“The most alarming move from the Justice Department lately came from a surprising source: the US attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, David Freed.
Many details about the underlying situation here are still murky. But on Monday, Freed’s office and the FBI began “an inquiry into reports of potential issues with a small number of mail-in ballots at the Luzerne County Board of Elections,” Freed said in a statement.
If there are reports of issues with ballots, the Justice Department should naturally investigate. But the way this information was dribbled out seemed designed to bolster President Trump’s baseless claims that mail voting is deeply flawed — when Freed’s actual findings have so far revealed no such thing.”
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“And indeed, Trump campaign spokesperson Matt Wolking quickly tweeted out Freed’s statement, writing: “BREAKING: FBI finds military mail-in ballots discarded in Pennsylvania. 100% of them were cast for President Trump. Democrats are trying to steal the election.” (Wolking eventually deleted the tweet after it had been retweeted thousands of times.)
But Freed’s longer letter about his findings so far, released later Thursday, contains nothing to back up the inflammatory “steal the election” claim. Indeed, it seemed entirely possible that the military ballots were opened accidentally because the election board staff thought they could have been ballot requests instead of the ballots themselves.
It’s also unclear whether the local election board’s practice was simply in keeping with a recent ruling from the Pennsylvania supreme court — that any mailed ballots lacking an inner “secrecy envelope” have to be discarded. Republicans in the state have supported this ruling, and Freed’s statement did not comment on the issue.
So it’s uncertain whether local officials did anything wrong at all, and there’s certainly been no evidence of a dastardly plot to steal the election. Yet Freed’s statement seemed designed to bolster Trump’s baseless claims to this effect. And ABC News’ Alexander Mallin reported that Barr had personally briefed Trump about the investigation, explaining why the White House was so prepared to pounce.”
https://www.vox.com/21454758/european-union-asylum-migration-plan
“The study, which surveyed 13,200 US adults in the first two weeks of August, found some limited recovery with respect to employment: Of all those who said they had lost a job, a third have returned to their old job, and 15 percent say they have a new job.”
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“while 58 percent of upper- and middle-income adults who lost a job due to the coronavirus have returned to their old job or gotten a new one, only 43 percent of lower-income adults have been able to do the same.”
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“reason for concern. The jobs report signaled a slowdown from earlier in the summer: the economy added 4.8 million jobs in June, and 1.7 million in July.”
““Herd immunity is the only way we’re going to move to a post-pandemic world,” says Bill Hanage, an epidemiology researcher at Harvard. “The problem is, how do you get to it?”
Typically, the term herd immunity is thought of in the context of vaccination campaigns against contagious viruses like measles. The concept helps public health officials think through the math of how many people in a population need to be vaccinated to prevent outbreaks.
With Covid-19, since we don’t yet have a vaccine, the discussion has centered on herd immunity through natural infection, which comes with a terrible cost. Confusing matters, too, is the persistent and erroneous wishful thinking by some who say herd immunity has already been reached, or will be reached sooner than scientists are saying.”
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“Hypothetically, yes, there are situations under which herd immunity to Covid-19 could be achieved. Manaus, Brazil, an Amazonian city of around 2 million people, experienced one of the most severe Covid-19 outbreaks in the world. At the peak in the spring and early summer, the city’s hospitals were completely full, the New York Times reported.
During this period, there were four times as many deaths as normal for that point in the year. But then, over the summer, the outbreak sharply died down. Researchers now estimate between 44 percent and 66 percent of the city’s population was infected with the virus, which means it’s possible herd immunity has been achieved there. (This research has yet to be peer-reviewed.)
But that’s much higher than 22 percent, and the cost of this herd immunity was immense: Between 1 in 500 and 1 in 800 residents died there, the researchers estimate.”
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“the oft-cited example of Sweden, which has pursued a laxer social distancing strategy than its European peers (partially with the goal of building up herd immunity in younger people, while protecting older residents and trying to keep hospitals from exceeding capacity), has paid a price, too: a much higher death rate than fellow Scandinavian countries.”
