#historical voter suppression

[alwaysbewoke]

and they're at it AGAIN!!!

[superbutch]

Book 1, Page 169

SuperButch is a 1940s lesbian superhero history noir webcomic by Becky Hawkins and Barry Deutsch. It follows Lillian Lewis, a reporter who's trying to uncover the superhero protecting the lesbian bars from corrupt cops.

For extra historical info and behind-the-scenes process posts, check out the SuperButch Patreon!

[tomorrowusa]

Ron DeSantis is to freedom what Vladimir Putin is to Ukraine. It’s not just Ukrainians whose freedom is being threatened by a power-hungry tyrant.

RELATED: Vote on the pronunciation of DeSantis’s name. 🗳

[wyrmfedgrave]

New Hampshire Republicans' new law targets student voting for future ele...

New Hampshire Republikkkans are passing laws to suppress the votes of their state's students!!

(I'd guess that means college & late term high schoolers - got to read up on it.)

End?

[pyaasa]

Is it evil of me to hold out hope that requiring id for the first time this ge will adversely impact labour voters and put a dent in their majority lol

[reasonsforhope]

For all the concern in recent years that U.S. democracy is on the brink, in danger or under threat, a report out Tuesday offers a glimmer of good news for American voters worried that casting a ballot will be difficult in 2024.

Put simply, the new data shows that voting in America has gotten easier over the past two decades. More voters have the ability to cast a ballot before Election Day, with the majority of U.S. states now offering some form of early in-person voting and mail voting to all voters.

"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report...

The data shows that, despite real efforts by some Republican-led legislatures to restrict access at the margins, the trend in the U.S. since 2000 has been toward making it easier to vote: Nearly 97% of voting-age American citizens now live in states that offer the option to vote before Election Day.

"The lies about early voting, the lies about voting machines and efforts in some state legislatures to roll back some of the election integrity and convenience measures that have evolved over the last several decades, those efforts almost all failed," Becker said. "In almost every single state, voters can choose to vote when they want to."

Forty-six states and Washington, D.C., offer some form of early in-person voting, the report tallied, and 37 of those jurisdictions also offer mail voting to all voters without requiring an excuse...

In 2000

In 2024

Infographic via NPR. If you go to the article, you can watch an animation of this map that shows voting availability in every election since 2000.

There are some political trends that show up in the data. Of the 14 states that don't offer mail voting to all voters, for instance, 12 have Republican-led legislatures.

-via NPR, March 19, 2024. Article continues below.

But maybe the more striking trends are geographic. Every single state in the western U.S. has offered some form of early and mail voting to all voters since 2004, according to the data. And those states span the political spectrum, from conservative Idaho to liberal California.

"It's really hard to talk about partisanship around this issue because historically there just hasn't been much," Mann said. "We've seen voting by mail and early in-person voting supported by Republican legislatures, Democratic legislatures, Republican governors, Democratic governors. We see voters in both parties use both methods." ...

In 2020, New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts all made changes to make voting more easily accessible, which have since partially or fully become permanent. Delaware is currently embroiled in a legal fight over whether it can implement early and mail voting changes this election cycle as well.

The South, with its history of slavery and Jim Crow laws, has long lagged behind when it comes to voting access. The CEIR data shows that, although some states have slowly started expanding options for voters, generally it is still the most difficult region for voters to cast a ballot.

As options nationwide have become more widely available, voters have also responded by taking advantage.

In the 2000 election, 86% of voters voted at a polling place on Election Day, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

In 2020, during the pandemic, that number dropped to less than 31% of voters. It went back up in 2022, to roughly half of the electorate, but was still in line with the two-decade trend toward more ballots being cast early.

...in reality, Becker says, more voting options actually make elections more secure and less susceptible to malicious activity or even human error.

"If there were a problem, if there were a cyber event, if there were a malfunction, if there were bad weather, if there were traffic, if there were was a power outage, you could think of all kinds of circumstances. ... The more you spread voting out over a series of days and over multiple modes, the less likely it's going to impact voters," he said...

-via NPR, March 19, 2024

[elljayvee]

image source: statista

Young friends, I'm asking you to vote. I'm asking you to get your friends to vote. I know it can feel like you don't have any power, and in a lot of ways, that's because those 70 million Baby Boomers are, genuinely, still holding onto it. About 70% of the US Senate is Baby Boomers and Silent Gen. There's more Silent Gen folks than there are Millennials. I generally think intergenerational conflict nonsense is, well, nonsense -- there's a LOT of Baby Boomers who are on the same side, politically, as I am, and a lot of younger people who are flat-out Nazis like JD Vance. But look at how much power they're holding.

And the only way to change that is to vote, and to run -- but the number of people who can run and want to run is smaller than those who can vote. You can change the political balance and the age balance in our government by voting.

