#what do you mean purging voter rolls

[timmie-p]

hey guys what tf is wrong with usamerican voting

[witheredgardenparty]

I will never forgive a single one of you

[tanadrin]

I feel like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm convinced the GOP cheated by disenfranchising enough voters to win. Not just in swing states. The margins in every state are weird. A few thousand votes here and there across every county. The huge number of split ticket votes. The sudden loss of 12 million democratic voters despite record early voting turnout and voter registration?

It doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense.

So many people who had confirmation of their ballot being received and accepted are now finding out that they were unregistered or there was a "problem" with it.

They were saying for months that they didn't need anyone's vote. The betting market manipulation. The billionaire backers. Elon Musk's grubby hands all over the election.

They did steal the election. And we'll probably never find out how.

in the broad sense, yes, american elections should be fairer, and the franchise should be more universal. in the narrow sense--this is cope. purges of voter rolls happen in public. there's litigation on them all the time. a purge of 12 million voters from voter roles would not have gone unnoticed. to account for all these factors you would need an improbably large conspiracy. (stealing elections in the united states would be hard. each state administers its own elections! you'd have to steal 50 elections. and once again, this would be a case of someone rigging the presidential election and forgetting to rig any of the downballot races, which would be stupid.) including a conspiracy to rig most polling, given the outcome was within the margin of error of most polling averages for this election.

i get why it's the preferable scenario--people aren't dumb! my opponents are just evil! there's some optimism in that--but "i personally do not understand how this outcome could have occurred" does not mean it was a conspiracy.

So many people who had confirmation of their ballot being received and accepted are now finding out that they were unregistered or there was a "problem" with it.

this is normal and you typically have several days after the election to amend your ballot if there was a problem with it. if you do, it still counts. fun word problem time: if ~150 million people vote in an election, and 0.001% post on twitter about how they needed to amend their ballot (especially in non-swing states), how many twitter posts in a row do you have to see to convince yourself there is a ~conspiracy~ afoot?

fun second word problem: out of seven swing states, how many were governed by the opposing party or someone who had publicly opposed donald trump's election subversion attempts in 2020?

fun third word problem: do you know how elections in your state work? do you know which state official is in charge of administering them, and their party affiliation? do you know what the margins of downballot races like house and senate in your state were this election, and their relative swing from 2020? in short, do you know in detail how elections in the US work and what "typical" voting patterns look like, or are you just going off of vibes from a vaguely paranoid local bubble in social media?

[embracetheshipping]

IMPORTANT VOTING INFORMATION

Now more than ever, it is important to make sure that you are registered to vote and that you fully understand all the requirements for in-person, mail-in, and absentee voting. Double check your registration OFTEN to make sure nothing has changed. Don't give Republicans ANY reason to disqualify your vote.

The video below explains some concerning trends happening in swing states. And while her point about the Montana and Oklahoma issues may not be as nefarious as projected (there are articles online saying the issue in Montana was a glitch and the Oklahoma purge has been ongoing by independent auditors), the other ones are more credible as deliberate attempts to suppress voters.

Regardless, it is in your best interest to make sure you are fully informed of what is going on regarding voter registration and laws in your state.

Transcript:

So Trump is now saying he doesn’t want a second debate with VP Harris. And you could say that’s because he got shellacked in the first one and doesn’t want to embarrass himself again, but I think something more nefarious is going on.

Trump is not campaigning in swing states. He’s not trying to sway new voters. And he keeps going around saying he doesn’t even “need votes”, that they “have all the votes they need”. In fact, he just did an interview with Fox News where he said he “wouldn’t run in 2028 if he loses”, but then he said, “Let’s just hope we’re successful in this one.” Not, “Let’s hope we win this one,” “Let’s hope we’re successful.”

People should think it’s weird that Republicans don’t seem to care about how bad their candidate is. That they don’t seem to care that Project 2025 came out, and we can all read for ourselves how awful their plans for America are. And it’s weird that so many swing states are suddenly changing their election laws and purging voters, or making it harder to vote, or count the votes just weeks before the election.

Look at what’s going on around the country. The Secretary of State of Montana just “accidentally” left Kamala Harris’s name off the absentee ballot. They sent the ballots out to absentee voters without VP Harris’s name on it.

The Texas Tribune just announced that Texas officials have absolutely scrubbed their voter rolls, and people should go out and check it they’re still eligible to vote.

Oklahoma purged 450,000 people from the voter registration list last week. That is one-fifth of their state’s voters who have to re-register seven weeks before the election.

Georgia’s GOP Board of Elections just passed a whole slew of new rules, including the biggest one being that they have to hand count every ballot. But they already have a rule that says they can’t start counting ballots until Election Day. So counting 5.5 million votes is going to require a lot of time and a lot of staff that many local jurisdictions in Georgia simply don’t have. So when the votes can’t be counted on time, that’s going to give space for the MAGA lawyers to come in and claim the election is defaulted or fraudulent , and kick the entire election back to the state House, or subsequently, the whole state misses the deadline to certify the Electoral College votes, and they either don’t send electors from Georgia at all, or they potentially pick their own alternative slate.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court just said that all mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have to have the “correct handwritten date on the outside of the envelope, or the vote inside won’t count.” I mean, sure, check to see if your envelope is dated correctly, but why would the handwritten date on the outside of the envelope disqualify the vote inside? Doesn’t it have to be postmarked and / or received by an official agency before even being opened?

Republicans even tried to change the rules in Nebraska for how electoral counts would be awarded less than 50 days before the election.

You have to ask yourself, “what are they doing?” And why do they keep accusing Democrats of trying to cheat? Talk about projection. This is the same party that was pushing for the SAFE Act in Congress and threatening to shut down the government if they didn’t get it. Their claim, which luckily, we have currently moved on from, is that they were just making sure every voter was an American citizen, which of course is important. But it has never been a real problem, no matter what Republican propaganda tells us. But they conveniently forget to mention that the SAFE Act also said, if you didn’t have a passport, something that fifty percent of the population doesn’t have, then your birth certificate had to match your ID. Which of course, would be impossible for say, any married woman who took her husband’s name. And there are lots of people who say, “So just use your marriage certificate to prove that you changed your name,” but the SAFE Act says absolutely nothing about your marriage certificate or license to count as ID, and it takes time to find that document and submit it and process it when we only have weeks before the election.

We need to be incredibly clear. The Republicans were looking to outright disenfranchise the women of America, Republican and Democratic women of all ages, I might add. And it’s not just women they’re looking to disenfranchise, because while the gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson’s scandals have been sucking up all the air in North Carolina, the RNC was quietly trying to block the UNC students from voting. But they recently lost that lawsuit.

If you have to keep changing the laws to get elected, you’re not winning elections. You’re sabotaging elections. The whole thing reminds me of that quote by the Russian communist leader Joseph Stalin, who said, “The people who cast the votes don’t decide the election, the people who count the votes do.”

