Tag: 2020 Election

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Facebook adds labels identifying state-controlled media

Facebook will soon add labels to news outlets owned or otherwise controlled by a government, marking that information as, if not necessarily false or unreliable, at least worth considering the origin of. Those so labeled will also be banned from buying ads starting this summer.

The company announced its plan to do this a few months ago as one part of its ongoing “election integrity efforts,” along with such things as requiring a confirmed owner for pages and banning anti-voting ads.

Under the new policy, which should roll out to all users over the next week, news organizations “that may be under the influence of a government” will have a subtle but clear label as such, as will their posts. You can see what one of those labels looks like in the top image, and here’s how it would look in the “about” and details pages:

The warning reads: “This publisher is wholly or partially under the editorial control of a state. This is determined by a range of factors, including but not limited to funding, structure and journalistic standards.”

These organizations have immense reach even outside the countries they’re based in: Oxford’s Computational Propaganda Project has tracked this engagement and the strategies used to accomplish it closely in an ongoing series of papers.

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The process of identifying state-run news is not quite as straightforward is it may seem. Certainly there are many openly state-run news organizations in many countries, like China Daily, Sputnik and so on. But governments may be pulling the strings behind far more, either by funding (or defunding) them, interfering with or directing editorial coverage, or operating a whole news organization via unacknowledged means.

Facebook turned to experts to analyze and classify the many news organizations on the platform, which seems to have clearly advised that there are many factors that should be considered. As a result, Facebook bases its “state-controlled” label based on official statements, ownership structure and stakeholders, editorial leadership and guidelines, policies and oversight, and last but not least the state of media freedom in the host country. Outlets can appeal the label if they think it has been applied in error.

Notably the label will not be applied to news posts or organizations that merely reference or base their reporting on state-controlled media. Nor is the information published by these labeled organizations subject to special scrutiny or fact-checking.

“Nevertheless,” writes the company’s cybersecurity policy head Nathaniel Gleicher in a blog post, “later this summer we will begin blocking ads from these outlets in the US out of an abundance of caution to provide an extra layer of protection against various types of foreign influence in the public debate ahead of the November 2020 election in the US.”

Outside the U.S. those ads will not be blocked but they will be labeled.

Zuckerberg explains why Facebook won’t take action on Trump’s recent posts

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Google says Iranian, Chinese hackers targeted Trump, Biden campaigns

Google security researchers say they’ve identified efforts by at least two nation state-backed hackers against the Trump and Biden presidential campaigns.

Shane Huntley, director for Google’s Threat Analysis Group, said in a tweet that hackers backed by China and Iran recently targeted the campaigns using malicious phishing emails. But, Huntley said, there are “no signs of compromise” and that the campaigns were both alerted to the attempts.

When reached by TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson reiterated the findings:

“We can confirm that our Threat Analysis Group recently saw phishing attempts from a Chinese group targeting the personal email accounts of Biden campaign staff and an Iranian group targeting the personal email accounts of Trump campaign staff. We didn’t see evidence that these attempts were successful. We sent the targeted users our standard government-backed attack warning and we referred this information to federal law enforcement. We encourage campaign staff to use extra protection for their work and personal emails, and we offer security resources such as our Advanced Protection Program and free security keys for qualifying campaigns.”

Spokespeople for the Biden and Trump campaigns did not immediately comment. We’ll update if we hear back.

Huntley said in a follow-up tweet that the hackers were identified as China’s APT31 and Iran’s APT35, both of which are known to target government officials. But it’s not the first time that the Trump campaign has been targeted by Iranian hackers. Microsoft last year blamed APT35 group for targeting what later transpired to be the Trump campaign.

Since last year’s attempted attacks, both the Democrats and Republicans improved their cybersecurity at the campaign level. The Democrats recently updated their security checklist for campaigns and published recommendations for countering disinformation, and the Republicans have put on training sessions to better educate campaign officials.

Microsoft says Iranian hackers targeted a 2020 presidential candidate

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Anything less than nationwide vote by mail is electoral sabotage

The global pandemic has cast a light on decades of cumulative efforts to manipulate and suppress voters, showing that the country is completely unprepared for any serious challenge to its elections system. There can be no more excuses: Every state must implement voting by mail in 2020 or be prepared to admit it is deliberately sabotaging its own elections. (And for once, tech might be able to help.)

To visualize how serious this problem is, one has only to imagine what would happen if quarantine measures like this spring’s were to happen in the fall — and considering experts predict a second wave in that period, this is very much a possibility.

If lockdown measures were being intensified and extended not on May 3rd, but November 3rd, how would the election proceed?

The answer is: it wouldn’t.

There would be no real election because so few people in the country would be able to legally and safely vote. This is hardly speculative: We have seen it happen in states where, for lack of any other option, people had to risk their lives, breaking quarantine to vote in person. Naturally it was the most vulnerable groups — people of color, immigrants, the poor and so on — who were most affected. The absurdity of a state requiring voters to gather in large groups while forbidding people to gather in large groups is palpable.