Gen Z had historically high turnout for 18-24 yr olds in the last Presidential election, and I'm super chuffed about that -- but it was still only about 28% of eligible voters. Overall, turnout was about 66% across all age groups -- and Boomers turned out at nearly 70%. Pew Research has talked about how largely the differences in success and failure of candidates are not due to preference (who the population as a whole would LIKE to win) but due to differences in voter turnout (who actually shows up to vote).

image source: brookings.edu

The United States is a LOT less conservative/fascist on a population level than it is on an elected official level, and differential voter turnout is why. Voters under 30 are the most likely to support candidates who aren't creepy fascist motherfuckers, and there are millions of you who aren't going to the polls.

Voter suppression is real, and there are lots of people working to counter it, but efforts to counter voter suppression only go so far if people aren't showing up in the first place. Gen Z -- on a population level, over 60% of you don't like creepy fascists! That's great, but not liking them needs to be backed up with action. Please get out there and vote like you care about keeping creepy fascists out of power. It's not as fun as dunking on them on the internet, sure. But it's very effective.

I want you to vote, young friends. I want everyone over 18 and younger than 60 to crank those numbers out, but I especially want everyone between 18-40 at that polling booth, ready to go. I want to see sky-high, record-smashing young voter turnout in this election -- and I want to see it at the next election, and the one after that. I want there to BE a next election. These motherfuckers tried once to overturn an election -- by legal challenges and by force -- and the way to make that not happen again is to shut. it. down.

Please. Vote.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Morgan Stephens at Daily Kos:

With a competitive House race in the balance, arsonists set democracy on fire.  Early Monday morning, ballot boxes at two locations in the Pacific Northwest were destroyed by fire—one in Vancouver, Washington, and another in Portland, Oregon—with election officials estimating that “hundreds of ballots” may have been burned. In Portland, Oregon, police found that an incendiary device had been placed inside a voting drop box. However, a fire suppressant inside the box protected all but three ballots, and the local elections office planned to reach out to the affected voters to help them obtain replacement ballots. Shortly thereafter, another fire was set at a ballot box in Vancouver, Washington, near a public transit center. Clark County Elections Auditor Greg Kimsey confirmed to Forbes that mail-in ballots dropped off in the receptacle over the weekend had not been picked up, and that “hundreds” have been destroyed. He urged voters who dropped their ballot in the box at Fisher's Landing Transit Center after 11 AM PT Saturday to contact Clark County Elections for a replacement. 

[...] At the presidential level, Washington and Oregon are historically solid Democratic states, with Joe Biden winning them in 2020 by over 19 percentage points and 16 points, respectively. However, there’s a crucial House race in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District between Democratic incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican Joe Kent, whom Donald Trump endorsed. She narrowly won in 2022, with a margin of 2,633 votes over Kent, who also ran that year. Her victory was a shock in this red-tinted district, which 538 calculated as having a partisan lean of R+11.2.

MAGA voter intimidation games are going on, as hundreds of thousands of ballots got burned in key Democratic strongholds such as Portland, Oregon, Vancouver, Washington, and Phoenix, Arizona in recent days.

See Also:

Arizona Republic: Phoenix police ID suspect in connection with mailbox fire where ballots burned

[alwaysbewoke]

[spoopy-moose]

How the Elden Ring regions would vote

Limgrave: historically red state but with a chance of swinging. The Democratic candidate Nepheli Loux is shaping to replace the incumbent republican representative Godrick.

Liurnia of the Lakes: historical blue state, as liberal as liberal gets. The incumbent democratic rep Rennala looks to continue her fourth term in office.

Calied: swing state, could go either way. Democratic in 2016, Republican in 2020, the incumbent representative Radahn is rumoured to be sick and unable to continue his duties.

Dragonbarrow: again, 50/50, hard to say. The population demographic is primarily draconic, who are known to swing conservative. But the state has seen a decline in draconic population as of late so anything could happen.

Weeping Peninsula: likely blue. Has close relations to its neighbouring state Limgrave and historically voted with it, it has recently seen uprisings from the demi-human population. A swing to democrats is expected.

Atlus Plateu: likely red, high religious population and strong sense of traditionalism.

Mount Gelmir: independent in the last election, likely independent this election too. Though Lady Tanith is replacing her husband Rykard as the running representative.

Special Administrative Region of Leyndell: swing state, contains a large amount of religious traditionalists and a large demographic of omen voters. Though Leyndell has been found guilty during the last 3000 election cycles of voter suppression, the change in leadership might see a significant change in voter turnout this cycle.

Mountaintop of the Giants: likely blue, possible independent. Could be looking at a swing state but electorally insignificant.

Consecrated Snowfield: blue, recent turnover in population has led to a large increase in Albinauric demographic. Secure win for the democrats.