So look around at what’s happening in America right now. The Republicans aren’t trying to win. They’re trying to make sure the Democrats can’t win. And while that should freak you out, I sincerely hope it also inspires you to get your friends and family out the polls and vote wholeheartedly against this kind of behavior.

[saingirl101]

Something for people online on any site to keep in mind as we get close to Nov and US elections is to be mindful of PSYOPs

Its been well documented for a long long time that several groups ranging from foreign governments to racist billionaires try to influence other countries elections particularly through social media.

Here are a few good rules of thumb as you peruse social media.

• Fact check sources. Often times if a claim seems outlandish, terrifying, or is designed to get you angry verify its legitimacy. This can be done through fact checking websites or independent media sources.

• Only register or verify your voter registration through your state governments election site. Some states may have differing laws but one scam we saw musk on twitter do was create a false registration site. To keep your information private from third parties only use your state government website. Also actively check your voter registration status as many states are either purging or threatening to purge voter rolls.

• Ignore polls. Its very easy for junk polls to be pushed in social media particularly by right-wing groups (we saw this in 2022) and they are actively attempting to demoralize you. Tune it out. Polls don't vote, people vote. And not a single vote has been cast yet.

• In a similar vein above avoid doomscrolling. Blocking is your friend. If you see a troll or bot, report, block, and move on. Don't actively look for upsetting news. First off seeing point 1 a lot of it isn't true and contributes to demoralization. It doesn't help to over-analyze something being pushed by a bot specifically to upset you.

• If you aren't certain about a candidate's position on something fact check or look for their policy page. A lot of stuff gets spread on social media smearing candidates on an issue they may have an opposite viewpoint on. Again partly a tactic to demoralize voters.

• Keep positive, calm, and vote. At the end of the day regardless of where you vote, your vote matters. Whether it is as a presidential level or any the local level you have a chance to influence the nation, state, or your community's direction and that matters. And no one has a say in what you do with your vote at the ballot box.

• Finally when you see friends, family, co-workers, followers, and etc. post biased or false social media reach out to them and help set things straight. Obviously some people will resist you but a lot of the time people are well meaning and repost/reblog something incorrect.

Reminder to check your states voter registration deadlines, vote early, and help GOTV in other ways. lets do this.

[whilomm]

U.S. election voting tips for anyone who hasn't done this before (or just doesnt know this stuff)

Figured a post like this might be useful, and if you agree I would appreciate a reblog. I'll block anyone doing vote-shaming shit though, cause once again yelling at people isnt the best tool for encouraging voter participation. I tried to make it readable but long post of course, sorry about that. brevity may be the soul of wit but I am a fucking fool and I have so many words to say.

caveats:

I'm gonna do my best to note when local laws might be diff, but just in gen election laws vary a LOT state by state, even county by county. when in doubt, check your local laws, cause this shits confusing as hell sometimes

obviously this is about ya kno. U.S. elections and U.S. laws.

Doing my best, but in case I get deets wrong, please correct me in the comments, and readers please check the comments for corrections. I'll update the OG post if theres anything MAJOR so you can reblog the corrected version if needed.

First things first: get your shit in order.

Does your state/county/area have a good elections website? check it out, sometimes its easier to look info up there than on the general nationwide sites, and itll give county specific information. just google like, "[county] elections", "[city] elections". Sometimes its its own website, sometimes its under the county clerk or something, and the quality of the site will probs depend on ya kno. the size of your county, how much they invest in it, etc. I'm sure some of them Suck Ass. Here's my county's for ref, its p good.

Are you registered to vote? Check. Even if you've registered before, its good to double check occasionally in case your info is out of date, or in case theres been a purge of voting rolls.

When is the registration deadline in your area? Look it up and get it done BEFORE then!

Have you moved recently? Reregister. Your address affects what's on your ballot, and if it was a big move (like across cities/counties), you might not be ABLE to vote where you are now, at least not without driving all the way back to wherever you're registered.

College student? You can either be registered to vote back home or at college. If you're studying in california but home is in texas for example, you can either register to vote in california, or keep your texas voting address, but not both! Registering to vote locally is the easier option since you can just vote like normal, while staying registered at home means you either have to go back home to vote, or vote absentee. Not too bad if homes an hour away and its just an excuse to visit anyway, lil bit more complicated if it's several states away. Your call, but if you choose to stay registered at home, either make travel plans or get your absentee ballot stuff done EARLY. like, look it up NOW what the deadlines are, which vary state by state. go do it. And remember, absentee ballots take time to mail.

Check what your voting options are. If you wanna vote by mail for example, check if you meet the requirements. Some states make it easy as hell (or make it the main/only voting method), others make it. a pain. a real goddamn pain. Figure out what your situation is.

Check if you need to vote at a specific polling place, or if you can vote anywhere in the area. I can vote anywhere in the city so i just choose whatever is closest/least busy/beside a good boba spot, but some areas have assigned polling places where you have to go to that specific one. If you go to the wrong polling place, you can't vote. Don't waste time in line at the wrong place.

Check if early voting is an option. If it is, and provided its an option for you (good locations/dates), trust me. do it. The lines are so much shorter, and its a lot easier to go on my day off cause I got a week and a half to choose when to go. But it ain't a thing everywhere, and some places make it difficult (weird hours, weird locations, etc) so your mileage may vary of course.

Ready to vote? Cool. Now, research BEFORE you get into the booth, and maybe bring written notes with you.

"Oh, well, I just plan on voting straight ticker ya kno. anyone with a D next to their name..."

Yeah, that works for partisan races, but it aint gonna work for nonpartisan races and ballot measures.

First, nonpartisan races

These are races where the candidates do NOT have their political party noted, because well. its nonpartisan! no parties! This often applies to school board elections, sheriffs, judges, and other stuff. that means you dont get a helpful little letter to tell you who to vote for nothing but a name, and if you'll have to research to find out what their views are. This can be. Annoying on occasion. Sometimes these races have a lotta coverage, candidates with websites, endorsements, and sometimes theyre just fucking. Yeah no you just get names p much good luck 👍.

Whether or not you can look this info up in the booth depends on your area. In Texas for example, you can't get your phone out in the booth at ALL. I mean, technically the law makes it sound like you can't even have a phone within 100 feet of a polling station, but. well. I've never seen them do searches. Still, if you get stuck in the booth staring at the names, tough luck kid. Maybe if you ask theyll let you leave and come back? idk! I've never asked! But you know whats easier than that? looking up info beforehand, and writing down all those names

When looking up candidate info, make sure you keep an eye out for dogwhistles. Sometimes you only get a couple of sentences of info about a candidate for a school board election, but if those sentences mention "family values", "protecting the children", "critical race theory", "parent's rights", etc. well. you know they probably got some rightwing politics going on. Probably don't vote for them unless you want even MORE book bans. I feel like judges and sheriffs are usually easier to get more detailed info on, but again, look for dogwhistles, and if available, look at their records.

