Hasen is right that “the most significant threats to election administration come from Trump-aligned officials at the state and local level….” Local election workers have to follow the direction of local election leaders, so corrupt local election leaders weaken protections against corruption.

How an Election Fight in Arizona Could Affect the Nation’s Midterms

A bitter struggle between Maricopa County’s Republican-dominated Board of Supervisors and a Trump-allied official over control of elections has ramifications far beyond Greater Phoenix.

nytimes.com

Rick Hasen @rickhasen.bsky.social · 2mo ago

#ELB: “Democrats warn of a Trump election takeover. What’s really happening?” https://electionlawblog.org/?p=157270

Most states have resisted the Justice Department’s demands that they hand over sensitive voter-roll information. Judges across the country - including in Maine - have ruled that the DOJ does not have authority to demand this data.

NEW: The Trump administration has shut down a controversial Homeland Security tool it had touted as a way to find noncitizens who’d illegally registered to vote, @propublica.org has learned. 🧵

CDT‘s @alexreevegivens.bsky.social: “Only Congress can preempt state laws, and it has now twice correctly decided not to pursue this misguided and unpopular policy. State officials should not be deterred in their efforts to provide guardrails for #AI.”

The flooding happening in WA state right now is extreme. Homes under water. Evacuations underway. We also have new, PNW-flavored competition for the "shark in the flood water" image from so many hurricanes past. (Just to be REAL CLEAR here, this photo is NOT REAL, and not meant to look real.)

Perhaps relevant today, a framework for understanding how many election rumors mislead.

Kate Starbird@katestarbird.bsky.social · 2y ago

The 2024 election is upon us. Millions of ballots have already been cast. Mail-in ballots are being returned. Early voting is taking place. And dozens of rumors are spreading. So, let me re-introduce our framework for diagnosing how many “evidence-based” rumors mislead:

Couldn’t get a more clear example of Wilhoit’s theory of conservatism: “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Anthony L. Fisher@anthonylfisher.bsky.social · last yr.

The "from my cold dead hands" crowd wants to ban people from owning guns

I've had this headline rattling around in my brain since January and I finally wrote it. Been hearing too many people in the startup world buying into the neoractionary nonsense that maybe a little light fascism is good for silicon valley. It's not. It's very, very bad.

Techdirt@techdirt.com · last yr.

Fascism For First Time Founders Over the last year or so I've seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump train. Yes, there are the big name folks who everyone knows about and who…

Who Goes MAGA? With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper’s, “Who Goes Nazi?” remains a worthwhile read on the cultural archetypes of who is drawn to fascism, and who would never go down such a path. It felt like it could use a modern updating, however. Update: Just after I…

Drawing on some of my work from the past year at the Center for an Informed Public, I published a piece in Lawfare with my colleague Stephen Prochaska.

Lawfare@lawfaremedia.org · last yr.

@ashlynba.bsky.social and Stephen Prochaska explore the ways the MAGA movement uses courts and litigation to propel fringe rumors about election fraud into mainstream consciousness. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-...

The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered. Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they've sided with the tech lobby over and over again. Their inaction is deadly.

This is an extraordinary and courageous piece of writing that wrestles with one of the great challenges of this moment: How do you decide whether to remain a part of broken institutions to try to fix them from within?

Alondra Nelson@alondra.bsky.social · last yr.

"For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging." Today I am resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council. I wrote about my decision in TIME. time.com/7285045/resi...

whenever i hear mark zuckerberg says the research meta is funding says social media isn’t bad for people, i think of tobacco execs saying smoking isn’t bad for your health

let’s be clear that personalisation amounts to determining a person’s future based on recurring patterns of the past. if you belong to a groups that society has not been kind to in the past (black & brown, LGBTQI, poor, disabled, etc), AI personalisation ensures your future encodes past injustice

WA Sen. Maria Cantwell is leading a #bipartisan push to give Congress more authority in setting #tariffs. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Cantwell leads bipartisan push to give Congress control over tariffs

Under the new legislation, all new tariffs would expire in 60 days unless they are approved by Congress. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley is a co-sponsor.

seattletimes.com

1/ 🏳️‍⚧️ Today is #TransDayOfVisibility so let’s talk about the disparate impact of AI on this community. From security checkpoint systems that use a binary definition of gender to biased facial recognition technologies, AI is failing transgender and nonbinary people in critical ways.

Just so we’re all clear, the Supreme Court *expressly ruled* that the president cannot fire FTC commissioners without cause in 1935’s Humphrey’s Executor. Trump’s action here is brazenly illegal under any interpretation of the law as it stands. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Exclusive: Trump fires both Democratic commissioners at FTC, sources say

President Donald Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, two sources familiar with the situation said, in another major test of the independence of regulatory agencies.

reuters.com

I can't believe we're gonna relitigate humphrey's executor. what's next. marbury v. madison? www.theverge.com/news/632267/...

Democratic FTC commissioners say they were just ‘illegally fired’ by President Trump

It’s the latest power grab over the independent agency.

theverge.com

Trump's freezing of all civil rights cases at the DOJ is not part of an anti-DEI agenda, but an anti-civil rights agenda. DOJ was *founded* to protect Black rights during Reconstruction. That this difference is unclear speaks to the success of conservative propagandists and the failures of liberals.

A really powerful thread 🧵

Mishell Baker@mishellbaker.bsky.social · 2y ago

Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce. Bear with me for a second while I try to explain.

BREAKING NEWS 🚨: Who supplied information to X users during the Trump assassination attempts? Our latest report dives deep into this and discovers that the news supply on X is becoming oligarchical, where few prominent accounts dominate the news supply and shape the discourse in key events.

Breaking News in the Hands of a Few: Newsbrokering on X During the Trump Assassination Attempts

Research Report

uwcip.substack.com

A quick read from @mikecaulfield.bsky.social on the pet eating rumors in Springfield. Do rumors cause violence? The answer Knopf provides and Mike summarizes here makes perfect sense to me ad a political scientist where rumors have potential but not sufficient to cause violence on their own.

The book that explains how the Springfield cat rumors put people at risk

Knopf's Rumors, Race, and Riots (1975) remains one of the best works on how misinformation fuels and sustains hate.

open.substack.com

The false narrative of "non-citizen voters" is a major theme of election rumors (and outright misinformation) in 2024. There's a whole cottage industry of creators generating "non citizen voters" content and the Heritage Foundation is getting in on the action: www.nytimes.com/2024/09/07/u...

Heritage Foundation Spreads Deceptive Videos About Noncitizen Voters

The right-wing think tank has been pushing misinformation about voting into social media feeds. The Georgia secretary of state’s office called one video “a stunt.”

nytimes.com

Claims that "strange" anomalies and/or patterns in voter registration data indicate fraud are often unfounded, and reflect misconceptions about data or election law. Read my recent piece w/ @katestarbird.bsky.social here! ⤵️ www.cip.uw.edu/2024/05/14/w...

Examining mischaracterizations of voter registration data in Washington state

There are often many explanations for why patterns and outliers occur in a dataset.

cip.uw.edu