MI5 moves UK Terrorism threat level to “SEVERE”
65 by neom | 32 comments on Hacker News.
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Kim Jong-un: fragile and under pressure but he won’t give up
The Observer The North Korean leader’s surprise freeze of his nuclear programme is less a genuine move than a diplomatic manoeuvre,...
Tuesday, 3 November 2020
I’m obsessed with The West Wing’s truly wild Electoral College maps
The pioneers of a bold new Electoral College map. | NBC/Getty Images
A Democrat winning South Carolina? A Republican winning Vermont? C’mon!
True fans of Aaron Sorkin’s center-left fantasia The West Wing (a show that has plenty of flaws but that also makes for magnificent comfort food sometimes) know that the series takes place in an alternate timeline where America has presidential elections in the years when our reality has midterm elections and vice versa. For instance, Democratic President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) was voted into office in 1998 and then again in 2002, and the series concludes with the election of Democrat Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) to the presidency in 2006.
Some West Wing fans have speculated (mostly in, like, online forums and comment sections) that the reason for this is that in the world of the show, Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 triggered a special presidential election that year (instead of leading to Gerald Ford ascending to the presidency, as happened in our reality). But the fact remains: The West Wing’s reality is not our own.
Perhaps that explains the show’s truly out-there Electoral College maps.
We see two presidential elections during the series’ run — Bartlet’s reelection in 2002 and Santos’s election in 2006 — and the electoral maps it cooks up for them are, well, they’re weird.
Here’s the one for the 2002 reelection of President Bartlet, courtesy of the West Wing fan wiki:
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22010671/2002_Election.png)
westwing.fandom.com
Now, in the 2002 election of the West Wing universe, President Bartlet won with an 11-point edge in the popular vote, which translated to 419 out of 538 electoral votes, with the other 119 taken by his Republican challenger Robert Ritchie. (Ritchie, alas, never realized he was running against the protagonist of a TV show, which would have been helpful information for his campaign to have.) I don’t really know why Bartlet would be that popular but for the fact of Sorkin stacking the deck in his favor, but let’s go with it.
At first blush, the map above is pretty darn odd. Bartlet wins a bunch of traditional Democratic strongholds on the West Coast and in the Northeast. But he also wins the Dakotas and Nebraska? And every swing state except notoriously swingy Florida (which the show said Bartlet won in 1998)? And the strip of states that borders the Mississippi River, from Minnesota down to Louisiana? Yeah, Democratic candidate Bill Clinton won that Mississippi River strip in 1992 and 1996, but he was from Arkansas. Bartlet (from New Hampshire) boasts no such geographical advantage.
Once you understand that Bartlet won the popular vote by 11 points, however, all sorts of goofy things become plausible. When a presidential candidate wins by a double-digit margin in the popular vote, states you wouldn’t expect them to win flip to that candidate’s column (though double-digit popular vote winners also typically sweep all the swing states, so Florida still doesn’t make sense). In our world, for instance, Clinton won reelection in 1996 with an 8.5 percent edge in the popular vote, and he won a number of states people might not have predicted him to win, including Arizona, which had been a Republican stronghold to that point (and which flipped back to George W. Bush in 2000).
Regardless: I don’t know that I would predict the Dakotas and Nebraska to fall into the blue-state column, even in a Democratic-friendly year, but maybe Bartlet had an amazing agricultural policy I’m forgetting about.
Anyway, the even more bizarre West Wing electoral map is the one from the show’s version of 2006:
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22010704/2006election.png)
westwing.fandom.com
The obviously wild thing here is Democratic Santos winning Texas and Republican Arnold Vinick winning California, but Santos is from Texas and Vinick is from California, and the “home state effect” apparently remains potent in the West Wing universe. (It isn’t really as potent in our universe — Al Gore lost Tennessee in 2000, and Donald Trump didn’t take New York in 2016.)
But even if you account for the series attempting to reverse-engineer an impossibly close election — Vinick wins the popular vote 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent while Santos wins 272 electoral votes to Vinick’s 266 — one that eventually results in both parties deciding to work together for the good of the country (because we’re all Americans!), this map is really strange.
It shows Vinick winning both Ohio and Florida, the two most crucial swing states of the 21st century, then losing South Carolina, when North Carolina is the much swingier state. Conversely, Santos wins South Carolina (somehow) but loses Vermont? There is no way a Democratic candidate loses Vermont to someone running to his right. Similarly, Arizona was still a Republican stronghold in our universe in 2006; I suppose you could argue that Santos, the first major Latino candidate for the presidency, created high turnout among Latino Americans across the Southwest (though somehow not in California). But still!