With this problem scaled to national levels, the entire electoral process would be derailed, and the ensuing chaos would be taken advantage of by all and sundry for their own purposes — something we see happening in practically every election.

For the 2020 election, if any elections official in this country claims to value the voters for which they are responsible, voting by mail is the only way to enable every citizen to register and vote securely and remotely. Anything less can only be considered deliberate obstruction, or at best willful negligence, of the electoral process.

Image Credits: Bill Oxford / iStock Unreleased / Getty Images

There’s a fair amount of talk about apps, online portals and other avenues, and these may figure later, but mail is the only method guaranteed right now to securely serve every address and person, providing the fundamental fabric of connectivity that is absolutely necessary to universally accessible voting.

Hand-wringing about fraud, lost ballots and other issues with voting by mail is deliberate, politically motivated FUD (and you can expect a lot of it over the next few months). States where voting by mail is the standard report no such issues; on the contrary, they have high turnout and few problems because it is simple, effective and secure. As far as risk is concerned, there is absolutely no comparison to the widespread and well-documented process and security issues with touchscreen voting systems, even before you bring in the enormous public health concerns of using those methods during a pandemic.

Federal law requires that troops around the world, among others unable to vote in person, are able to request and submit their ballots by mail. That this is the preferred method for voting in combat zones is practically all the endorsement such a system needs. That the president votes by mail is just the cherry on top.

Fear of voters

So why hasn’t voting by mail been adopted more widely? The same reason we have gerrymandered districts: Politicians have manipulated the electoral process for decades in order to stack the deck in their favor. While gerrymandering has been employed with great (and deplorable) effect by both Democratic and Republican officials, voter suppression is employed overwhelmingly by the political right.

While this is certainly a politically charged statement, it’s not really a matter of opinion. The demographics of the voting public are such that as the proportion of the population that votes grows, the aggregate position begins to lean leftward. This happens for a variety of reasons, but the result is that limiting who votes benefits conservatives more than liberals. (I am not so naive to think that if it were the other way around, Democrats would altogether abstain from the practice, but that isn’t the case.)

This is not a new complaint. Deliberate voter suppression goes back a century and more. Nor is the practice equally distributed. For one thing, white, well-off, urban areas are more likely to have effective and modern voting systems and laws.

This is not only because those areas are generally the first to receive all good things, but because voter suppression has been aimed specifically at people of color, immigrants, the poor and so on. Again, this is no longer a controversial or even particularly partisan statement; it has been admitted to by politicians and strategists at every level — including, quite recently, by the president: “They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

When voting by mail was merely a convenient, effective alternative to voting in person, it was fairly easy to speak against it. Now, however, voting by mail is increasingly looking like the only possible method to accomplish an election.

Again, think of how we would vote during a stay-at-home order. Using only today’s methods would be dangerous, chaotic and generally an ineffective way to ask the population at large who they want to lead their city, state and country.

That is no way to conduct an election. Therefore, we currently have no way to conduct a national election. Voting by mail is the only method that can realistically be rolled out to accomplish an effective election in 2020.

Disunited states

Because elections are run by state authorities, voting methods and laws vary widely between them. The quickest way to a nationwide vote-by-mail system would use federal funding and authority, but even if states were in favor of this (they won’t be, as it is an encroachment on their authority), Washington is not. The possibility of a bill implementing universal voting by mail passing the House, Senate and the president’s desk by November is, sadly, remote.

Which is not to say that no one in D.C. is not trying it:

Vote-by-mail should be having its moment. Will it?

This means it’s down to the states — not great news, considering it is at the state level that voting rights have been eroded and voter suppression enshrined in policy.

The only hope we have is for state authorities to recognize that the 2020 presidential election will be a closely watched litmus test for competence and corruption that will haunt them for years. It’s one thing to put your finger on the scale under normal circumstances. It’s quite another to author a high-profile electoral failure in an election few doubt will be one of the most consequential in American history — especially if that failure was manifestly preventable.

And we know it is preventable because due to federal voting rights laws, every state already has some form of accessible, mail-in or absentee voting. This is not a matter of inventing a new system from scratch, but scaling existing, proven systems in ways already demonstrated and verified over decades. Several states, for instance, have simply announced that all voters will get absentee ballots or applications sent unrequested to their homes. No one said it would be easy, but the first step — committing — is at least simple.

It will be obvious in a few months which state authorities actually care about the vote and which see it as just another instrument to manipulate in order to retain and accrue power. The actions taken in the run-up to this election will be remembered for a long time. As for the federal government interfering with states’ prerogative to run their own elections — that’s a violation of states’ rights that I expect will encounter strong bipartisan opposition.