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“Regardless of the exact figure, as a country, the US is nowhere near reaching this threshold. In New York City, which experienced the worst coronavirus outbreak in the US, around 20 percent of residents got infected and 23,000-plus people died. Overall, a new Lancet study — which drew its data from a sample of dialysis patients — suggests that fewer than 10 percent of people nationwide have been exposed to the virus. That means we have a long, sick, and deadly way to go if the US is going to reach herd immunity through natural infection.
So far, there have been more than 200,000 deaths in the United States, with relatively few infections. There’s so much more potential for death if the virus spreads to true herd immunity levels. ”
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“The herd immunity threshold can be lower than estimated. But hypothetically, the threshold could be higher as well. It’s also the case that the herd immunity threshold can change over time. Remember the simple math of how herd immunity calculated: The threshold is dependent on the contagiousness of the virus.
Well, the contagiousness of the virus isn’t a fixed biological constant. It’s the result of the biology of the virus interacting with human biology, with our environments, with our society. As seasons change, as our behavior changes, so can the transmissibility of the virus. The herd immunity threshold is not one fixed target.”
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“Once you hit the herd immunity threshold, it doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. After the threshold is reached, “all it means is that on average, each infection causes less than one ongoing infection,” Hanage says. “That’s of limited use if you’ve already got a million people infected.” If each infection causes, on average, 0.8 new infections, the epidemic will slow. But 0.8 isn’t zero. If a million people are infected at the time herd immunity is hit, per Hanage’s example, those already infected people may infect 800,000 more.”
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““I think it’s impossible to think that you can have infections only among younger people, and not let them spread to other groups with populations that might be more vulnerable,“ Tedijanto says. People just don’t separately themselves so neatly into risk groups like that.
“We can try and insulate” older people, Hanage says. “We can do a very good job of insulating them. But the fact is, the larger the amount of infection outside them, the higher the chance that something’s going to get into them.””
“The confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, back in 1991, was a squeaker: 52 yeas, 48 nays — the narrowest margin in over a century.
The senators who voted to put him on the bench had won their most recent elections with a combined tally of 42 million votes. But the senators who voted “nay” were elected by 46 million. Thomas became the first Supreme Court justice to be confirmed by a bloc of senators who had been elected by a minority of voters.
Then it happened again. And again and again. The senators who confirmed Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh received millions fewer votes than the senators who opposed their confirmations.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement seems certain to join the ranks of these “minority justices.” Even if President Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, wins the support of every Republican senator, including moderate hold-outs like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, all those senators combined received 13 million fewer votes than their colleagues across the aisle.
With this new confirmation, the Supreme Court will enter a particularly undemocratic new era. For the first time since senators were directly elected, a controlling majority of the court will have been put there by senators who most voters didn’t choose. (And of course, the last three will have been nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.)”
“Oregon votes only by mail. It has done so for nearly two decades, after voters approved a ballot measure in 1998. Across Oregon, registered voters are sent a ballot, and they can either mail it back or drop it off.”
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“Other western states, including Colorado, Washington, and Utah, have since adopted similar systems in the years since. Advocates say it’s as safe as in-person voting, cost-effective, and boosts turnout. They argue it could — or should — be the future of how America votes.”
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“The number of Americans voting by mail has steadily increased in the past decade. In 2018, about 25 percent of all voters cast their ballots by mail. That number could about double in 2020. Beyond the states that already do it, this year, states like California, where counties already had many voters casting ballots by mail, are now also sending ballots to registered voters. Others, like Vermont and New Jersey, are mailing out ballots for the first time.”
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“Republicans, not Democrats, were the early champions of vote by mail in Oregon.”
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“Oregon’s vote-by-mail system has safeguards in place. Registered voters have their signatures on file — either by mailing a voter registration card to election officials, or by opting-in to registration directly when they get or renew a license. When it comes time to vote, election officials mail ballots to registered voters, which they typically receive about two to three weeks before an election.
The ballot contains a few things: the ballot itself; a “secrecy envelope” that the ballot goes inside once it’s marked; and a return envelope, which now even has the postage prepaid so voters don’t have to cover the cost of return postage.