Propositions and Ballot Measures

Sometimes, elections include you getting to vote on stuff DIRECTLY, rather than you know. The people you elected deciding everything. Sometimes these are relatively boring (but oftentimes still important) stuff like taxes and whatnot, sometimes theyre Major Ass Measures (like states literally putting abortion rights to a vote), and sometimes they LOOK boring on the surface but wooo boy, look a lil deeper and this shit is spicey.

The problem though? Well, a lotta these things are written to be confusing as hell. Sometimes this is just because its aforementioned boring (but important) tax stuff and you just have no idea what any of this means, other times its because the measures are deliberately written in a confusing manner to obfuscate what you're REALLY voting on. At least where I am, on the ballot itself you only get to see a the name of the measure and a quick paragraph explaining it, so there can be a LOT of shit hidden in the actual official text of the act.

theres lots of ways they do this, but a few major things:

Giving the measure a confusing name. "shelter animal welfare act". Well, that sounds nice! you like animals, and the welfare thereof! But you look a lil closer, and find out that the main thing the act will ACTUALLY do is shut down/defund shelters because they arent "meeting standards", which the act deliberately sets waaay too high, cause the goal of the act is actually to just. save a few bucks by diverting money away from shelters.

The actual wording of the prop being confusing. You read the little blurb beneath it, and it talks about beautifying parks to increase visitors. Cool! but uh, turns out that means selling it off to private investors who plan on developing those boring natural areas into a cool new concert venue, charge admission, and oh turns out its gonna ruin the habitat for an endangered salamander species. (Like, not that outdoor concert areas cant be cool, but not in the salamander habitat man. fuck off.)

deliberately making it confusing what voting "for" or "against" mean. Like. Okay, am i voting yes to NOT allow them to sell off the salamander habitat?? am i voting NO to not block the sale?? or is it the other way around?? what the fuck man. cant even read this shit my god.

having multiple similar sounding propositions which are actually Very Different. Happened here in austin recently, we had two "police reform acts", both with very similar ballot language, but one was sponsored by the police union and designed to fuck up the ACTUAL police reform act.

And many more!! i never trust the ballot language on the proposition. sometimes a quick look shows its just what it seems like, and other times boy howdy do i got some shit to sort thru.

How hard it is to find out info on candidates and props varies. Good places to start:

Local newspapers, which often have candidate/prop info and endorsements. Personally, I usually look at the papers I know are more left-leaning for their endorsements to get me started (taking note of course of their reasonings for why they endorse certain candidates, cause of course sometimes i Disagree). Still good for getting some of the easier ones outta the way (like "this school board candidate is pro book bans, this ones anti", good enough for me, one less race to research!). You can also look at the shitty rightwing newspapers, see who they endorse, and vote the opposite way lmao

Sites like vote 411, ballotready, or ballotpedia, which let you enter in your address to find a sample ballot and ALSO give info on races. Some of them have a feature where you can go through, read info race-by-race and select your choices as you go, then give you a printable selection list. for example, they might have a short questionaire for each school board candidate where you can read their answers, or short blurbs for the "yes" and "no" endorsements for props. on that note,

LOOK AT ENDORSEMENTS! this one is huge sometimes. Maybe the "no" option on an act is endorsed by local wildlife orgs, conservation groups, leftwing orgs, etc, while the "yes" option is endorsed by chevron, Oil R Us, The Center For The Destruction Of Rare Endangered Salamanders, Autism Speaks for some goddamn reason... Well, it's not always that easy, but hell, sometimes it is. Keep in mind that you can't always tell a group's politics by their name though, cause the "deliberately misleading titles" thing also applies political groups formed for the specific purpose of endorsing shit to make it look better/worse, so if its not comically obvious like this, or theres names you dont recognize, give it another looksie. Also works for candidates!

Note that sometimes the "yes" and "no" options will have their own websites just like candidates do to make finding who endorses them easier, since they might just have lists of who endorses that option right there. Not all the time though (and sometimes theyre hard to find), but its a great tool when you do find em!

if you really wanna get deep into research, well, you can always snoop the candidates socials if they got em. thats usually too much for me unless i REALLY need to check em out, though.

Luckily, I usually find that I don't need to research every single little race or prop, and its just a few every once in a while i REALLY gotta dig into. dont worry, not every single election is a fucking research project, just go thru it and CHECK whether you gotta dig deeper on anything or nah

like, if i have a long ass ballot with 50 things to vote on, I might have 25 nonpartisian races and ballot measures I gotta look up first. Most of the NP races I super quickly choose bc the newspaper im looking at endorsements for straight up tells me some of them are conservatives, and most of the ballot measures are p straightforward, cool. Theres like 3 NP races im Not Sure About to dig into tho, and like 2 ballot measures im still confused on. So, out of 50 things to vote on, i might only have like, 5 i need to dig into to varying degrees. or, sometimes I get into it, and nah all of these are straightforward, im good.

Once you're done researching, write it down, get it on paper.

Unless its a mega short ballot that you can easily remember (or you just have crazy good memory), write it down, print out a sample ballot to fill out, or use a site like vote 411/ballotpedia to print your choices. you dont wanna get in the booth and forget half the shit. As far as I can tell, paper notes and stuff are always allowed.

Actually Voting Stuff

Lots of states have pretty strict electioneering laws, and you can be kicked out or asked to change for stuff as simple as "wearing campaign apparel". Usually defined by distance from the polling place, which varies by state. Unless you're SURE your state doesnt outlaw it, I would skip those campaign shirts and pins, or just anything that could debately be called "political". Could stuff like queer pride shirts be called "political"? I honestly have no fuckin idea, seems like a kinda not set issue, and maybe it wouldnt hold up if someone DID say something, but personally I wouldnt chance it. Dress Boring. leave your pins at home or in the car.

Check what ID you need to bring, and bring it. you dont wanna get to the front of an hour long line and find out you forgot your ID.

Be careful about selfies and phone use! As Stated, some states like texas seem to outlaw phone use entirely around the polls (though last I checked I was a bit confused by some states whos laws were about "photography devices such as cell phones", are they only banned if being USED for photography or entirely? still confused tbh), some outlaw just photography in gen, some only outlaw pics of your ballot itself, and some states dont give a shit if you take a ballot selfie. If you don't wanna do the research, just go with the safest option: no phone in polling place, and take the selfie with your sticker after you leave. if you fuck up, your vote may be invalidated, meaning you basically didnt vote. If you KNOW you live in a state where its chill tho, do what you want 👍

Double check your votes when you're able to. If its a paper ballot give it a good glance afterward, if its electronic it should have a results screen before the final confirmation

yaaaay good job. you voted. dont forget the sticker. you should get yourself a lil treat too. I usually get boba. mmmmm balls in my mouth yum.

anyway. hope this is vaguely helpful, reblog if you feel like it. if this ends up getting any notes, check em for extra advice, corrections, etc.