How tech can help without hindering

Image Credits: NickS (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The tech world will want to aid in this cause out of several motives, but the simple truth is there’s no way a technological solution can be developed and deployed by November. And not only is it infeasible, but there is serious political opposition to online voting systems to be widely deployed. The idea is a non-starter for this election and probably the next.

Rather than trying, Monolith-style, to evolve voting to the next phase by taking on the whole thing tip to tail, tech should be providing support structures via uniquely digital tools that complement rather than replace effective voting systems.

For example, there is the possibility, however remote, that a mailed ballot will be intercepted by some adversary and modified, shredded, selectively deposited, or what have you. No large-scale fraud has ever been perpetrated, despite what opponents of voting by mail might say. States developed preventative solutions long ago, like secure ballot boxes placed around the city and tamper-evident envelopes.

But end to end security is something at which the tech sector excels, and moreover recent advances make a digitally augmented voting process achievable. And there’s plenty of room for competition and commercial involvement, which sweetens the pot.

Here’s a way that commonplace tech could be deployed to make voting by mail even more secure and convenient.

Imagine a mail-in ballot of the ordinary fill-in-the-bubble type. Once a person makes their selections, they take a picture of the ballot in a dedicated, completely offline app. Via fairly elementary image analysis nearly any phone can now perform, the votes can be detected and tabulated, verified by the voter, then hashed with a unique voter sheet ID into a code short enough to be written down.

The ballot is mailed and (let us say for now) received. When it is processed, the same hash is calculated by the machine reader and placed on an easily accessible list. A voter can check that their vote was tabulated and correctly recorded by entering their hash into a website — which itself reveals nothing about their vote or identity.

What if something goes wrong? Say the ballot is lost. In that case the voter has a record of their vote in both image and physical form (mail-in ballots have little tear-off tabs you keep) and can pursue this issue. The same database that lets them verify their vote was correct will allow them to see if their vote was never cast. If it was interfered with or damaged and the selections differ from what the voter already verified, the hash will differ, and the voter can prove this with the evidence they have — again, entirely offline and with no private information exposed.

This example system only works because smartphones are now so common, and because it is now trivial to process an image quickly and accurately offline. But importantly, the digital aspect only addresses shortcomings of the mail-in system rather than being central to it. You vote with only a ballpoint pen, as simply as possible — but if you want to be sure, you may choose to employ the latest technology to track your vote.

A system like this may not make it in time for the 2020 election, but voting by mail can and must if there is to be an election at all.

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Biden campaign releases a flurry of digital DIY projects and virtual banners. Yes, there are Zoom backgrounds

2020 is a nightmare year by most metrics, and it’s also a worst-case-scenario emerging out of a best-case-scenario for Joe Biden . After trailing in early primary states, Biden came crashing back on a stunning wave of Super Tuesday support. Now the presumptive Democratic nominee in the midst of a global health crisis that’s immobilized the U.S. workforce and somehow even further polarized American politics, the former Vice President will have to navigate completely uncharted waters to find a path to the presidency.

Biden—not the most internetty candidate out of 2020’s wide Democratic field by a long shot— is now tasked with getting creative, connecting with voters not at rallies or traditional events, the kind of thing the famously affable candidate excels at, but through screens. Making those connections is crucial for attracting less engaged voters, wrangling straying progressives and even maintaining its body of existing supporters, who need to be kept energized to power the campaign into the general election.

To that end, the Biden campaign is rolling out a new collection of digital assets to energize supporters stuck at home and to communicate the Biden brand’s visual language to everybody else. The selection of “Team Joe swag” includes some DIY options for supporters like big “No Malarkey!” home window placards and “We want Joe” button templates.

The campaign is also releasing an array of print-friendly coloring book pages to amuse idle politically-inclined progeny. Some of the pages thank frontline workers and immortalize Biden’s two german shepherds in crayon, while others depict Biden’s more meme-worthy symbols: ice cream cones and his trademark aviator sunglasses. (A viral moment from 2014 combined the two.)

For supporters who aren’t leaning into arts and crafts just yet, there’s “Joementum” phone wallpapers, banners optimized for social media and yes, a full set of Zoom backgrounds depicting Biden’s recent campaign stage: his home library.

Some critics say he needs to ditch his basement studio, but Biden said he plans to follow public health guidelines, hitting the virtual campaign trail from his now-expanded home setup in Delaware via virtual town halls and video chats, like his recent Instagram Live sit-down with U.S. soccer superstar and former Warrenite Megan Rapinoe.

The signs and wallpapers are just a tiny part of the campaign’s big picture, but depending on what comes after, a candidate’s visual signature can sear a political moment into the collective consciousness. Think Obama’s 2008 “Hope” poster by the artist Shepard Fairey, later acquired by National Portrait Gallery (Fairey himself later denounced the Obama administration’s drone program). Or Trump’s telltale red MAGA hats, which no one will be forgetting any time soon, regardless of how the general election shakes out.