Anyway, if Donald Trump wins Vermont and Joe Biden wins South Carolina in 2020, I will retract this post with a full apology to the staff of The West Wing. Until then, I continue to believe these electoral maps are a mess, concocted not to reflect reality but, rather, to create drama and high stakes on a TV show. The gall.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/11/3/21548254/west-wing-electoral-college-map-vinick-santos-bartlet-ritchie
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How the US counts votes
The US doesn’t have one election. It has 3,141.
In a normal presidential election year, many Americans go from casting their vote before work in the morning to turning off the TV before bed, secure in their knowledge of who will lead the country for the next four years. But in 2020, there’s a better-than-average chance that won’t happen.
Even before the coronavirus struck, Americans were increasingly voting early or by mail. But in 2020, these numbers are expected to skyrocket, which means states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which don’t start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day, probably won’t have results for several days. This year, voters are facing a pandemic, a deliberately underfunded Postal Service, and the closure of thousands of polling locations in battleground states such as Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, and Texas.
In this video, we take a comprehensive dive into how states count votes. Each of the 3,141 counties in the US has its own rules, but there are some basic steps that are mostly the same across the country. Whether you’re voting in person early or on Election Day, by mail or by dropping off your ballot, we break down some of the differences and similarities in how and when states collect, verify, process, and count votes.
Once you understand how votes are counted, it’s clear just how important each vote really is.
Further reading:
- Voting by mail and absentee voting (MIT Election Data and Science Lab)
- Democracy Diverted: Polling Place Closures and the Right to Vote (The Leadership Conference Education Fund)
- Election night marks the end of one phase of campaign 2020 — and the start of another (Pew)
- How Quickly Will Your Absentee Vote Be Counted? A State-by-State Timeline (The New York Times)
- The Voting Process: From the Ballot Box to the Presidency (NBC News)
- VERIFY: This is how drop box ballots are collected and counted (WUSA9)
- How Mail-in Voting Works In Ohio: A Step-By-Step Guide (WVXU)
This video is the ninth in our series on the 2020 election. We aren’t covering the horse race; instead, we want to explain the stakes of the election through the issues that matter most to you.
You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/videos/2020/11/3/21548310/election-results-count-votes-which-states
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Electoral college map memes are as funny as they are triggering
Who among us hasn't been burned by the sheer sight of an electoral college map?
You may recall that in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote over Donald Trump by nearly three million votes. But because the 2016 electoral college map showed an unexpected sea of red, Trump became president.
The electoral college sucks so much that Trump himself even complained about it on Twitter back in 2012. But the system still exists, so it seems we just have to deal with it!
The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012 Read more...
from Mashable https://mashable.com/article/electoral-college-map-meme/
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Monday, 2 November 2020
NordVPN has already dropped an impressive Black Friday deal
SAVE 68%: A two-year subscription to NordVPN is on sale for £2.86 per month until Dec. 1, and includes an extra plan as a gift.
The Black Friday shopping period is always a good opportunity to save on consumer technology, household appliances, and a wide range of digital services. It's usually the physical items that get the most attention, like TVs, speakers, and consoles, but VPN deals deserve some credit at this time.
Black Friday VPN deals regularly offer impressive value on the most popular services, and this year is going to be the same. NordVPN has already dropped an impressive Black Friday deal, with 68% off a two-year plan until Dec. 1. Read more...
More about Vpn, Mashable Shopping, Shopping Uk, Uk Deals, and Nordvpnfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/uk/shopping/nov-3-early-black-friday-nord-vpn-deal/
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Here's how to watch the Premier League for free with Amazon Prime
TL;DR: Subscribe to Amazon Prime to watch Premier League games in December.
This news has sort of gone under the radar with everything that's going on, but Amazon has once again bagged the rights to a number of Premier League games over the festive period. We know there are much bigger things happening at the moment, but this could be a welcome distraction.
Amazon is confirmed to be showing 20 Premier League fixtures in December, with two more to be announced. You are going to need an Amazon Prime account if you want to watch any of these festive fixtures, which will grant you access to Prime Video. Read more...
More about Football, Mashable Shopping, Prime Video, Shopping Uk, and Uk Dealsfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/uk/shopping/nov-3-prime-video-premier-league/
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New top story on Hacker News: Sales as a Core Competency in Your Company
Sales as a Core Competency in Your Company
3 by neinasaservice | 0 comments on Hacker News.
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Donald Trump’s 2020 Superspreader Campaign: A Diary
From “COVID, COVID, COVID” is a fake to “Fire Fauci!”
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-trumps-2020-superspreader-campaign-a-diary
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-trumps-2020-superspreader-campaign-a-diary
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Facial recognition used to arrest protestor at Trump bible photo op
Of course a little known facial recognition tool was used on Black Lives Matter protestors.