Haligtree: blue, historically blue, most liberal state in all of the lands between.

Crumbling Farum Azula: red, aging demographic means strong affinity for traditionalism.

Siofra River and Nokron: blue, the democrats’ environmental stance has boded well with the Ancestral Followers population

Ainsel River and Nokstella: blue, state capital Nokstella houses a large female population, though surrounding electorates mostly lean republican

Deeproot Depths: blue, representative Fia is known to be one of the most progressive candidates in the running.

Lake of Rot: red, it’s actually just red.

Mohgwyn Dynasty: independent, independent presidential candidate Mohg is expected to win all 3 electoral votes, and with his recent acquittal against allegations of kidnapping and incest his popularity might rise.

[wyrmfedgrave]

New Hampshire Republicans' new law targets student voting for future ele...

New Hampshire Republikkkans are passing laws to suppress the votes of their state's students!!

(I'd guess that means college & late term high schoolers - got to read up on it.)

End?

[asm5129]

I was watching the new Olay and friends (linked below) and it got me thinking

Well first of all it’s very thought provoking, regardless of whether I do or don’t agree with every point

And I definitely see how the pro-Palestine movement—at least, the capital D Discourse version—lacks serious focus beyond being loud. if activism is just shouting down the people who are approaching the same problem differently than you, that’s not a real strategy. “End the genocide” isn’t an actual demand, because it’s not something America can actually *do*. The idea of emotional extortion is interesting, how gatekeeping and exclusion are tools of white supremacy is interesting as well, and how “the masters tools cannot dismantle the masters house” has been kind of twisted. There’s a lot more to it but the big thing that I started thinking about

In terms of strategy

I started thinking of how much the notion that voting is meaningless or the idea that not voting is useful in the long run kind of flies in the face of the fights that have been fought over decades with sweat and tears and far too much blood to gain the right to vote. I know some people have used the line “if voting did anything they wouldn’t let you do it.”

If you know literally *any* American history you should no that the powers that be definitely did not “let” most people vote. Even right now, voter suppression wouldn’t be a priority for MAGA if voting wasn’t a genuine threat to them.

You don’t feel the need to rig the game if you believe you can win.

It’s just interesting how in leftist debate about strategy the right to vote kind of gets flattened as an unimportant part of historic fights for civil rights and overlook how heavily allowing oppressed and disenfranchised people to vote scared those in power.

To be clear—voting ain’t enough. Not at all.

But to act as if the blood that was spilled in that fight was meaningless , that ultimately the establishment doesn’t need to care who votes feels a rather ignorant take.

[mariacallous]

As the United States nears its consequential November election, concerns about the impacts of artificial intelligence on the country’s electoral integrity are front and center. Voters are receiving deceptive phone calls mimicking candidates’ voices, and campaigns are using AI images in their ads. Many fear that highly targeted messaging could lead to suppressed voter turnout or false information about polling stations. These are legitimate concerns that public officials are working overtime to confront.

But free and fair elections, the building blocks of democratic representation, are only one dimension of democracy. Today, policymakers must also recognize an equally fundamental threat that advanced technologies pose to a free and open society: the suppression of civil rights and individual opportunity at the hands of opaque and unaccountable AI systems. Ungoverned, AI undermines democratic practice, norms, and the rule of law—fundamental commitments that underpin a robust liberal democracy—and opens pathways toward a new type of illiberalism. To reverse this drift, we must reverse the currents powering it.

Liberal societies are characterized by openness, transparency, and individual agency. But the design and deployment of powerful AI systems are the precise inverse.

In the United States, as in any country, those who control the airwaves, steer financial institutions, and command the military have long had a wide berth to make decisions that shape society. In the new century, another set of actors joins that list: the increasingly concentrated group of corporate players who control data, algorithms, and the processing infrastructure to make and use highly capable AI systems. But without the kind of robust oversight the government prescribes over other parts of the economy and the military, the systems these players produce lack transparency and public accountability.

The U.S. foreign-policy establishment has long voiced legitimate concerns about the use of technology by authoritarian regimes, such as China’s widespread surveillance, tracking, and control of its population through deep collusion between the state and corporations. Civil society, academics, and journalists have recognized the threat of those same tools being deployed to similar ends in the United States. At the same time, many of today’s AI systems are undermining the liberal character of American society: They run over civil rights and liberties and cause harm for which people cannot easily seek redress. They violate privacy, spread falsehoods, and obscure economic crimes such as price-fixing, fraud, and deception. And they are increasingly used—without an architecture of accountability—in institutions central to American life: the workplace, policing, the legal system, public services, schools, and hospitals.