Warm and fuzzy

For a campaign stuck indoors, visual branding is more important than ever. Biden’s visual brand mostly seems to focus on positive feelings that bring people together—kindness, faith, togetherness—rather than policy specifics or even “dump Trump” style calls to action.

“We want to find ways to make people feel involved while they’re cooped up at home,” the campaign’s Deputy National Press Secretary Matt Hill said. “These are tools that are going to help everyone who is involved with the campaign communicate that visually in a time when everyone is particularly logged on.”

Much has been written about how the virtual race poses unique challenges for the Biden campaign. The presumptive Democratic nominee is a candidate best known for his affable, empathetic in-person demeanor. But empathy doesn’t always perform well online, particularly when cast against the sound and fury of the factually-unencumbered, cash-flush Trump campaign.

“Branding communicates values, and during this crisis we want to let Joe Biden’s values shine through,” Hill said. “Yes, it’s of course ice cream and aviators, but it’s also decency, empathy, hope, and everything that is just the polar opposite of Donald Trump.”

The campaign frames this in broad strokes, good-against-evil language, describing Biden’s online movement as one of “empathy and human connection” out to topple the dark forces at work on the internet. The campaign’s digital director Rob Flaherty has said that 2020 is not just a fight for America itself, but also a “battle for the soul of the internet.”

“Right now, people are craving empathy and good… it gives us an advantage,” Hill said. “You have one side that often fights to win the Twitterverse with vitriol, and then you have us,”

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Joementum?

Biden’s campaign has come under some scrutiny in recent weeks for the perception that it’s been slow to adapt to the pandemic era. Obama campaign veterans David Plouffe and David Axelrod penned a New York Times op-ed in early May calling for Biden to step up his digital efforts, likening his current broadcasts to “an astronaut beaming back to earth.”

After weeks of concern from insiders worried the Biden campaign might not be building the online momentum it needs, the campaign just beefed up its previously lean team with a flurry of new hires. The new talent will particularly build out the campaign’s digital operations, which it plans to double in size.

The hires include former Elizabeth Warren staffer Caitlin Mitchell, who will advise the Biden camp on digital strategy and help it scale up, Buzzfeed Video and Kamala Harris campaign alum Andrew Gauthier, who joins the Biden campaign as its video director and Robyn Kanner, previously Beto for America’s creative director, to lead design and branding.

It will be interesting to see what else emerges out of the “Biden brand,” which doesn’t translate as easily to organic virality as Bernie’s all-purpose “I’m once again asking” meme or the somehow-not-cloying antics of Elizabeth Warren’s lovable golden retriever Bailey. At least for now, the campaign doesn’t seem to view that as a problem.

But cracking virtual campaigning is not the only headwind for the Biden campaign at the moment. Sexual assault allegations by former Biden Senate aide Tara Reade made their way into mainstream reporting in April. And if formulating a response to such serious allegations would be delicate under normal circumstances, the Biden campaign has had to figure out how do it from a silo.

With its early technical difficulties ironed out, the Biden campaign may have a bit more breathing room to get creative. The campaign is focused on what it views as its “core platforms” for now—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat—but it plans to both “invest more deeply” in those and also look at other platforms in the process of scaling up.

“We’ve already seen volunteers expand on Discord, Reddit, Pinterest and elsewhere,” Biden campaign Director of Digital Content Pam Stamoulis told TechCrunch.

Stamoulis also notes that the campaign is in “close communication” with the major social platforms where it focuses its efforts.

“… We have scheduled and consistent check in times to go over best practices, recommendations, new tools and brainstorm ideas and concepts to help optimize our use of their platforms,” Stamoulis said. “We anticipate working closely with platforms as we continue to move into the general.”

Biden’s stay-the-course digital strategy seems to reflect the thinking of his unlikely Super Tuesday coup, believing that you need the biggest coalition possible and you don’t necessarily build it through the buzziest politics or the flashiest moments. The campaign doesn’t want Biden to go viral as much as it wants him to connect with the most people in the broadest possible sense.

And to his credit, between the South Carolina comeback and his team-of-rivals Super Tuesday trick, Biden pulled it all off somehow. If there’s anything we can count on in 2020, whether it’s U.S. politics or a global health reckoning, it’s that we don’t know what the hell is going to happen. That lesson seems especially resonant for the extremely online among us, who seem to discover again and again that we are but a tiny, self-selecting sliver of the American electorate.

There’s no word on if we’ll see Biden trading island codes for Animal Crossing à la AOC or a virtual likeness of the candidate looming over Fortnite’s map psychedelic Travis Scott-style, but in a truly unusual election year, nothing is quite off the table.

Vote-by-mail should be having its moment. Will it?

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Vote.org founder launches VoteAmerica, a nonprofit using tech tools to help Americans vote by mail

With November looming, the scramble to protect the 2020 U.S. election from coronavirus chaos is on.

