Mission Everywhere

The election process is working.  A  long-building “chaos” narrative  being pushed by President Donald Trump suggests that the election is fatally flawed, fraud is rampant, and no institutions other than Trump himself can be trusted. There is no evidence for any of that, and as the election math increasingly turns against him, the actual election systems around America continue functioning well. Nothing about the 2020 elections is normal, of course, because nothing about 2020 is normal. The fact that the vote count is slower than usual is unavoidably stressful—but it’s also  exactly what officials and experts have said  for months would happen as every vote is counted.  “I think how the election process has played out has been remarkable,” says David Levine, the elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “I think the entire country owes a tremendous gratitude to state and local election officials and those that have worked closely...

So Election Day is over, but the election continues. The world’s attention has turned to a set of swing states still counting important mail-in votes, particularly Pennsylvania. So what exactly is happening today? How are counts happening? Is the election fair and secure? “I urge everyone to remain patient,” Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said in a press conference today, “We are going to accurately count every single ballot.”  “The vote count, as I’ve said many times, is never done on the day of election night. The counties are doing this accurately as quickly as they possibly can.” Across the state, mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day are still arriving—don’t forget there have been significant postal delays—and so counting continues. The Republican state legislature declined to change Pennsylvania law, which meant that processing of over 2.5 million mail-in votes could only begin on Tuesday morning, while other states started the process m...

The election results will start to come in as early as 7pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, when seven states begin closing the polls. The next few hours will see more polls close around the country, more votes processed, more counts updated. But we won’t have the final result that night. This isn’t unusual : In the US, counting votes and officially certifying them always goes on longer than Election Day, and the coronavirus means the counting will probably take longer than that. But on Sunday, Axios reported that President Trump intends to prematurely declare victory if it looks like he’s leading in the early returns, even if there are still millions of votes left to be counted. He has denied this specific claim, but it is in line with his long campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the election , and matches his promise to use lawyers to stop ballot counting in Pennsylvania as soon as polls close—even though the state will still have many mail-in ballots left to count and report.  ...

During the 2016 primary season, Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard had an unusual political strategy. Instead of targeting Republican base voters—the ones who show up for every election—he focused on the intersection of two other groups: people who knew of Donald Trump, and people who had never voted in a primary before. These were both large groups.  Because of his TV career and ability to court controversy, Trump was already a household name. Meanwhile, about half America’s potential voters, nearly 100 million people , don’t vote in presidential elections, let alone primaries. The overlap between the groups was significant. If Trump could mobilize even a small percentage of those people, he could clinch the nomination, and Braynard was willing to put in the work.  His strategy, built from polls, research, and studies of voting behavior, focused on two goals in particular. The first was registering, engaging, educating, and turning out non-voters, the largest electoral bl...

The 2020 election may be among the most consequential in modern memory, but it’s not just candidates that are on the ballot. Voters in 34 states are deciding on 129 measures, including several that touch on the way we use technology. Among these are three initiatives in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan that could affect access to and control of data, with national implications for both citizen and consumer rights.  State and local initiatives are typically bellwethers, with successful ones serving as models for other states. And in areas such as data and technology, where there aren’t always federal regulations, state laws can often become the de facto national policy when companies choose to match the highest regulatory standard. Here are three ballot initiatives worth watching on November 3.  California: Will Proposition 24 expand privacy protections?  California’s Proposition 24, the “Consumer Personal Information Law and Agency Initiative,” seeks to expand...

In the past month, US President Donald Trump and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie were diagnosed with covid-19 and spent time in the hospital, just like tens of thousands of other Americans nearly every day since the pandemic began. But Trump and Christie were special cases. They received experimental covid-19 treatments that are not readily available to the general public. They have both since recovered and publicly acknowledged that US companies granted them access to drugs still off-limits to the vast majority of Americans with the disease. Their treatment has generated a lot of conversation about the perception that the rich and famous have priority access to health care. What has received much less attention is whether these two men circumvented the rules to get access to experimental drugs outside clinical trials, and if so, how their actions could affect drug development. Seriously ill patients with no other options are permitted by law to receive drugs in developme...