All of this makes for a less democratic American society. In cities across the United States, people of color have been arrested and jailed after being misidentified by facial recognition tools. We’ve seen AI used in loan refinancing charge more to applicants who went to historically Black colleges. An AI program aimed at preventing suicide among veterans prioritizes white men and overlooks survivors of sexual violence, who are much more likely to be women. Hidden behind computer code, illegal and unfair treatment long banned under federal law is becoming harder to detect and to contest.

To global observers, the trendlines of AI in American society will look familiar; the worst harms of these systems mirror the tenets of what has been called “illiberal democracy.” Under that vision—championed most famously by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a darling of the U.S. right—a society “maintains the outward appearances of a democracy … but in fact seeks to undermine all the institutions and norms that give democracy meaning,” scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman wrote in 2021. This doesn’t have to look like canceling elections or dismantling a sitting legislative body; instead, the vision takes the form of a more subtle assault—foreclosing the ability of individuals and minority groups to assert their rights.

As powerful new AI products are born and come of age amid a growing political alliance between far-right ideologues and some of the most powerful leaders in the technology industry, these foundational threats to free society could accelerate. Elon Musk, amplifying alarmist narratives on migrants and dehumanizing language about women and LGBT people, has said he would serve in a potential second Trump administration. Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, a growing cadre of venture capitalists are boldly betting the house on Trump in the belief that their portfolios—brimming with crypto and AI bets—may be better off under a president who is unfazed by harms to the most vulnerable and who challenges the exercise of fundamental rights.

Simply studying these tools and their effects on society can prove difficult: Scientific research into these systems is dominated by profit-motivated private actors, the only people who have access to the largest and most powerful models. The systems in question are primarily closed-source and proprietary, meaning that external researcher access—a basic starting point for transparency—is blocked. Employees at AI companies have been forced to sign sweeping nondisclosure agreements, including those about product safety, or risk losing equity. All the while, executives suggest that understanding precisely how these systems make decisions, including in ways that affect people’s lives, is something of luxury, a dilemma to be addressed sometime in the future.

The real problem, of course, is that AI is being deployed now, without public accountability. No citizenry has elected these companies or their leaders. Yet executives helming today’s big AI firms have sought to assure the public that we should trust them. In February, at least 20 firms signed a pledge to flag AI-generated videos and take down content meant to mislead voters. Soon after, OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, launched a $2 million Societal Resilience Fund focused on educating voters about AI. The companies point to this work as core to their missions, which imagine a world where AI “benefits all of humanity” or “helps people and society flourish.”

Tech companies have repeatedly promised to govern themselves for the public good—efforts that may begin with good intentions but fall apart under the pressure of a business case. Congress has had no shortage of opportunities over the last 15 years to step in to govern data-centric technologies in the public’s interest. But each time Washington has cracked open the door to meaningful technology governance, it has quickly slammed it shut. Federal policymakers have explored reactive and well-meaning but flawed efforts to assert governance in specific domains—for example, during moments of attention to teen mental health or election interference. But these efforts have faded as public attention moved elsewhere. Exposed in this story of false starts and political theatrics is the federal government’s default posture on technology: to react to crises but fail to address the root causes.

Even following well-reported revelations, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, no legislation has emerged to rein in the technology sector’s failure to build products that prioritize Americans’ security, safety, and rights—not to mention the integrity of U.S. democracy. The same story has unfolded in the doomed push to achieve data privacy laws, efforts that have stalled out in committee ad infinitum, leaving Americans without the basic protections for their personal information that are enjoyed by people living in 137 other countries.

The Biden-Harris administration decided to push harder, through initiatives we worked both directly and indirectly on. Even before ChatGPT vaulted AI to the center of the national discourse in November 2022, President Joe Biden’s White House released an AI Bill of Rights proposing five key assurances all Americans should be able to hold in an AI-powered world: that AI technologies are safe, fair, and protective of their privacy; that they are made aware when systems are being used to make decisions about them; and that they can opt out. The framework was a proactive, democratic vision for the use of advanced technology in American society.

The vision has proved durable. When generative AI hit the consumer market, driving both anxiety and excitement, Biden didn’t start from scratch but from a set of clear and affirmative first principles. Pulling from the 2022 document, his 2023 executive order on AI mandated a coordinated federal response to AI, using a “rights and safety” framework. New rules from the powerful Office of Management and Budget turned those principles into binding policy, requiring federal agencies to test AI systems for their impact on Americans’ rights and safety before they could be used. At the same time, federal enforcement agencies used their existing powers to enforce protections and combat violations in the digital environment. The Federal Trade Commission stepped up its enforcement of digital-era violations of well-established antitrust laws, putting AI companies on notice for potentially unfair and deceptive practices that harm consumers. Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the launch of a new AI Safety Institute, calling for a body that addressed a “full spectrum” of risks, including both longer-term speculative risks and current documented harms.