To that end, a small, skilled cluster of voting rights advocates are launching a new voter mobilization project. Called VoteAmerica, the new non-profit shares DNA with Vote.org, the esteemed nonpartisan voter mobilization site VoteAmerica founder Debra Cleaver first launched in 2008.

VoteAmerica’s goal is to boost voter turnout by helping people vote by mail. In a normal year that might mean striving to drive record turnout. But in the midst of the pandemic, the team is working to ensure that 2020’s presidential election turnout doesn’t slump like it would in a midterm election year.

“It seems at this point that Americans are either going to be unable or unwilling to vote in person in the November election, which could lead to catastrophically low turnout,” Cleaver said in an interview with TechCrunch. “But if we have our way, there will be no perceivable dip in turnout in November.”

While Vote.org is still around, the organization severed ties with Cleaver last summer in a drawn out battle with the group’s board. As Recode reported last month, some key Vote.org partners and donors walked out the door with Cleaver—a major concern for an organization with valuable ties in Silicon Valley and a more dire mission than ever in 2020.

With VoteAmerica, they might be back in the picture. Some of Cleaver’s previous Silicon Valley backers include Y Combinator’s Sam Altman (Cleaver is a YC alum), LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor Ron Conway. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Cleaver noted that at least Conway is back on board, pitching in with the $5 million in initial funding—a mix of grants and early contributions—to get the fledgling organization off the ground.

“We have the expertise, the team, the experience, and the plan,” Cleaver wrote in a Facebook post last month, adding that a “generous donor” had already stepped up to cover the nascent organization’s payroll costs.

Cleaver describes VoteAmerica as a lean team with deep experience—and one ready to hit the ground running. The project’s new website VoteAmerica.com fittingly displays an election day countdown clock in stark white-on-red lettering to convey the urgency of its task.

In the announcement for the new project, Cleaver said she believes that the 2020 elections “will be the most chaotic in American history”—a prediction that unfortunately is very difficult to argue with.

“Chaos driven by a global pandemic, foreign interference, threats of political violence, a radicalized electorate, a virulent campaign of disinformation, and fragile election administration technology all combine to make voting in person more difficult and less secure than ever before,” Cleaver said.

Because states conduct elections in the United States, her group’s core mission is to shepherd voters through the national patchwork of voting registration systems. On the simple site, visitors can register to vote, check their registration status, find a polling place, request an absentee ballot or sign up to vote-by-mail.

While many states in the U.S. already administer a large chunk of their voting through absentee vote-by-mail, It looks likely that the urgent public health threat posed by the coronavirus will mean that mass public gatherings in crowded polling places remain unwise. In light of that threat, states are looking to dramatically scale up those systems now to get them ready in time for November.

California turns to vote-by-mail to keep residents safe come November

Old systems, new solutions

For VoteAmerica, navigating the quirks of American election systems can look like lending voters a fax machine.

“You can only sign up [for a mail-in ballot] online in 15 states, which is not actually a significant number, but there’s another 15 more where you can fax in your form, which doesn’t seem relevant because it’s 2020 and who uses a fax machine?”

But using fax APIs, VoteAmerica is building out a system that allows voters to request a vote-by-mail application just by taking a photo of their signature. VoteAmerica’s tool then uses code to put the signature in the right spot on the form and then programmatically faxes it to the relevant local election official.

“This is kind of wonky because we’re using truly antiquated technology to modernize the vote-by-mail process,” Cleaver said. “But if you have a mobile device—and 87% of Americans have a smartphone—we’re building technology that lets you sign up directly from your mobile device without printing and mailing.”

It’s just one way that VoteAmerica plans to employ technology solutions to civic problems—like the outdated government systems that still haunt American life. The solution sounds small, but at scale it can mobilize a huge amount of voters who otherwise could have been tangled up in the bureaucratic process. Naturally, that kind of elegant workaround to inefficient systems attracts interest from the tech community.

“We definitely do get a lot of tech money, and I think it’s because tech people both appreciate and trust using technology to clear antiquated hurdles,” Cleaver said.

“The things that we do, people in Silicon Valley are very receptive to it, whereas people outside the Valley might take a little more time to warm up to it.”

Vote-by-mail should be having its moment. Will it?

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California turns to vote-by-mail to keep residents safe come November

California Governor Gavin Newsom announced Friday that his state would issue a mail-in ballot to every registered voter for November’s election. Newsom issued the decision as an executive order in coordination with other California officials.

The order will require all county election officials to provide mail-in ballots to voters, but it also provisions for in-person voting stations for Californians with disabilities, those without an address due to homelessness and voters who need voting materials in a language other than English.

According to the order, the governor will coordinate with the Secretary of State and the California legislature to make in-person voting as safe as possible. In California, the Secretary of State is the top election official, tasked with overseeing voting equipment, security and accessibility.