[yippeecahier]

If urban queers aren't elitist, are really doing all they can to help, and not in fact doing the shit that @spacelazarwolf is talking about, then why do I get notifications from people like this wishing death on Texans (which would include me, a queer Texan) because of our legislators and our votes being suppressed?

I get *this* response to me basically saying hey not cool, people who didnt deserve this died, after seeing that comment in my notifications. This is just one example. Others, I deleted because they're too upsetting tbh and I get to curate my experience. I don't even get the same amount of hate mail from urban/blue state queers as my trans mutuals who also live in Texas.

And stop acting like *we* arent doing everything we can, too. My grandma gets pushed off the voter polls EVERY YEAR for having a foreign sounding name, being elderly, and a registered democrat. She was in a class action suit (again) against the state for doing this. They continue to pass legislation because the propaganda has effectively convinced everyone not affected by this that there are "illegal immigrants" and "dead people" voting, so the rolls keep getting purged for the stupidest reasons.

This isn't because I love Texas. I hate it here. I want out, but I cannot afford to leave. If you really mean what you said, I happily take donations to help me move with my friends to California; my cashapp is $formersparkle

Your blue states are NOT immune to propaganda. They're coming for your little blue bastions next if you don’t put up or shut up.

white trans ppl from liberal suburbia in blue states will go on and on about how scary it is to be a trans person right now but the second they encounter a trans person from a red state they’ll be like “ummmmm why would you live in such an uncivilized place lmao maybe you shouldn’t have voted for republicans like if you don’t like how conservative it is then just leave” as if these states aren’t populated by black and brown people who face intense voter suppression and poor people who can’t just up and leave. not to mention the fact that all those articles y’all are sharing about the state of trans safety? those are in our states and we will be the ones who go down first. so instead of laughing at us dumb hicks from your liberal safe haven, consider instead shutting the fuck up and actually doing something to help us. because they’re coming for you next.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Machine learning's crumbling foundations

Technological debt is insidious, a kind of socio-infrastructural subprime crisis that’s unfolding around us in slow motion. Our digital infrastructure is built atop layers and layers and layers of code that’s insecure due to a combination of bad practices and bad frameworks.

Even people who write secure code import insecure libraries, or plug it into insecure authorization systems or databases. Like asbestos in the walls, this cruft has been fragmenting, drifting into our air a crumb at a time.

We ignored these, treating them as containable, little breaches and now the walls are rupturing and choking clouds of toxic waste are everywhere.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/27/gas-on-the-fire/#a-safe-place-for-dangerous-ideas

The infosec apocalypse was decades in the making. The machine learning apocalypse, on the other hand…

ML has serious, institutional problems, the kind of thing you’d expect in a nascent discipline, which you’d hope would be worked out before it went into wide deployment.

ML is rife with all forms of statistical malpractice — AND it’s being used for high-speed, high-stakes automated classification and decision-making, as if it was a proven science whose professional ethos had the sober gravitas you’d expect from, say, civil engineering.

Civil engineers spend a lot of time making sure the buildings and bridges they design don’t kill the people who use them. Machine learning?

Hundreds of ML teams built models to automate covid detection, and every single one was useless or worse.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/02/autoquack/#gigo

The ML models failed due to failure to observe basic statistical rigor. One common failure mode?

Treating data that was known to be of poor quality as if it was reliable because good data was not available.

Obtaining good data and/or cleaning up bad data is tedious, repetitive grunt-work. It’s unglamorous, time-consuming, and low-waged. Cleaning data is the equivalent of sterilizing surgical implements — vital, high-skilled, and invisible unless someone fails to do it.

It’s work performed by anonymous, low-waged adjuncts to the surgeon, who is the star of the show and who gets credit for the success of the operation.

The title of a Google Research team (Nithya Sambasivan et al) paper published in ACM CHI beautifully summarizes how this is playing out in ML: “Everyone wants to do the model work, not the data work: Data Cascades in High-Stakes AI,”

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/0d556e45afc54afeb2eb6b51a9bc1827b9961ff4.pdf

The paper analyzes ML failures from a cross-section of high-stakes projects (health diagnostics, anti-poaching, etc) in East Africa, West Africa and India. They trace the failures of these projects to data-quality, and drill into the factors that caused the data problems.

The failures stem from a variety of causes. First, data-gathering and cleaning are low-waged, invisible, and thankless work. Front-line workers who produce the data — like medical professionals who have to do extra data-entry — are not compensated for extra work.

Often, no one even bothers to explain what the work is for. Some of the data-cleaning workers are atomized pieceworkers, such as those who work for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, who lack both the context in which the data was gathered and the context for how it will be used.

This data is passed to model-builders, who lack related domain expertise. The hastily labeled X-ray of a broken bone, annotated by an unregarded and overworked radiologist, is passed onto a data-scientist who knows nothing about broken bones and can’t assess the labels.

This is an age-old problem in automation, pre-dating computer science and even computers. The “scientific management” craze that started in the 1880s saw technicians observing skilled workers with stopwatches and clipboards, then restructuring the workers’ jobs by fiat.

Rather than engaging in the anthropological work that Clifford Geertz called “thick description,” the management “scientists” discarded workers’ qualitative experience, then treated their own assessments as quantitative and thus empirical.

http://hypergeertz.jku.at/GeertzTexts/Thick_Description.htm

How long a task takes is empirical, but what you call a “task” is subjective. Computer scientists take quantitative measurements, but decide what to measure on the basis of subjective judgment. This empiricism-washing sleight of hand is endemic to ML’s claims of neutrality.

In the early 2000s, there was a movement to produce tools and training that would let domain experts produce their own tools — rather than delivering “requirements” to a programmer, a bookstore clerk or nurse or librarian could just make their own tools using Visual Basic.

This was the radical humanist version of “learn to code” — a call to seize the means of computation and program, rather than being programmed. Over time, it was watered down, and today it lives on as a weak call for domain experts to be included in production.

The disdain for the qualitative expertise of domain experts who produce data is a well-understood guilty secret within ML circles, embodied in Frederick Jelinek’s ironic talk, “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”

But a thick understanding of context is vital to improving data-quality. Take the American “voting wars,” where GOP-affiliated vendors are brought in to purge voting rolls of duplicate entries — people who are registered to vote in more than one place.

These tools have a 99% false-positive rate.

Ninety. Nine. Percent.

To understand how they go so terribly wrong, you need a thick understanding of the context in which the data they analyze is produced.

https://5harad.com/papers/1p1v.pdf

The core assumption of these tools is that two people with the same name and date of birth are probably the same person.