Once you make your choices on your ballot, you slip it into the secrecy envelope, seal it up, slip that into the return envelope and seal it. Then you read and sign the statement printed on the back of the envelope, which basically says that you verify that you are you. Once that’s done, you either send it back by mail or put it into a secure drop box — either method requires that election officials receive the ballot before 8 pm on Election Day. Oregonians can also track their ballot to make sure it’s been received and counted.
Only about one-third of Oregonians actually send their ballots back through the postal service, instead placing them in secure drop boxes at places like libraries or movie theaters or even McDonald’s.”
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“Each ballot has a unique bar code specific to each voter, so once the ballot is received, election officials can verify the signature on that ballot envelope to make sure it matches the one on that voter’s registration. There are often multiple reviews to guarantee it’s a match — Druckenmiller said if someone questions the signature, two other people will review it; if they’re not sure, he makes the final call. If the signature doesn’t match, voters are notified and given the opportunity to remedy that, in what’s known as a “cure” process.
But once a signature is verified, the ballot is separated from the return envelope so the ballot can be tabulated. Along the way, there are layers of auditing to make sure the number of ballots received matches the tabulated numbers for the vote count. Many see mail-in ballots as more secure because there’s a paper trail, and so cant be hacked.
Oregon election officials get updates from public records, like change-of-address notifications and death records, to check against the voter registration databases. “We use the Postal Service. When most of us move, we change our address, right?” Paul Gronke, a professor of political science and director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, told me. “And so actually, vote by mail works really well and has very little deadwood. The rolls are very clean.””
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“According to the Oregon secretary of state’s office, in 2016, officials referred 54 cases of possible voter fraud to law enforcement. Of those, 22 people — representing just 0.0001 percent of all ballots cast that year — were found guilty of having voted in two states.
Election officials in Oregon I spoke to told me that vote by mail is also much more efficient to oversee than polling-place elections, where sites are spread out across the county.”
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“An April 2020 YouGov poll found that 77 percent of adults in Oregon backed vote by mail, compared to 11 percent who opposed it. Indeed, voters in states that have vote by mail — whether in bluer states like Washington or redder states like Utah — all tend to overwhelmingly like it.
It’s convenient. Voters don’t have to take off from work, or spend time waiting in line at a polling place.”
“Democrats are mostly ignoring a massive group of voters who are becoming an increasingly crucial part of their base: people who don’t have any religion at all.”
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“The unaffiliated are a key demographic for Democratic candidates in particular. More than one-third of the people who voted for Clinton in 2016 were religiously unaffiliated, making them just as electorally important for Democrats as white evangelical Protestants are for Republicans. Yet despite constantly hearing about the importance of white evangelical voters in an election cycle, Democratic politicians have been slow to embrace the growing number of nonreligious people who vote for them. Why?
In the past, the challenges of organizing the religiously unaffiliated have made it easy to understand why Democrats haven’t made a real effort to appeal to them more. As most don’t regularly gather like a church congregation, religiously unaffiliated Americans can be difficult to reach. A lack of institutional leadership also means there aren’t many prominent people or groups showing up to nudge politicians to pay attention to their issues. And despite rising tolerance for atheists and nonreligious people in American culture, overt appeals to the nonreligious still run the risk of turning off the majority of voters who are people of faith.”
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“1 in every 4 Americans who are now religiously unaffiliated, including 40 percent of millennials. Meanwhile, there’s no sign that nonreligious Americans are returning to religion as they get older.”
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“One reason we haven’t heard as much about religiously unaffiliated people is because they are often dismissed as less likely to vote, even as their share of the total population has grown. But that perception of nonreligious voters as less engaged could be increasingly wrong, as there are indications that the voting gap between secular and religious Americans has shrunk in recent elections.”
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“there are ways to make appeals to secular voters that can also speak to religious Democrats — for example, emphasizing the importance of protecting religious minorities and nonreligious people through the separation of church and state, or focusing on science-based issues like climate change. That kind of big-tent strategy isn’t without risk, though. “The last thing Democrats want is to be portrayed as the godless party, because that would probably turn off a lot of voters,” Campbell said. But he added that Democrats may be missing a big political opportunity if they don’t start thinking about ways to engage with nonreligious voters as a group.”