This was a consequential paradigm shift from America’s steady state of passive technology nongovernance—proof-positive that a more proactive approach was possible. Yet these steps face a range of structural limitations. One is capacity: Agencies across the federal government carrying out the work of AI governance will need staff with sociotechnical expertise to weigh the complex trade-offs of AI’s harms and opportunities.

Another challenge is the limited reach of executive action. Donald Trump has promised to repeal the AI executive order and gut the civil service tasked with its implementation. If his first term is any indication, a Republican administration would reinstate the deregulatory status quo. Such is the spirit of plans reportedly drawn up by Larry Kudlow, Trump’s former National Economic Council director, to create “industry-led” task forces, placing responsibility for assessing AI tools’ safety into the hands of the powerful industry players who design and sell them.

And Biden’s measures, for the most part, guide only the government’s own use of AI systems. This is a valuable and necessary step, as the behavior of agencies bears on the daily lives of Americans, particularly the most vulnerable. But the effects of executive actions on the private sector are circumscribed, related to pockets of executive authority such as government contracting, civil rights enforcement, or antitrust action. A president’s pen alone cannot create a robust or dynamic accountability infrastructure for the technology industry. Nor can we rely on agencies to hold the line; recent Supreme Court decisions—Loper Bright, Corner Post, and others—have weakened their authority to use their mandated powers to adapt to new developments.

This, of course, is the more fundamental shortcoming of Biden’s progress on AI and technology governance: It does not carry the force of legislation. Without an accompanying push in Congress to counter such proposed rollbacks with new law, the United States will continue to embrace a largely ungoverned, innovation-at-all-costs technology landscape, with disparate state laws as the primary bulwark—and will continue to see the drift of emerging technologies away from the norms of robust democratic practice.

Yet meaningful governance efforts may be dead on arrival in a Congress that continues to embrace the flawed argument that without carte blanche for companies to “move fast and break things,” the United States would be doomed to lose to China, on both economic and military fronts. Such an approach cedes the AI competition to China’s terms, playing on the field of Chinese human rights violations and widespread surveillance instead of the field of American values and democratic practice. It also surrenders the U.S. security edge, enabling systems that could break or fail at any moment because they were rushed to market in the name of great-power competition.

Pursuing meaningful AI governance is a choice. So is the decision, over decades, to leave powerful data-centric technologies ungoverned—a decision to allow an assault on the rights, freedoms, and opportunities of many in American society. There is another path.

Washington has the opportunity to build a new, enduring paradigm in which the governance of data-centric predictive technologies, as well as the industry that creates them, is a core component of a robust U.S. democracy.

We must waste no time reaffirming that the protections afforded by previous generations of laws also apply to emerging technology. For the executive branch, this will require a landmark effort to ensure protections are robustly enforced in the digital sphere, expanding enforcement capacity in federal agencies with civil rights offices and enforcement mandates and keeping up the antitrust drumbeat that has put anti-competitive actors on notice.

The most consequential responsibility for AI governance, though, rests with Congress. Across the country, states are moving to pass laws on AI, many of which will contradict one another and form an overlapping legal tangle. Federal lawmakers should act in the tradition of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, issuing blanket protections for all Americans. At a minimum, this should include a new liability regime and guarantee protection from algorithmic discrimination; mandate pre- and post-deployment testing, transparency, and explainability of AI systems; and a requirement for developers of AI systems to uphold a duty of care, with the responsibility to ensure that systems are safe and effective.

These AI systems are powered by data, so such a bill should be accompanied by comprehensive data privacy protections, including a robust embrace of data minimization, barring companies from using personal information collected for one purpose in order to achieve an unrelated end.

While only a start, these steps to protect democratic practice in the age of AI would herald the end of America’s permissive approach to the technology sector’s harms and mark the beginning of a new democratic paradigm. They should be followed forcefully by a separate but complementary project: ensuring that individuals and communities participate in deciding how AI is used in their lives—and how it is not. Most critically, more workers—once called America’s “arsenal of democracy”—must organize and wield their collective power to bargain over whether, when, and how technologies are used in the workplace.

Such protections must also extend beyond the workplace into other areas of daily life where technology is used to shape important decisions. At a moment of weakening democratic norms, we need a new, concerted campaign to ease the path for anyone to challenge unfair decisions made about them by ungoverned AI systems or opt out of AI systems’ use altogether. This must include a private right of action for ordinary people who can show that AI has been used to break the law or violate their rights. We must also open additional pathways to individual and collective contestation, including robust, well-resourced networks of legal aid centers trained in representing low-income clients experiencing algorithmic harms.