“Today we become the first state in the nation to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by mailing every registered voter a ballot,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla said of the decision. “We are meeting our obligation to provide an accessible, secure, and safe election this November. Sending every registered voter a ballot by mail is smart policy and absolutely the right thing to do during this COVID-19 pandemic.”

With the November election looming, states are moving swiftly to adapt to the unique challenges posed by a general election in the midst of a pandemic. The primary season offered a preview of the chaos that could come for states that fail to rethink their voting systems, particularly in Wisconsin, where photos depicted long lines and crowded polling stations. As many other states bought time by pushing their own primaries back, Wisconsin went ahead with in-person voting on its original date in spite of warnings from health experts and concern among voters.

While some political figures—President Trump chief among them—seek to frame vote-by-mail as a partisan issue, the reality is that election officials in both red and blue states are looking at sending residents ballots by mail come November.

Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii already safely use vote-by-mail as their primary method of voting and incidents of voter fraud in those states—and other states that allow some voting via absentee ballot—are statistically negligible.

Vote-by-mail should be having its moment. Will it?

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Vote-by-mail should be having its moment. Will it?

It’s a mark of 2020 that the image of throngs of Americans flocking to polling places to exercise their right to vote, once a heartening symbol of democracy in action, is now a nightmare scenario that could visit widespread death on unsuspecting communities nationwide.

In the midst of a viral outbreak that’s infected more than half a million people and swiftly claimed more than 20,000 lives in the U.S. alone, the country is grappling with the question of how Americans will safely cast their votes in November’s election—and time is running out.

A number of state officials have pushed back their primaries to protect residents, but last week’s Wisconsin primary, with its long lines, uneven protective measures and shuttered polling places demonstrated a worst case scenario for what November’s general presidential election could look like if states don’t quickly implement a Plan B.

But a handful of lawmakers pushing for a more equitable voting system don’t believe we need a full-on Plan B to rescue the election, just a scaled-up version of systems in place that millions already use to cast their ballots each election cycle. Early voting, absentee voting and mail-in voting have all ticked upward in the last 20 years. Five states now use vote-by-mail as their primary way of voting: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii. The military also relies on mail-in absentee voting for those deployed overseas. By 2018, one in four Americans who voted did so through the mail.

Residents wait in long lines to vote in a presidential primary election outside the Riverside High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 7, 2020. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP) (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

With the economy still frozen in place, Congress is working on another big coronavirus relief package, though efforts are at a political standstill for the moment. Proposing their own bill, Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden are striving to get vote-by-mail provisions into the next relief package. “… It is wrong to shortchange our election officials as we provide relief to address the effects of this global pandemic,” Klobuchar said in a statement.

The bill, called the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act (NDEBA), seeks to provide 20 days of early voting for all states, a guarantee that all voters can request to vote with a no-excuse absentee ballot, accommodations for voters who don’t receive an absentee ballot in time and additional funding for the Election Assistance Commission to make the changes.

“We are gonna fight like hell to get our bill in the next COVID-19 package,” Wyden told TechCrunch in an interview.

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States take the lead

Republicans in Congress have yet to show any support for expanded mail-in voting, but a swath of Republican state officials close to the election process have turned to mail voting systems to keep residents safe, including the secretaries of state in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Georgia.

On a bipartisan call led by Sen. Klobuchar with secretaries of state last week, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner was skittish about the idea of a permanent, expanded vote-by-mail system but agreed voters should be allowed to cast their votes safely through the mail during the COVID-19 crisis. He previously announced that all West Virginia voters would be sent application postcards for voting through the mail.

“The Governor, Attorney General, county clerks and I have zealously worked together within state law to balance health concerns with the ease of voting,” Warner said. “We have determined that the absentee voting process is the safest method… Your ballot box is as close as your mailbox.”

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, also a Republican, touted her state’s own system in the bipartisan call.

“Washington state’s vote-by-mail system is accessible, secure, fair, and instills confidence in our voters,” Wyman said, encouraging officials “across the political spectrum” to unify around keeping voters safe and stressing that expanded absentee voting and vote-by-mail “must be options on the table” for 2020.

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On the call, secretaries of state around the U.S. emphasized the need to act quickly to scale up absentee voting systems, stressing that funding, organizing and putting new systems into practice will be a scramble over the next seven months.

President Trump has attacked vote-by-mail systems in recent White House coronavirus briefings and tweets, but there is no evidence that voting through the mail is “fraudulent in many cases” as he has claimed. Trump himself uses mail-in voting to cast his absentee ballot in Florida.

The president’s attacks on expanded vote-by-mail also contradict the CDC’s own guidance for safe elections during the pandemic, which encourage expanded mail-in voting to “minimize direct contact with other people and reduce crowd size at polling stations.”