But guess what month people named “June” are likely to be born in? Guess what birthday is shared by many people named “Noel” or “Carol”?

Many states represent unknown birthdays as “January 1,” or “January 1, 1901.” If you find someone on a voter roll whose birthday is represented as 1/1, you have no idea what their birthday is, and they almost certainly don’t share a birthday with other 1/1s.

But false positives aren’t evenly distributed. Ethnic groups whose surnames were assigned in recent history for tax-collection purposes (Ashkenazi Jews, Han Chinese, Koreans, etc) have a relatively small pool of surnames and a slightly larger pool of first names.

This is likewise true of the descendants of colonized and enslaved people, whose surnames were assigned to them for administrative purposes and see a high degree of overlap. When you see two voter rolls with a Juan Gomez born on Jan 1, you need to apply thick analysis.

Unless, of course, you don’t care about purging the people who are most likely to face structural impediments to voter registration (such as no local DMV office) and who are also likely to be racialized (for example, migrants whose names were changed at Ellis Island).

ML practitioners don’t merely use poor quality data when good quality data isn’t available — they also use the poor quality data to assess the resulting models. When you train an ML model, you hold back some of the training data for assessment purposes.

So maybe you start with 10,000 eye scans labeled for the presence of eye disease. You train your model with 9,000 scans and then ask the model to assess the remaining 1,000 scans to see whether it can make accurate classifications.

But if the data is no good, the assessment is also no good. As the paper’s authors put it, it’s important to “catch[] data errors using mechanisms specific to data validation, instead of using model performance as a proxy for data quality.”

ML practitioners studied for the paper — practitioners engaged in “high-stakes” model building reported that they had to gather their own data for their models through field partners, “a task which many admitted to being unprepared for.”

High-stakes ML work has inherited a host of sloppy practices from ad-tech, where ML saw its first boom. Ad-tech aims for “70–75% accuracy.”

That may be fine if you’re deciding whether to show someone an ad, but it’s a very different matter if you’re deciding whether someone needs treatment for an eye-disease that, untreated, will result in irreversible total blindness.

Even when models are useful at classifying input produced under present-day lab conditions, those conditions are subject to several kinds of “drift.”

For example, “hardware drift,” where models trained on images from pristine new cameras are asked to assess images produced by cameras from field clinics, where lenses are impossible to keep clean (see also “environmental drift” and “human drift”).

Bad data makes bad models. Bad models instruct people to make ineffective or harmful interventions. Those bad interventions produce more bad data, which is fed into more bad models — it’s a “data-cascade.”

GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out — was already a bedrock of statistical practice before the term was coined in 1957. Statistical analysis and inference cannot proceed from bad data.

Producing good data and validating data-sets are the kind of unsexy, undercompensated maintenance work that all infrastructure requires — and, as with other kinds of infrastructure, it is undervalued by journals, academic departments, funders, corporations and governments.

But all technological debts accrue punitive interest. The decision to operate on bad data because good data is in short supply isn’t like looking for your car-keys under the lamp-post — it’s like driving with untrustworthy brakes and a dirty windscreen.

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[bartfargo]

Remember the first time the Republicans decided to rig the system in their favor?

No? Let me tell/remind you: 

Florida has an interesting law: If you have the same name as a convicted felon, then the Florida Secretary of State can remove you from the voter rolls, until such time as you prove that you’re not the felon (”presumed guilty until proven innocent” is how that saying goes, right?). I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: This law has been applied to white voters a whopping never times.

Well, during the 2000 election cycle, the Florida Secretary of State, a woman named Katherine Harris, decided to ramp up the enforcement of this law, and purge the rolls of people with the same first names as convicted felons. And no, she still didn’t do this against white people.

When George W. Bush heard about this (likely from the chair of his Florida campaign, a woman named Katherine Harris), he sent over a list of Texas felons who might have relocated to Florida (”might have,” in this case, means that there was no law keeping them from staying in Texas).

This purging led to the count being too close to call, necessitating a recount.

Once the recount began, a group of Florida Republicans showed up to disrupt the recount, insisting that the election simply be handed to Bush.

SCOTUS, including one justice whose wife worked on the Bush campaign, and another who declared that she wanted a Republican to choose her successor, imposed a deadline, The weekend before this deadline, Katherine Harris abruptly halted the recount. When she stopped the recount, Bush was ahead; if she had continued it, Gore would have won.

The reason you haven’t heard much about this is because the DNC decided that the real villains of the piece were the 5% of Democratic voters who voted for Ralph Nader (and not the 10% of Democrats who voted for Bush). They were more upset that some voters treated their votes as if they were theirs to give than they were at Republicans for having the election run by someone who wanted one candidate to win.

And the Republican Party took notes.

[odinsblog]

*sigh*

That was what woke me up, finally. My support of Barack Obama was unshakable - until I saw him pull that stunt in Flint where he pretended to drink a cup of filtered tap water from Flint, to convince Flint residents that their water was more or less “safe” to drink.

Not only that, but Michelle has it backwards - it’s politians who owe voters, not the other way around.

And how do you even fix your face to say you blame someone more than Trump voters??

Yeah, I am fully aware of that saying, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” but to place the blame for Trump’s win anywhere near the foot of BLACK voters?? GTFOH.

And also, yes, I understand that “mad at black voters” was not a direct quote, and that “our people” could mean black voters, or general Democratic voters - but come tf on. This is some Bill Cosby level finger wagging going on here.

And it is the very worst kind of revisionist history, because it’s coming from a Black person.

Does anybody remember all the White men and women who knowingly and eagerly voted for a racist? What about them?

Does anyone recall how the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act right before the 2016 election?

Does anyone remember how a record number of polling places were shut down before the election, or how millions of legally registered voters with black sounding surnames were purged from the voter rolls in Republican states, or how Republican states went ham on pumping out racist voter ID laws, and then closed down driver’s license offices that were near black communities so that voter ID would be even harder to get? Am I the only one who remembers all that shit??

And even in the face of all of those obstacles, Black voters still voted the hardest against Trump.

Somebody please help me out here: According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by +20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by +28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by +14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher, to Joe the Plumber, to Joe the Banker.

Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37).

He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19).

Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5).

In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. (source)

Literally, the most reliable, single best indicator of who someone was going to vote for in 2016 was one simple metric: were they a white person?

So given all of that, how do you fail to mention the most obvious of problems: white voters voting against their own self interests!??

I hope that one day—one day very soon—Democrats will learn that you cannot finger wag nor shame people into voting for someone, and that you have ceded any moral high ground when one of your strongest arguments is lesser evilism.

Being “the lesser evil” is a tacit admission of just how bad your GOP-lite candidate is.

I’m sorry, but Michelle Obama is engaging in the worst form of finger wagging + publicly shaming black people + respectability politics.