We can bring many more people into the process of deciding what kinds of problems powerful AI systems are used to solve, from the way we allocate capital to the way we conduct AI research and development. Closing this gap requires allowing people across society to use AI for issues that matter to them and their communities. The federal government’s program to scale up access to public research, computing power, and data infrastructure is still only a pilot, and Congress has proposed to fund it at only $2.6 billion in its first six years. To grasp that number’s insufficiency, one needed only to listen to Google’s spring earnings call, where investors heard that the tech giant planned to spend about $12 billion on AI development per quarter. Next, the U.S. government should invest in the human and tech infrastructures of “public AI,” to provide both a sandbox for applied innovation in the public interest and a countervailing force to the concentration of economic and agenda-setting power in the AI industry.

These are some of the measures the United States can undertake to govern these new technologies. Even in an administration that broadly supports these goals, however, none of this will be possible or politically viable without a change in the overall balance of power. A broad-based, well-funded, and well-organized political movement on technology policy issues is needed to dramatically expand the coalition of people interested and invested in technology governance in the United States.

Ushering in these reforms begins with telling different stories to help people recognize their stake in these issues and understand that AI tools directly impact their access to quality housing, education, health care, and economic opportunity. This awareness must ultimately translate to pressure on lawmakers, a tool those standing in the way of a democratic vision for AI use to great effect. Musk is reportedly bankrolling a pro-Trump super PAC to the tune of tens of millions per month. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm led by anti-regulation founders, increased its lobbying budget between the first and second quarter of this year by 135 percent. Not only are the big corporate tech players spending millions of dollars on lobbying per quarter, but each is also running a political operation, spending big money to elect political candidates who will look after their interests.

The academic, research, and civil society actors whose work has helped change the tech policy landscape have succeeded in building strong policy and research strategies. Now is the time to venture further into the political battlefield and prepare the next generation of researchers, policy experts, and advocates to take up the baton. This will require new tools, such as base-building efforts with groups across the country that can help tie technology governance to popular public issues, and generational investments in political action committees and lobbying. This shift in strategy will require new, significant money; philanthropic funders who have traditionally backed research and nonprofit advocacy will need to also embrace an explicitly political toolkit.

The public interest technology movement urgently needs a political architecture that can at last impose a political cost on lawmakers who allow the illiberal shift of technology companies to proceed unabated. In the age of AI, the viability of efforts to protect democratic representation, practice, and norms may well hinge on the force with which non-industry players choose to fund and build political power—and leverage it.

A choice confronts the United States as we face down AI’s threats to democratic practice, representation, and norms. We can default to passivity, or we can use these instruments to shape a free society for the modern era. The decision is ours to make.

[kemetic-dreams]

Political motivations

Two years after the Civil War ended, Congress overrode a veto from President Andrew Johnson to pass the Reconstruction Act of 1867. The law required former Confederate states to provide universal voting rights for all men. African men in the South voted for the first time, and African politicians soon held large shares of legislative seats in South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida.

The Ku Klux Klan responded with systematic, violent intimidation of African Americans, including lynchings specifically meant to deter voting, Williams finds. The klan killed more than 2,000 African people in 1868 in Louisiana alone, according to the paper.

“It’s hard to get rid of that trauma, and it does span generation to generation,” Williams says.

Few, if any, of the thousands of lynchings carried out from 1882 to 1930 were criminally prosecuted, and past research has demonstrated lynchings suppressed African voter turnout in the months leading to an election.

“We think of racial domination as social practices, like segregation and racial violence, being about intimidation in the social sphere,” says Ohio State University economics professor Trevon Logan, who was not involved in Williams’ analysis but provided feedback as she developed her research. “But there always has been a very pertinent political end to the story of racialized violence.”

Some states are restricting voting, others are expanding it

Williams’ paper reveals how violence from decades past affects current voting patterns at the same time states have passed or are considering laws to restrict voting.

In March, the Georgia legislature attracted news coverage when it passed a law making it harder to vote absentee. Georgia counties can now limit early voting on Sundays ahead of an election — a move critics contend targets “souls to the polls” get-out-the-vote efforts at African churches. The law does require that counties hold two Saturday advance voting sessions for general elections.

Republican lawmakers in Ohio have proposed legislation that would restrict mail ballots for most voters there and ban drop box voting. At least 18 states have passed laws restricting voting this year, while 25 states have expanded voting access through mail ballots and other measures, according to a tally by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

At the federal level, the House of Representatives last week passed voting rights legislation that would restore provisions the Supreme Court stripped in recent years from the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Most notably, the court in 2013 ruled that states could change their voting laws without federal approval. At the time of the ruling, Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and select counties in other states were subject to federal oversight because of historical evidence of racial discrimination in voting access.

The lingering effects of violence from decades ago are “a huge factor, and why African people in particular are not voting,” Williams says. “So now, when we add legislation to make it more difficult to vote, to me that is why it’s really important. Do we want to have a healthy electorate or not? When we have a healthy electorate, we have policies that represent everyone.”

Historical events ripple through time: A growing body of research

To conduct her analysis, Williams used data from the Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, which covers 1882 to 1930. She also used voter registration rolls from 2000 to 2012, and other academic and government data.