Out of the billions of absentee votes cast through the mail in the U.S. over a 12 year period, an examination of all known instances of voter fraud found only 491 cases involving absentee voting. With those numbers, Americans are less likely to commit voter fraud than they are to be struck by lightning. In states with vote-by-mail, safeguards built into the system can catch or deter anyone who might tamper with a ballot. In Oregon, which uses forensic signature matching to secure its vote, a poll was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay a $13,000 fine for tampering with two ballots.

Politics aside

Republicans today mostly believe that Democrats would benefit from any effort that might broadly boost voter turnout, a perspective that the president echoed in a recent Fox News interview discussing the early coronavirus relief bill. “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

That package included $400 million to safeguard November’s election—an amount Democrats argue is insufficient—and no requirements that states implement vote-by-mail. But the conversation around vote-by-mail hasn’t always broken down along today’s political lines and the political reality of a broad mail-in voting system is likely nuanced, though untested on a national scale.

An early and vocal proponent of vote-by-mail, Wyden explains that those lines have been redrawn over the years as attitudes toward implementing vote-by-mail have shifted.

“You have to put this in context of where we are,” Wyden said, noting that the debate around vote-by-mail was an “academic thing” two decades ago, with political scientists hashing out which party stood to benefit. In Oregon, other Democrats initially opposed vote-by-mail efforts, believing that because their voters skewed older, Republicans would benefit.

“After all this bickering back and forth on who would benefit, Oregonians put it on the ballot.” In 1998, 69% of voters supported the ballot measure, which passed easily.

In the U.S., implementing any voting changes across the country is politically challenging due to the fact that states oversee and administer their own elections. Even the oversight process varies widely from state to state. Differences aside, many states have expanded absentee voting in recent years.

“Back then when I was introducing those first bills, you didn’t have the number of people voting absentee that you have today,” Wyden said. While voting absentee once required a justification, a “big chunk” of those excuse requirements have given way since then, allowing more people to vote by mail.

“Absentee voting is enormously popular,” Wyden said. “Basically what I tell people… is what we’re really doing with our legislature is kind of upscaling what is already going on—not reinventing the wheel.”

Wyden warns that we’ve already seen the worst case scenario play out in Wisconsin. “You have older voters waiting in line to talk to older poll workers… some had masks, some didn’t.

“[In] Wisconsin, literally in the middle of a pandemic, the legislature said ‘we’re going to put the lives of our people at risk.’ I thought that was very troubling,” Wyden said.

“All I can think of was at this point in the middle of a pandemic, I don’t think this is a partisan issue.”

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Bernie Sanders ends his historic campaign for the presidency

On Wednesday, two-time Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders announced that he would end his bid for the party’s nomination, marking an end to a deeply influential progressive political campaign.

“I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” Sanders said in a livestream Wednesday morning delivering the news. In states with remaining primaries, the former candidate will stay on the ballot in an effort to exert ongoing influence on the Democratic party as it moves toward nominating former Vice President Joe Biden.

“While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not,” Sanders said.

Sanders built momentum quickly in the 2020 race, with strong early showings in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, but his momentum was upended when Biden surged back in South Carolina in late February. With the remaining centrist candidates dropping out in quick succession just before Super Tuesday, a blitz of support recharged the lagging Biden campaign as Sanders struggled to build a winning coalition. After Super Tuesday, it became clear that the Sanders campaign was not driving record turnout among young voters, a critical metric for the campaign’s success.

More than any candidate, Sanders reshaped the Democratic race—and often the entire political conversation—pushing the party left with a tireless message of fair wages, universal health care, and financial reform. It’s not a stretch to argue that the policies core to the Sanders campaign could have provided some protection for the U.S. against the existential threat it’s facing now, with record unemployment, dangerous working conditions for hourly and gig workers, and uninsured Americans left out in the cold.

With Elizabeth Warren out of the race, Sanders appeared to pose the last major Democratic threat of sweeping reform to the tech industry, though some comments from Biden in January suggest otherwise. Over the last few years, the tech industry has faced intense scrutiny for its monopolistic tendencies, questionable labor practices, and the failure of social media platforms to prevent Russia from interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. While Republicans and Democrats largely agree that tech needs to be held responsible for its failings, their motivations and proposed reforms don’t always overlap.

Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

Biden hasn’t suggested that regulating tech would be a central priority for his presidency, but he has stated that breaking up big tech is “something we should take a really hard look at” without making any firm commitment to do so. In January, Biden also said that he believed tech platforms should no longer be shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a deeply controversial policy stance that could upend some of tech’s biggest businesses while causing a cascade of side-effects that could prove extremely consequential for a broad swath of the internet and its users. With Sanders out, Biden will likely be building out his policies with more clarity, and we’ll be following those developments closely.

Sanders’ exit from the 2020 race marks the end of an era, even if his ideals live on in future candidacies. From 2016 to 2020, no Democratic political figure exerted as much influence from the outside, completely transforming the national political conversation. And even out of the race, the leftmost wing of the party Sanders championed continues to wield influence as the 2020 race marches on—influence Biden would be smart to court to expand his support beyond the moderate coalition that paved his way to the nomination.

