to hold their 2024 Democratic presidential primary on the same date: Sunday, March 10, 2024. Candidates that do well in one or more of those early contests will have ample time to leverage those victories to acquaint the rest of the country’s Democratic voters with their vision, values and policies by designating Sunday, April 7 2024 (the week after Easter) as National Democratic Primary Day. The offer to each of the four states to retain some of their early prominence should come from the DNC with a condition that none of them seek to become “more first” than any other state. If any state decides to jump the gun, the DNC rules should disqualify the results in calculating the winner of the nomination and refuse to seat any delegation chosen based on those results. The “vacancy” caused by any such flouting of the rules by a state that went too early would be filled by another relatively small state from the same region of the country which is prepared to abide by the rules. In this way, the ability of a candidate, such as John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama, to make an early and surprisingly good impression will be preserved by providing them the ability to campaign for a month among a total electorate about the size of Columbus, Ohio. It is likely that New Hampshire would not only object to this new primary calendar but point to the legislative mandate its state legislature has given to the state’s secretary of state to set the date for its primary at least one week before any other state’s primary. They could choose to hold such a “beauty contest” they wanted to, but its outcome would have nothing to do with votes at the Democratic National Convention. This relatively simple two-step process for establishing a Democratic National Primary Day would greatly enhance the public’s acceptance of the outcome. Although no set of rules can guarantee the selection of a presidential nominee who is prepared to meet the challenges the country now faces, by increasing the participation of as many Democrats as possible in an open process that better reflects the makeup of today’s Democratic coalition, the party can improve the odds that its next nominee will win the prize national politicians dream about winning.

[1] According to Pew Research Center’s 2018 report on party identification, whites make up 59 percent of all Democratic identifiers nationally, Hispanics 19 percent, African Americans 12 percent, and Asian-Americans 8 percent. Despite this distribution among Democratic voters, the current Democratic nominating calendar gives the disproportionately white electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire an outsize influence on which candidate the Democratic Party should choose for president. Iowa’s population is 80 percent white; New Hampshire’s is 90 percent. Only six percent of Iowans are Hispanic, a percentage still twice that of their representation among residents of New Hampshire. African Americans make up three percent of Iowa’s population. Their numbers aren’t even that large in New Hampshire. The two states’ demographics are uniquely unsuited to providing insights on the beliefs and concerns of the various constituencies that Democrats will need to attract and turn out in November. [2] Super delegates are party leaders or elected officials who are free to vote for any candidate regardless of the results of the popular vote in primary elections and caucuses preceding the convention.

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vinayv224 · 4 years ago

Link

Wolf Blitzer announces CNN’s election night coverage. | CNN

The election is in an anxiety-inducing holding pattern, and TV doesn’t know what to do.

“What are we doing?” Stephen Colbert kept asking his producer as his 2020 election special on Showtime wound its way toward a chaotic conclusion.

In 2016, the late-night host’s live election special had felt a little like a wake for America as Colbert attempted to cope in real time with a country that had voted by a slim majority to elect Donald Trump as its commander in chief. It was surprisingly electrifying television. His 2020 special — which aired while America waited for votes to be counted, with no immediate end in sight — was much less electrifying.

Colbert was already filming in the midst of a pandemic, a performer who’s at his best when he has other people to play off of interacting only with a handful of people in the studio (most notably his wife, sitting off to his side) and then a variety of guests beamed in via videoconferencing software. Though he’s gotten very good at doing his show without a live audience laughing for every joke, the rhythms of an episode of late-night TV produced with Covid-19 safety protocols in place will always feel a little awkward.

But a newly revealed and even bigger challenge is that the era of live late-night election specials has largely been confined to the Obama and Trump administrations. The results of both Obama elections were known or almost certain by the time those specials launched in the 11 pm hour on the East Coast, and the 2016 election was clearly tilting toward Trump (if not over yet) by the time Colbert’s special aired. In 2020, the fact that results were going to be delayed — something that all of America had been conditioned to expect — didn’t really matter. The show had to go on because that’s what shows like this do.

TV abhors a vacuum, but the 2020 election, especially, occurred in a vacuum. Even once all of the votes are counted, the urge to fill hours and hours of airtime on election night and beyond will linger with viewers who thought they needed information and instead got a steady dose of anxiety.

This week’s nonstop coverage of the vote count has only served to underscore that election TV — both in late-night and on cable news — has long been broken. Maybe it should go away forever.

Cable news just isn’t equipped for an election whose results aren’t immediately clear

CNN

Wolf Blitzer introduces CNN’s election night coverage.

For weeks now, Americans have known one thing about the 2020 election: We probably wouldn’t know official results for days or even weeks after Election Day because holding an election in a pandemic means lots of votes arriving via mail, and some states wouldn’t count mail-in ballots until polls had closed.