Williams focused on the historical lynching rate per 10,000 African Americans during that roughly half century across 267 counties in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and South Carolina. She analyzed those states because they ask voters to identify their race when registering.

“In a place like Lafayette County, Florida, there were eight lynchings during those years,” Williams explains in a 2020 video for the Economic Policy Institute, where she was an economist before joining RAND. “This means for every 1,000 African people, one of them was lynched. Today, the African voter registration rate is about 15% in that county. If those people hadn’t been killed, you would expect to see a African voter registration rate of 55%.”

The relationship between historical lynchings and voter registration today that holds for African voters doesn’t show for white voters.

“Further analyses suggest that this result is unlikely to be driven by education, earnings, incarceration rates of Africans, institutions that remained after slavery, geographic sorting, or contemporary barriers to voting,” Williams writes. Her forthcoming paper adds to a growing body of research investigating how violence and legislation from decades ago reverberates today.

Michigan State University economics and international relations professor Lisa Cook has found that violence in the decades after Reconstruction suppressed the patent output of African inventors, writing that a “lynching signaled that personal security — and with it the freedom to work and innovate — was not guaranteed.”

Princeton University economics professor Ellora Derenoncourt, along with University of California, Berkeley economics professor Claire Montialoux, have shown how a minimum wage expansion in 1966 narrowed the earnings gap between African and European workers throughout the 1970s.

Logan, the Ohio State professor, has linked higher taxes during Reconstruction — when the American South was decimated and needed funding to rebuild — with more violence against African officeholders. Referring to Williams’ current work, Logan says: “This is not something I think a traditional economic historian would address. It speaks to the need to have diverse voices in the profession.”

[feelingbluepolitics]

An Ethical AI-generated Prompt Sheet for Those Thanksgiving Conversations

*based on a neutral question

Question:

On issues relevant in our politics right now, which political platform is more beneficial to us, Democrat or Republicon, and why?

Response:

Analyzing the two major U.S. political platforms—Democrat and Republican—requires a clear, issue-by-issue comparison based on policies and their likely impacts on society. Below is an overview of how each party approaches the listed issues and which platform tends to benefit the majority of Americans, based on available evidence and historical actions.

1. Climate Change and Energy

• Democrats: Support renewable energy investment, international climate agreements (e.g., Paris Accord), and regulations on emissions.

• Benefit: Reduces long-term environmental risks and creates clean energy jobs.

• Republicans: Focus on deregulating fossil fuels, questioning climate science, and prioritizing short-term energy independence through oil and gas.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Climate science overwhelmingly shows the urgency of reducing emissions to prevent global warming and its catastrophic effects.

2. Wealth Inequality

• Democrats: Advocate for higher taxes on the wealthy, expanding social safety nets, and raising the minimum wage.

• Benefit: Promotes economic fairness and reduces poverty rates.

• Republicans: Favor tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, arguing it boosts economic growth (“trickle-down economics”).

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Data shows tax cuts for the wealthy primarily widen inequality, while social programs reduce economic disparity.

3. Reproductive Rights

• Democrats: Support access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive healthcare.

• Benefit: Empowers individuals to make personal medical decisions, reducing maternal mortality rates.

• Republicans: Advocate for restricting or banning abortion, often without exceptions for rape or incest.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Restricting abortion leads to unsafe procedures and worsens healthcare outcomes for women.

4. Healthcare Access

• Democrats: Push for expanding Medicaid, lowering drug costs, and supporting universal healthcare.

• Benefit: Reduces the number of uninsured Americans and improves public health.

• Republicans: Seek to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and reduce government involvement in healthcare.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Expanding access improves health outcomes, while Republican policies risk leaving millions uninsured.

5. Gun Violence

• Democrats: Advocate for universal background checks, assault weapon bans, and red flag laws.

• Benefit: Reduces gun deaths and mass shootings, according to studies from countries with similar laws.

• Republicans: Oppose gun control measures, emphasizing Second Amendment rights.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Data consistently shows that stricter gun laws correlate with lower rates of gun violence.

6. Education and Student Debt

• Democrats: Propose reducing student loan debt, increasing public education funding, and making college more affordable.

• Benefit: Expands access to education, which drives economic mobility.

• Republicans: Support school choice, privatization, and reducing federal involvement in education.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Underfunded public schools and high student debt hinder social mobility, which Democrats address more effectively.

7. Voting Rights

• Democrats: Work to expand voting access through early voting, mail-in ballots, and combating voter suppression.

• Benefit: Increases voter turnout and strengthens democracy.

• Republicans: Focus on voter ID laws, restricting voting methods, and questioning election integrity.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Voting restrictions disproportionately harm marginalized groups and undermine democratic participation.