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Elizabeth Warren for President open-sources its 2020 campaign tech

Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren may have ended her 2020 presidential run, but the tech used to drive her campaign will live on.

Members of her staff announced they would make public the top apps and digital tools developed in Warren’s bid to become the Democratic nominee for president.

“In our work, we leaned heavily on open source technology — and want to contribute back to that community…[by] open-sourcing some of the most important projects of the Elizabeth Warren campaign for anyone to use,” the Warren for President Tech Team said.

In a Medium post, members of the team — including chief technology strategist Mike Conlow and chief technology officer Nikki Sutton — previewed what would be available and why.

“Our hope is that other Democratic candidates and progressive causes will use the ideas and code we developed to run stronger campaigns and help Democrats win,” the post said.

Warren’s tech team listed several of the tools they’ve turned over to the open source universe via GitHub.

One of those tools, Spoke, is a peer to peer texting app, originally developed by MoveOn, which offered the Warren Campaign high volume messaging at a fraction of the costs of other vendor options. The team used it to send four million SMS messages on Super Tuesday alone.

Pollaris is a location lookup tool with an API developed to interface directly with Warren’s official campaign website and quickly direct supporters to their correct polling stations.

One of Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign app, Caucus, designed for calculating delegates. (Image: supplied)

Warren’s tech team will also open-source Switchboard (FE and BE) — which recruited and connected volunteers in primary states — and Caucus App, a delegate calculating and reporting tool.

The campaign’s Redhook tool took in web hook data in real time and experienced zero downtime.

“Our intention in open sourcing it is to demonstrate that some problems campaigns face do not require vendor tools and are solved…efficiently with a tiny bit of code,” said the Tech Team.

Elizabeth Warren ended her 2020 presidential bid on March 4 after failing to win a primary. Among her many policy proposals, the Massachusetts senator had proposed breaking up big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Her campaign will continue to share the tech tools they used on open source channels.

“We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks on all that we did with technology on our campaign,” the team said.

Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

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States strategize to protect voters as COVID-19 changes some primary plans

This week brings another batch of Democratic primaries, this time in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. But a lot has changed since Super Tuesday. Lately, a lot changes every hour.

In a joint statement last Friday, top election officials from the four states with a primary scheduled on March 17 addressed concerns about COVID-19.

“Americans have participated in elections during challenging times in the past, and based on the best information we have from public health officials, we are confident that voters in our states can safely and securely cast their ballots in this election, and that otherwise healthy poll workers can and should carry out their patriotic duties on Tuesday,” they wrote.

Three days after Ohio’s top election official reassured voters that the primaries would continue as planned, the state’s situation seemed to be in flux. On Monday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine supported an eleventh hour lawsuit to push the state’s primary back.

“We cannot tell people to stay inside, but also tell them to go out and vote,” DeWine argued on Twitter.

 

On Monday evening, a state judge rejected the request. Judge Richard Frye ruled that it was too late to make changes to the Ohio primary and that there was no assurance that the risk posed by the novel coronavirus could still be present months later.

“The doctors giving briefings in the national media suggest it could be months before we get to the point where there is stability,” Frye said of the decision.

While Gov. DeWine requested that the primary be pushed back to June, an attorney for the Ohio Democratic Party requested that it be moved to April 28, the same day as Connecticut, New York and other states in the Northeast. But as of Monday night, Ohio’s primary will continue as planned.

In a Facebook post over the weekend, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the state’s top election official, reassured voters that Ohio’s 88 county election boards have been working with the CDC and the Ohio Department of Health on safety practices to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

“Voters should practice social distance in line, and though every effort is made to avoid it, some lines may be a bit longer, but none of this should discourage voters from participating,” LaRose said in a statement Sunday.

Ahead of its own Tuesday primary, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs issued some safety guidelines on Twitter.

In a statement, Hobbs said that the decision to continue with voting was “not made lightly” and that there might not be a safer time in the near future for voting to take place.

“My message to voters is, stay informed and make a decision that is right for you,” Hobbs said, mentioning curbside voting locations and drive-up ballot drop boxes.

On Twitter, Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee encouraged residents to vote early and reassured residents that the state is “aware of voters’ concerns over #COVID19.” In an op-ed, Lee also noted that voters in assisted living facilities will be allowed to vote “without public exposure.”

In some states, polling locations have been relocated to mitigate the risks of the coronavirus. In any state voting Tuesday, primary voters are encouraged to double check their polling location before heading out to vote.

The state of Louisiana was the first to postpone its primary, which was set for April 4. Now, voting will take place on June 20. Georgia pushed its primary back two months from March 24 to May 19. The state of Kentucky will delay its own voting from May 19 to June 23.