And I am not here for that shit.

[originalleftist]

Trump is literally planning to put millions of people in concentration camps if reelected.

This is what the Republican Party supports.

He's not even hiding it. If Trump is able to carry out another Holocaust, no one will be able to pretend that they "didn't know".

If you do not work to prevent Trump's reelection, then you will share added guilt for what follows. And yes, in most cases, that means voting for Democrats, not third party/independent candidates who will be lucky if they hit 5%. It also means that if you are in a rare race where a decent, non-fascist third party or independent candidate is more electable (as sometimes happens at the state or local level), then you vote for them. It means maximizing the number of non-fascists in office, at all levels. Check your voter registration early to make sure it's up to date, and check it regularly. Republican states in particular like to pull shit like purging voter rolls right before an election.

It also means doing more than just voting. It means volunteering and donating to support campaigns. It means getting others to turn out. And it means being prepared to engage in protest and civil disobedience, to strike, and to put yourself at risk to help protect and shelter refugees and members of marginalized groups should the worst still happen.

You should be doing all these things anyway (and I admit I need to do a lot more myself). But now more than ever. This fight has been going on for a long time, and it won't end in 2024, whatever happens. But 2024 will do a lot to determine how bad the next few years are, and how many of us make it through them.

Concentration camps.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

So, how many states do you think will stop holding elections in 2024?

States aren't constitutionally required to hold elections for the presidency, they're allowed to appoint electors however they see fit, it just so happens that all 50 states agree to award them based on statewide popular vote. From the Revolution until Reconstruction, South Carolina never held a single election, instead allowing the state legislature to appoint electors from whatever party they wanted. There's nothing stopping this from happening again today; Republicans in a swing state will change the state laws regarding elections so that the legislatures pick the electors. This would spit in the face of the very idea of a liberal democracy (liberal in this instance doesn't mean leftist, it means open, free, and fair), but the Republicans don't want that anyway. Republican voters would be more than willing to give up their own right to vote if they thought it would keep their party in power. They're willing to strip themselves of agency so long as it hurts the Democrats long term; it's a net gain for them, because the candidate they would have voted for gets to win anyway. The 6-3 conservative Supreme Court certainly won't stop the states from doing this because the right to vote guaranteed by the constitution only applies to the House and Senate (until 1913, it didn't even apply to the senate; before the 17th Amendment was ratified, senators were appointed by the state legislatures)

I expect at least one state to change its election laws going forward. Probably a state that would have voted red anyway, something like Wyoming or Idaho, where they can test the waters and see what they can get away with. Democrats begrudgingly accept that they don't always win elections because that's how democracy works, but Republicans would rather throw out democracy altogether to ensure they always win; the ends justify the means, they don't care about fairness or equality.

Maybe to keep up pretenses, instead of getting rid of elections altogether, the Republicans will recreate the Electoral College one level down. Instead of awarding electors based on a statewide popular vote, they'll award them based on whoever wins the most counties or Congressional districts, or they'll draw up entirely new boundaries just for presidential elections so they can gerrymander even more specifically. It's like how primary elections work; whichever candidate gets the most votes won't necessarily win the state. There's even precedent for that among the Democratic party; Bernie Sanders won both New Hampshire and Iowa in the 2020 primaries, but they awarded more delegates to Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden to knock him out of his spot a frontrunner. The establishment wanted Joe Biden, so they changed the rules to give it to him, setting the precedent for Republicans to do the same thing during general elections going forward.

And then we have to think about voter roll purges. What's stopping red counties from purging their rolls the day before the election? You register to vote well in advance, you check and recheck and check again to make sure, then they purge you at 11:59:59 on Monday, so when you go to vote on Tuesday you're not in the system anymore. What's stopping them from declaring a ton of minorities to be "delinquent" or "inactive" and disqualifying them? They already do this, they just have the "courtesy" of purging the rolls a few weeks in advance, which hypothetically gives the purged voters time to re-register. They don't need to give this grace period, hell, they could keep the purge timeline as is and simply change how long it takes to get registered; they could purge you on September 30th and say that it now takes 6 to 8 weeks for a registration to go through, meaning you wouldn't be eligible to vote until mid-to-late November.

I'm sure the reality will be worse and more blatant than anything I can think of, because I have morals and there are some lines even my imagination says are too far.

[robertreich]

Will He Get A Second Term?

Donald Trump has proven himself to be the most corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent president in American history. 

But despite all of the lies, abuses of power, and damage to the country -- I must warn you -- there’s a very real possibility he could be reelected. This doesn’t have to be the case. 

Let me explain.

Although Trump has been impeached and is one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history, he still has devoted support among his core base. Nearly 90 percent of Republicans still approve of the job he’s doing, a rate that’s held constant throughout his presidency. According to one survey, a third of Trump supporters said there was nothing he could do to lose their support.

Trump still maintains substantial support in key swing states as well. Recent polls show him neck and neck with leading Democratic candidates in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina. Remember, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by 3 million votes but still lost the election because of the power of these states in the Electoral College.

Big money donors are also forking over record sums of money to keep Trump in office. In the last quarter of 2019 alone, he raked in a staggering $46 million, far outpacing any of his Democratic opponents. He now has more than $100 million in the bank, not to mention the millions raised by pro-Trump Super PACs. The GOP’s biggest donors -- some of whom didn’t support him in 2016, but received massive windfalls from Trump’s tax cut -- are now paying him back.  

At the same time, voter suppression is on the rise. To suppress turnout by likely Democratic voters, Republican officials have doubled down on their efforts to keep low-income and minority voters from the polls. They are intimidating immigrant voters, purging voter rolls, closing polling places, and making it harder to register in the first place. 

Florida went so far as to institute a modern-day poll tax, requiring people with past felony convictions to pay off any fines or fees before exercising their right to vote. In 2016, over 20 percent of black voting-age Floridians weren’t able to vote due to past felony convictions, and now, hundreds of thousands could still be prevented from going to the polls this November in this key state.

We are also at risk of foreign powers trying to interfere in the election, as they did in 2016. Experts warn that many states still lack the necessary safeguards to protect against interference. The FBI, Department of Justice and National Security Agency have also raised concerns that Russia, China, and Iran might attempt misinformation campaigns. I can’t believe I even have to say this, but foreign governments should not have a say in our elections.

So why am I telling you all of this? I don’t mean to scare you. And the last thing I want to do is cause you to be hopeless, and give up. To the contrary, I want you to be more determined than ever. Despite all these attacks on democracy, we have what it takes to make Trump a one-term president. But only if we remain focused and united.

It may seem daunting. We’re up against a full-fledged attack on our democratic institutions. But there is a way forward: 

We can defeat Trump and his enablers by building a multiracial, multi-class coalition. And we do that by supporting a true progressive with a bold vision for an economy and democracy that works for all Americans. That way enough voters will be inspired to show up to the polls and stop Trump’s authoritarian machine for good.