“Asian American voters didn’t always lean Democratic. In 1992, less than a third of Asian Americans voted Democratic. But nowadays, most Asian Americans identify as Democrats, with more than half saying they plan to back Joe Biden and less than a third saying they’d vote for President Trump, according to the latest Asian American Voter Survey released this week.”
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“The different groups that comprise Asian American voters are divided over how much — and whether — they will back Biden for president.1 For instance, Filipino Americans are more evenly divided among supporting Biden and Trump than Japanese Americans. And Indian Americans, who have been reliably Democratic for years, now show some signs of slowly shifting to the right. Finally, Vietnamese Americans lean pretty consistently Republican.”
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“it’s important that we don’t read too much into one survey. Only about 250 respondents were in each subgroup, putting the margin of error at +/- 6 percentage points for each group.”
“the Senate is an enormous problem for Democrats given the current political coalitions, in which Democrats are dominant in cities while Republicans triumph in rural areas. And because the Senate is responsible for confirming Supreme Court picks, that means the Supreme Court is a huge problem for Democrats too. Sure, Democrats might win back the Senate this year — indeed, they were slight favorites to do so before the Ginsburg news. But in the long run, they’re likely to lose it more often than not.”
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“the overall U.S. population (including Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico) is split almost exactly evenly between these buckets: 25 percent rural, 23 percent exurban/small town, 27 percent suburban/small city, and 25 percent urban core/large city.”
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“Because there are a lot of largely rural, low-population states, the average state — which reflects the composition of the Senate — has 35 percent of its population in rural areas and only 14 percent in urban core areas, even though the country as a whole — including dense, high-population states like New York, Texas and California — has about 25 percent of the population in each group. That’s a pretty serious skew. It means that the Senate, de facto, has two or three times as much rural representation as urban core representation … even though there are actually about an equal number of voters in each bucket nationwide.”
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“Since rural areas tend to be whiter, it means the Senate represents a whiter population, too.”
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“In a strong national environment for Democrats, in other words, the Senate can be competitive. Generally speaking, at least. A Democratic-leaning environment wasn’t enough to overcome the Senate’s baseline GOP-lean and a bad map in 2018. Democrats lost seats. And in an average year — and certainly in a year like 2014 where Republicans have the advantage — Democrats face dire prospects in the Senate.”
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“despite their current 47-53 deficit in the Senate, Democratic senators actually represent slightly more people than Republicans.”
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“the Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole, which means that Democrats are likely to win it only in the event of a near-landslide in their favor nationally. That’s likely to make the Republican majority on the Supreme Court pretty durable.”
“One of the biggest factors in a Hispanic voter’s political identity is how long his or her family has been in the United States. For instance, foreign-born Latinos and the U.S.-born children of Latino immigrants tend to be more Democratic than Latinos whose families have been in the U.S. for at least three generations. According to Latino Decisions’s election-eve poll, first-generation Hispanic Americans1 were 12 percentage points more likely than third- or higher-generation Hispanic Americans to support Clinton in 2016 (84 percent vs. 72 percent), although both groups strongly supported her over Trump.
“Many Latino Americans can trace their family history to before the United States was the United States,” says Melissa Michelson, a professor at Menlo College who studies Latino politics. (Specifically, 32 percent of Latino registered voters are third generation or higher, according to Pew Research Center’s 2019 National Survey of Latinos.) “And they have a very different perspective from folks who are closer to the immigration experience.”
Gary Segura, a co-founder and senior partner at Latino Decisions, sees both economic and cultural factors at play. First, higher-generation Hispanic Americans are likelier to be higher income, which nudges them toward the Republican side of the aisle. But their Hispanic identity also tends to be weaker. For instance, a 2017 Pew report found that only about one-third of self-identified Hispanics whose families have been in the U.S. for at least three generations had parents who took them to Hispanic cultural celebrations or who spoke often about their heritage while growing up, and relatively few live in predominantly Hispanic or Latino neighborhoods. According to that Pew report, Latinos are more likely than white or Black people to marry people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds — which means that Latinos with deeper family roots in the U.S. are also more likely to be of mixed ancestry. Simply put, the longer a Hispanic family has lived in the U.S., the likelier they are to have assimilated — and vote more like white Americans, who lean toward the Republican Party.”