But even if that simple likelihood hadn’t been discussed over and over and over again by politicians and pundits (here’s Bernie Sanders talking about it), a quick glance at recent history could have guided our expectations regarding when we’d find out who won. Of the five presidential elections of the 21st century before the 2020 election, only two — 2008 and 2012 — were called before midnight on the East Coast, and the 2000 election dragged on for over a month.

Even extremely recent history — which is to say, the 2018 midterms — took weeks to fully understand, particularly when it came to the extent of Democratic gains in the House.

It’s true that many elections of the TV era — roughly 1952 on — were called well before midnight on the East Coast. But those elections took place in a less polarized time, where landslide wins were much more common. In the 21st century, the ossification of Democrats’ and Republicans’ respective bases has led to electoral maps that largely look the same, with minor variations, in election after election after election.

And yet to watch TV coverage on election night — not to mention social media reactions to said TV coverage — was to watch a full-blown meltdown over the fact that nobody really knew anything yet, something that continued to play out across Wednesday and Thursday as all involved waited for official vote counts. In the case of Democrats, much of that meltdown was driven by Trump’s stronger-than-expected performance in Florida, a mirror of 2018 when Democrats’ early hopes seemed to have foundered on the shores of the Sunshine State before the overall picture ended up far rosier for the party.

Easy to say now, but imagine if MI and WI got called first, and then FL later. Would completely change the way everyone reacted to the news, and the way many are still reacting at this moment.

— Jonathan Tamari (@JonathanTamari) November 4, 2020

As of Thursday afternoon, an official winner still hasn’t been declared (though it seems likely that Joe Biden has won the presidency), and 24-hour cable news is still focused solely on the dribs and drabs of information seeping in from the handful of outstanding battleground states as the vote count crawls forward in Pennsylvania and Georgia, in Arizona and Nevada. Every once in a great while, a quick burst of information about the latest Covid-19 numbers will break through, but otherwise, it’s all election all the time. (The Covid-19 numbers have been bad! I don’t know if you’ve heard!)

The election results have largely been in the same holding pattern since midday on Wednesday when Michigan and Wisconsin were called for Biden, making his path to victory easier to see. So the cable news just keeps repeating the same information, even as MSNBC’s poor Steve Kornacki (the guy who does the network’s vote breakdowns on a giant map) looks as though he’s slept for maybe a half-hour since Tuesday.

A frequent narrative told about American presidential elections is that each successive one is “the most important of our lifetimes.” I think there’s truth to that during this period when Democrats and Republicans have such divergent visions of what America might look like. But the fashion in which cable news treats each presidential election like it is the only piece of news in a given year has created a uniquely terrible recipe that undervalues actual useful information and overvalues anything that might produce anxiety and/or dopamine hits.

As such, cable news faces the same dilemma that Stephen Colbert did on Tuesday night: It simply doesn’t know what to do with an election that occurs over several days, not several hours. You never know when the development that changes everything might arrive, so keep watching! Tuning in feels like clinging to a constantly unraveling rope, building and building and building tension without ever breaking. By the time a winner is finally declared, we’ll all be wiped out.

The “just keep talking until we know something” approach underserves viewers and creates endless amounts of anxiety

One of the biggest flaws of 24/7 cable news coverage in this moment is that it largely obscures the actual story of the election. And all week long, it has poked at what basically everybody knew would be the story going in. Counting the votes would take a while. We wouldn’t have results for a few days. But the demand for more, more, more led to a long election night and then, after the election, long days of single tea leaves being extrapolated into an entire plant without much thought given to how that approach might sway public opinion or how it might fail viewers.

For instance: Several networks — CNN in particular — used a light shade of pink to indicate states where Trump was leading but that hadn’t yet been called, and a light shade of blue to indicate states where Biden was leading but that hadn’t yet been called. And Trump was leading in, say, Michigan and Wisconsin on Tuesday night, and held that lead until the states’ largest urban centers were counted on Wednesday morning. For as long as it lasted, the pink hue of those states created unwarranted anxiety in Democratic viewers and unwarranted optimism in Republican viewers.

This is not a new complaint about cable news. On the whole, cable news is empty and sensationalistic, and it provides little information that is actually necessary except in situations where a story is truly unfolding at a rapid clip. (The terrorist attacks of September 11 are the most obvious example.)

But ongoing coverage of the 2020 election has highlighted just how little information there was to share in the immediate aftermath of the polls closing, and it has heightened the ultimate uselessness of increasingly vague talking heads waiting for something like real data.

The way the American media covers elections seems so deeply entrenched as to be unchangeable, but 2020 shows just how badly we need to rethink how television reports on them. The UK’s laws on how an election can be covered (which ban coverage while polls are open) might be a good starting point for finding workable reforms. There has to be a better way. By 2024, let’s hope we’ve found one.

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