This isn’t a pipe dream. We already beat the liar-in-chief by 2.8 million votes in 2016. And the 2018 elections had the highest turnout of any midterm election since 1914 -- handing House Republicans their most resounding defeat in decades. People are outraged -- and we must keep fighting. If we come together, we will prevail.

[jennymanrique]

Fight to secure the freedom to vote heats up in Congress

Two key bills would set national standards for voting access and strengthen protections against racial discrimination at the ballot box in America.

While legislators in 47 states have introduced nearly 400 bills that seek to restrict voting rights, two key initiatives are being considered in Congress to strengthen access to the polls and protect against racial discrimination.

For the People Act, and the John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, are initiatives that seek to prevent foreign interference in elections, limit the influence of money on politics, and modernize infrastructure to increase electoral security. They also establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions, a 15-day early voting period for all federal elections, and expanded access to voting by mail and automatic voter registration, among other provisions.

“These bills are critical to stopping the scourge of vote suppression that is facing our country today, and to protecting the freedom to vote going forward,” said Wendy Weiser, Vice President of Democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, during a press briefing hosted by Ethnic Media Services.

“Voting rights in America are under attack as they haven’t been since the Jim Crow era, and the push to restrict access to voting in state legislatures is unprecedented,” she added.

The Brennan Center has been tracking more than 360 bills that have already been signed into law in states like Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa and Utah and are aggressively moving toward approval in others like Arizona, Texas, Michigan and New Hampshire.

These laws seek to tighten voter identification requirements, make voter registration more difficult, and expand voter list purges – all measures that particularly affect ethnic communities. In most cases, these local initiatives have been justified in “false narratives about supposed voter fraud, without a shred of evidence,” said Thomas Saenz, President and General Counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF).

“When (political) leaders seeking to retain power and knowing they do not have the support of the growing Latino community, they take steps to suppress the vote,” added Saenz. The growth of the Hispanic vote in places like Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, was decisive for the Democratic triumph in those states in 2020.

Asian Americans, African Americans, and other minorities also saw an unprecedented rise in voter turnout.

In states like Texas, Latinos already make up 40% of the population. After the census results, the state won two more representatives in the House. If Hispanic turnout at the polls follows the numbers seen in past elections, their vote could contribute to another blue victory for those new seats.

“In parts of our country, primarily the South, but also including the State of Texas, we must anticipate that if there is a new community reaching critical mass to threaten the (local) powers, there is a need to have in place protections including pre clearance review requirements,” Saenz said.

The section V of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 established that states could not approve changes in voting rules without federal authorization. But that section was overthrown by a 2013 Supreme Court decision, which has allowed discriminatory practices against minorities, the elderly and youth.

Saenz argues that in the case of Latinos, the greatest threat is “intimidation” with measures such as demanding proof of citizenship for new voters and poll watchers who have permission to take cell phone video of voters who are receiving assistance at the polls.

In the case of the African American population, measures such as voter ID restrictions, moving of precincts without adequate notice and limitations to mail-in voting, are serious threats to this right.

According to Hilary Shelton, Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy for the National Association for the Advancement of People of Color (NAACP), “seemingly innocuous issues like having to have an official state photo ID means in some places that people that don’t own cars (without a driver’s license), now having to pay an additional expense… if you have to pay extra money to go to the polls and cast your vote, that is a poll tax.”

Shelton also stressed that the United States is one of the few countries that does not automatically register its citizens in the electoral rolls when they turn 18, “but it does register them for the draft.”

Another right to vote that the initiatives in Congress want to restore is that of Americans with criminal records. “If you’ve made the mistake of committing a felony offense, even after you’ve served the time, even after you’ve come out of jail, in most states today you can’t vote.”

No polling places

The situation is more dire for Native American voters. According to Jacqueline De León, Staff Attorney for the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), over the past four years her organization has challenged in court North Dakota’s voter ID law, Montana’s ballot collection ban, Alaska’s witness signature requirement to vote during the pandemic, and the refusal to open an in-person polling location on the Blackfeet reservation, that would have forced tribal members to travel up to 120 miles in order to vote.

“We have filed nearly 100 lawsuits, with a success rate of over 90%. These cases have been litigated in front of judges appointed by Republican and Democratic presidents, and the facts are so bad that we nearly always win,” De León said. “But litigation is a blunt and expensive instrument that could have been avoided if the laws that go to Congress had been in effect today.”

Many Native American reservations do not have polling places, and DMVs and post offices can be hundreds of miles away. “Due to ongoing discrimination and government neglect, many Native Americans live in overcrowded homes that do not have an address, do not receive mail, and are located on dirt roads, that can be impassable in wintery November,” De León said.

Another provision that the bills in Congress want to include is assistance at the polls for people with disabilities and access to ballots in different languages.

“Language barriers are one of the biggest impediments to the Asian-American vote with one-third of Asian-Americans being what is called limited English proficient,” said John C. Yang, President and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC).

“In every election poll, monitors have observed missing Asian language signage and interpreters, which limits our access to the ballot. Ensuring effective language assistance is paramount to closing that consistent barrier in national and local elections,” he said.

The John L. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act will be presented shortly in the House of Representatives and the For the People Act has already passed in the House and will have a Senate hearing in the next two weeks. Several polls have shown that both bills have bipartisan support.

Originally published here

Want to read this piece in Spanish? Click here

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 21, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Lawmakers today are jockeying before tomorrow’s test vote in the Senate on S1, the For the People Act. This is a sweeping bill that protects the right to vote, ends partisan gerrymandering, limits the influence of money in politics, and establishes new ethics rules for presidents and other federal officeholders.

Passing election reform is a priority for Democrats, since Republican-dominated legislatures across the country have gerrymandered states to make it almost impossible for Democrats to win majorities and, since President Biden took office, have passed laws suppressing the vote and making it easier for Republican state officials to swing elections to their candidates no matter what voters want.

But it is not just Democrats who want our elections to be cleaner and fairer. S1 is so popular across the nation—among voters of both parties—that Republican operatives agreed in January that there was no point in trying to shift public opinion on it. Instead, they said, they would just kill it in Congress. This conversation, explored in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, happened just after it became clear that Democrats had won a Senate majority and thus Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had previously been Senate Majority Leader, would no longer be able to stop any legislation Republicans didn’t like.

Still, Republican senators can deploy the filibuster, which permits just 41 of the 50 Republican senators to stop the act from passing. It is possible for the Democrats to break a filibuster, but only if they are all willing. Until recently, it seemed they were not. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), a conservative Democrat in a Republican-dominated state, opposed some of the provisions in S1 and was adamant that he would not vote for an election reform bill on partisan lines. He wanted bipartisan support.