8. Judicial Integrity

• Democrats: Push for judicial appointments that preserve civil rights, voting rights, and environmental protections.

• Benefit: Ensures balanced courts that reflect public values.

• Republicans: Focus on appointing conservative judges, often with corporate or religious biases.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Progressive judicial rulings better protect individual freedoms and minority rights.

9. Media and Information Integrity

• Democrats: Support policies to combat disinformation and promote media literacy.

• Benefit: Encourages informed citizenry and accountability for platforms spreading falsehoods.

• Republicans: Often align with narratives undermining trust in mainstream media and fact-checking.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Misinformation destabilizes democracy, making this issue critical.

10. Immigration

• Democrats: Advocate for comprehensive immigration reform, including pathways to citizenship and humane treatment of migrants.

• Benefit: Bolsters the economy, addresses labor shortages, and upholds human rights.

• Republicans: Emphasize border security, including walls and mass deportations, often framing immigration as a threat.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Immigrants contribute significantly to the economy, and humane policies align with democratic values.

11. Corporate Accountability

• Democrats: Push for stronger regulations on corporations, including anti-trust actions and environmental accountability.

• Benefit: Prevents corporate abuse and ensures fair competition.

• Republicans: Advocate for deregulation and reducing corporate taxes.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: History shows unchecked corporations exploit workers and the environment.

12. Digital Privacy and AI

• Democrats: Support regulating tech companies and protecting digital privacy.

• Benefit: Balances innovation with individual rights.

• Republicans: Often resist regulation, favoring corporate interests.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Without regulations, tech monopolies and privacy violations harm consumers.

13. Infrastructure and Transportation

• Democrats: Invest in public transit, green infrastructure, and broadband expansion.

• Benefit: Improves quality of life and creates jobs.

• Republicans: Focus on traditional infrastructure projects but resist spending on green initiatives.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Comprehensive infrastructure plans address future needs.

14. Military Spending vs. Human Needs

• Democrats: Aim to reduce excessive military budgets and redirect funds toward healthcare, education, and climate action.

• Benefit: Balances security with societal well-being.

• Republicans: Advocate for high military spending, often at the expense of domestic programs.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Excessive military budgets often neglect urgent domestic priorities.

15. Food Security and Safety

• Democrats: Support sustainable farming, SNAP benefits, and food safety regulations.

• Benefit: Addresses hunger while ensuring food safety.

• Republicans: Focus on reducing regulations and cutting food assistance programs.

• Why Democrats are more beneficial: Robust food programs and safety regulations are vital for public health.

This analysis generally favors the Democratic platform across these issues, as it aligns more closely with data-supported policies that prioritize equity, sustainability, and public welfare.

[captainjonnitkessler]

a vote for a candidate is an endorsement of that candidate and they will correctly view it as such. if you keep voting for that candidate no matter what they do because the alternative is worse, they will have no motivation to change what they're doing

I disagree that a vote is an endorsement but I think you're right that they will view it as one, which is why the vast, vast majority of the work needs to be done between elections. It's voting in primaries, educating and talking to your friends and family about important issues, voting in local elections, campaigning for politicians you actually do endorse, etc. By the time an election year rolls around your time for getting a better candidate is up - the only thing you can do is choose the best of the two options you have.

The problem with using this reasoning to conclude that you shouldn't vote in any election where you don't endorse any candidate is twofold:

They might view a vote as an endorsement, but they don't view a lack of vote as an indictment. Young leftists, the people most likely to be pro-Palestine, have historically voted in much smaller numbers than other demographics. Young leftists withholding their votes isn't going to make Democrats think they need to move left, it's going to make them think they need to work even harder to court the centrists because at least they actually show up to the polls, and they're more likely to vote Republican if they're unhappy, making their loss a double whammy. And most older centrist Democrats support Israel. It's not in Biden's best political interest to risk losing those voters to try to court a group who historically never votes anyway. Basically - if leftists had enough numbers to make withholding our votes worth it, we'd have enough numbers to just vote in a better candidate to begin with.

2. Even if we were to grant that withholding our votes would push the Democrat party left, that comes at the cost of four more years of Republican rule. Only you can decide if that would be morally worth it. But in my view, four years of increased support to Israel and the possibility of the American military getting involved in the genocide, increasingly violent legislation against queer people in America, conservative federal judges appointed across the board, and repeals of all the progress we've made on the climate change and labor fronts is not worth the possibility that Democrats could maybe be pushed a little to the left.

And that's setting aside the fact that Republicans are pretty openly announcing their intent to dismantle the federal government to force it to serve conservative interests. I'm hoping they can't actually accomplish that, but having a more progressive Democratic party four years from now isn't going to help much if Republicans get free rein to lock in voter suppression and gerrymandering tactics and stack the courts with Republican judges in the meantime.