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The 2020 “Support Black Lives at MIT” petition by the Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA) and Black Students’ Union (BSU): http://bgsa.mit.edu/sbl2020 The Tech’s article on student evaluation of the 2015 BSU/BGSA recommendations: https://thetech.com/2020/06/02/letter-bsa-bgsa-recommendations 2015 BSU Recommendations: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13wGeu4Soj5a5pO0J-33uB0qmQtjJhcny/view 2015 BGSA Recommendations: http://bgsa.mit.edu/recommendations What happens to black women and girls in a world without policing? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yb3kcfIZVi4&feature=youtu.be What does America with defunded police look like? Here is one version: . @AOC 's answer to "what does defund the police look like?" was "a suburb" and that is totally gonna be my answer from now on pic.twitter.com/JIlIfngMCv — Ashley (@ashley_quan) June 11, 2020 from MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/3oa6DQu

Day by day, the evidence is mounting that Facebook is bad for society. Last week Channel 4 News in London tracked down Black Americans in Wisconsin who were targeted by President Trump’s 2016 campaign with negative advertising about Hillary Clinton—“deterrence” operations to suppress their vote. A few weeks ago, meanwhile, I was included in a discussion organized by the Computer History Museum, called Decoding the Election . A fellow panelist, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager Robby Mook, described how Facebook worked closely with the Trump campaign. Mook refused to have Facebook staff embedded inside Clinton’s campaign because it did not seem ethical, while Trump’s team welcomed the opportunity to have an insider turn the knobs on the social network’s targeted advertising.  Taken together, these two pieces of information are damning for the future of American democracy; Trump’s team openly marked 3.5 million Black Americans for deterrence in their data set, while Facebo...

SpaceX has already launched more than 700 Starlink satellites, with thousands more due to come online in the years ahead. Their prime mission is to provide high-speed internet virtually worldwide, including to many remote locations that have lacked reliable service to date. Now, research funded by the US Army has concluded that the growing mega-constellation could have a secondary purpose: by doubling as a low-cost, highly accurate and almost unjammable alternative to GPS. The new method would use existing Starlink satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to provide near-global navigation services.  In a non-peer reviewed paper , Todd Humphreys and Peter Iannucci at the  Radionavigation Laboratory  at The University of Texas at Austin claim to have devised a system that uses the same satellites, piggybacking on traditional GPS signals, to deliver location precision up to ten times as good as GPS, and much less prone to interference.  Weak signals The Global Pos...

The covid-19 pandemic shocked the world and generated high levels of economic, political, and social uncertainty. And for many people, the virus compounded the growing sense of uncertainty they already felt in their lives as a result of automation, geopolitical tensions, and widening inequalities. With the many sudden changes that covid-19 has brought, planning for the future can feel impossible. Even short-term decisions—What will we do this weekend? Should I send my kids to school?—now require us to process a broad set of data and considerations. Trying to envision life months or a couple of years down the road may seem futile or even foolish. When faced with high degrees of uncertainty, we tend to worry about all that might happen, and often do so in an unstructured manner. This kind of worry can spur knee-jerk reactions and inhibit sound decision-making, which is especially problematic in the middle of a global crisis when so much is at stake. Strategic foresight offers an alter...

Daniel Schrag has spent most of his life working on climate change. He studied the planet’s ancient warming periods early in his career, served as a climate advisor to President Barack Obama, and is now director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment. But when he imagines the possibilities if President Donald Trump is reelected, climate change isn’t the issue he’s most concerned about. “I immediately worry about democratic institutions,” he says. “I worry about profound and deep corruption at all levels, including the Justice Department.” “The good news is that four years later, or whenever this ends, there are still a lot of things you can do for climate,” says Schrag. “But that’s not true if we have decimated the basic institutions of democracy.” I heard similar responses again and again as I polled climate scientists and policy experts on what a Trump reelection would mean. After years of watching the administration unravel climate policies, subver the rule of law , stack court...