Last week, Manchin indicated which of the measures in the For the People Act—and in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—he will support. In a mixture of the priorities of the leadership of each party, he called for expanding access to voting, an end to partisan gerrymandering, voter ID, automatic registration at motor vehicle offices, making Election Day a holiday, and making it easier for state officials to purge voters from the rolls.

Democrats across the ideological spectrum immediately lined up behind Manchin’s compromise. Republican leadership immediately opposed it, across the board. They know that fair voting practices will wreck them. Today, McConnell used martial language when he said he would give the measure “no quarter.”

Tomorrow, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will bring up for a vote not the measure itself, but whether to begin a debate on such a measure. “Tomorrow, the Senate will also take a crucial vote on whether to start debate on major voting rights legislation,” Schumer said today. “I want to say that again—tomorrow the Senate will take a vote on whether to start debate on legislation to protect Americans’ voting rights. It’s not a vote on any particular policy.”

Republicans can use the filibuster to stop a debate from going forward. Getting a debate underway will require 60 votes, and there is currently no reason to think any Republicans will agree. This will put them in the untenable spot of voting against talking about voting rights, even while Republicans at the state level are passing legislation restricting voting rights. So the vote to start a debate on the bill will fail but will highlight the hypocrisy of Republican lawmakers.

Perhaps more to the point in terms of passing legislation, it will test whether the work the Democrats did over the weekend incorporating Manchin’s requests to the measure have brought him on board.

If so, and if he gets frustrated with Republican refusal to compromise at all while the Democrats immediately accepted his watering down of their bill, it is possible he and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who has also signaled support for the filibuster in its current form, will be willing to consider altering it. The Senate could, for example, turn it back into its traditional form—a talking filibuster—or carve out voting rights bills as they have carved out financial bills and judicial nominations.

There are signs that the Democrats are preparing for an epic battle over this bill. Today White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki indicated that the administration hopes the vote will show that all 50 Senate Democrats are now on board and that they will find a new way forward if the Republicans do not permit a debate.

More telling, perhaps, is an eye-popping op-ed published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Mike Solon, a former assistant to McConnell, and Bill Greene, a former outreach director for former House Speaker John Boehner; both men are now lobbyists. In order to defend the filibuster, they argue that the measure protects “political nobodies” from having to pay attention to politics. If legislation could pass by a simple majority, Americans would have to get involved. The system, they suggest, is best managed by a minority of senators.

“Eliminating the Senate filibuster would end the freedom of America’s political innocents,” they write. “The lives that political nobodies spend playing, praying, fishing, tailgating, reading, hunting, gardening, studying and caring for their children would be spent rallying, canvassing, picketing, lobbying, protesting, texting, posting, parading and, above all, shouting.”

The authors suggest misleadingly that the men who framed the Constitution instituted the filibuster: they did not. They set up a Senate in which a simple majority passed legislation. The filibuster, used to require 60 votes to pass any legislation, has been deployed regularly only since about 2008.

But that error is minor compared to the astonishing similarity between this op-ed and a speech by South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond in 1858, when he rose to explain to his colleagues that the American system was set up to make sure lawmakers could retain control no matter what a majority of Americans wanted. Hammond was one of the nation’s leading enslavers and was desperate to make sure his party’s policies could not be overridden by the majority.

Voting only enabled people to change the party in charge, he said. “It was not for the people to exercise political power in detail… it was not for them to be annoyed with the cares of government.”

Hammond explained that the world is made up of two classes: those who ”do the menial duties… perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill….. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government.” On them, he explained, rests “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.”

It was imperative, he said, to retain these distinctions in politics. The South had managed such a thing, while the North, he warned, had not. “Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries [sic] of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’... where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property, divided, not… with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

—-

Notes:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-the-koch-backed-effort-to-block-the-largest-election-reform-bill-in-half-a-century

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/manchin-proposes-compromise-voting-bills-n1271058

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/schumer-republican-debate-voting-bill-for-the-people

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-senate-elections-bills-election-2020-1a9b201f9234e2050496768be995ea2f

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-filibuster-helps-nobody-and-that-means-you-11624226249

James Henry Hammond, “Speech on the Admission of Kansas…,” in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of James H. Hammond (New York: John F. Trow & Co., 1866), 301-322, available at Google Books (for free).

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[eridanidreams]

Marina Sirtis Has No Empathy For Texas

In a series of Tweets, Marina Sirtis felt compelled to point out how the past week of misery was all our fault...

And when she got called on her callousness, she doubled down...

She’s spreading misinformation...

It really, really isn’t. 

Oh, so I guess that the Democratic state senators that left the state to protest the Republican redistricting in 2003 were figments of our Texas-sized imagination?

Ooops. Look at her backpedal. But she still knows what she’s talking about, dammit!

No, Marina, you don’t. You know what the process is supposed to look like. You don’t understand Texas politics. I mean, sure, you can look at the county voting results of 2020, you can look at the congressional districts, but that’s misleading when you consider what Texas voters have to contend with.

The Republican government, since it took overwhelming power in the early 2000s, has been aggressively moving to consolidate its hold. 

Gerrymandering is horrible here. It started with the redistricting conflict in 2003, where Texas Senate Democrats left the state to try to stop the gerrymandering we ended up with. But, hey, tell me if you think this sounds reasonable: I live just north of Austin. My current congressional district stretches from College Station to Waco. Someone who lives two miles east of me is in a congressional district that stretches to the western edge of Houston. Someone who lives five miles south of me is in a congressional district that stretches north almost to Fort Worth. Do those sound like sane districts? Does that sound like we’re legitimately represented? And did we protest! You bet we protested! And we wrote, and we voted! But when your vote is systematically diluted, it’s hard to push change through.

On top of that, Texas has always, shall we say, struggled against the Voting Rights Act. And when it got suspended, Texas increased its reliance on all the modern ways to suppress votes, including voter ID requirements, restricting early voting, eliminating polling places, purging voter rolls of anyone whose registration wasn’t perfect, restricting mail-in voting in a time of pandemic...

And let’s not forget that the money in Texas flows to the Republicans, thanks mostly to Big Fossil Fuels. This isn’t the Federation, Marina. I wish we had a post-capitalist, post-scarcity, rational economy like the Federation does (and I’ve written for Star Trek, and I’ve made sense of the Federation economy, so I know what I’m talking about), but we don’t. We’re one of the most crony-capitalist states in a crony-capitalist country. In state-level elections, the Republicans usually are able to outspend the Democrats by a significant margin, and that matters.

And you know what? In 2020, despite all of these hurdles, despite all of the obstacles Texas Republicans threw in voters’ way, despite COVID... we came within 650,000 votes of flipping the goddamned state. That’s 2% of our state population.

But, hey, Marina, don’t let the facts get in the way of kicking Texans while we’re down.

Yeah. Pat yourself on the back for your empathy.