This past June, as protestors were tear-gassed in Washington D.C.'s Lafayette Square so that Donald Trump could have a bible-thumping photo op, officials claim a man assaulted a police officer. The man, Michael Joseph Peterson Jr., wasn't arrested at the scene. Instead, police pulled images off Twitter and ran them through a previously secretive facial recognition system to find a match.
So reports the Washington Post, which notes that many experts believe this is the first time a defendant has been told the National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System (NCRFRILS), as it is called, was used to track them down. This, despite the fact that the NCRFRILS has reportedly been used over 12,000 times. Read more...
More about Black Lives Matter, Facial Recognition, Tech, and Cybersecurityfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/facial-recognition-arrest-black-lives-matter-protestor-trump-bible-photo-op/
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What If This Election Ends in Another Bush v. Gore?
As we approach the decision’s twentieth anniversary—and Election Day—myriad cases about states’ voting arrangements have created an unnerving sense of legal cacophony.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-if-this-election-ends-in-another-bush-v-gore
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-if-this-election-ends-in-another-bush-v-gore
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A Vote-Tripling Project Is Betting That Non-Voters Will Vote if a Friend Asks Them to
How and where a nonprofit is spending three and a half million dollars to do something that—the evidence suggests—is quite effective.
from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-vote-tripling-project-is-betting-that-non-voters-will-vote-if-a-friend-asks-them-to
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from Everything https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-vote-tripling-project-is-betting-that-non-voters-will-vote-if-a-friend-asks-them-to
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Early voting numbers are truly astounding
Americans have participated in early voting in record numbers this year. | Chen Mengtong/China News Service via Getty Images
It turns out Americans really, really wanted to vote before Election Day.
More than 97 million people have already cast ballots in the 2020 election — an early turnout record that shows this year’s election carries enormous weight with Americans.
In 11 states, the number of votes cast so far in 2020 is at least 90 percent of the total cast in the entire 2016 election.
About 24 hours before polls are set to close on Election Day, the number of votes cast was almost 98 million, about two-thirds of which came via mail-in ballots. The rest of the voters showed up at a polling place to vote in person. The early voting figure is just shy of 71 percent of 2016’s total numbers nationwide.
In some states, the early voting numbers have already cruised past 90 percent of 2016 total voting levels, including several key swing states or states with close Senate races: Montana Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, and Georgia.
In Texas, early voting is even more of a success: Early voting now represents more than 108 percent of 2016’s total number. In Hawaii, the share is more than 110 percent.
It seems likely that 2020’s total voter turnout could be the highest in a century, with some forecasters projecting turnout as high as 65 percent of registered voters casting a ballot. And the reasons are clear to all — chiefly, the current occupant of the White House.
As Vox’s Jen Kirby and Rani Molla put it, “Enthusiasm among both Democratic and Republican voters is high. President Donald Trump is the reason: His supporters are extremely motivated to reelect their guy, and the other side is extremely motivated to vote him out.” Voters who wished to avoid a polling place also may have voted with absentee ballots, though those who went to early voting locations hoping to avoid a crowd during a pandemic may have been confronted with long lines.
These numbers are no crystal ball, however. Nobody knows who is going to win right now. There’s a strong possibility we won’t even know on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, either. But it is clear that Americans are highly motivated to make sure their vote is counted.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/2020/11/2/21546804/early-voting-turnout-numbers-percentage
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Why countries interfere in elections
Russian president Vladimir Putin in December 2016. | Russian Presidential Press and Information Office/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
According to an expert.
What Russia — or any other foreign power — might do to disrupt the 2020 US election has loomed over the entire race.
Russia and other actors are using social media to sow discord. US intelligence officials announced in October that Russia (and Iran) had gained access to voter registration data. And the New York Times reported last month that Russia has plans to interfere in the last few days of the election or just after November 3, primarily to help Trump.
How big Russia’s impact will be is impossible to know right now, though it did have an impact on the outcome in 2016, says Dov Levin, an expert on foreign election interference and author of Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions.
Russia and the US have a long history of intervening in each other’s politics, going back and forth dozens and dozens of times since the end of World War II. And foreign attempts to meddle in US elections have occurred since its founding, though that time the blame went to the French.
But whatever the time period, foreign actors rarely just meddle for meddling’s sake. Levin argues that a country’s leaders have to believe that one side’s victory in a particular foreign election would be untenable for their interests — and they need to know that the opponent might be interested in getting their assistance. When those conditions exist, hello foreign interference.
I called up Levin to talk more about why countries decide to intervene in other countries’ elections, how he sees Russian and other foreign interference playing out in 2020, and what kinds of interference we may see more of in the future. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Jen Kirby
There’s been such a focus in the United States on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and potential meddling in the 2020 election. But from your book, it sounds like foreign election interference was a pretty common occurrence around the world throughout history.
Dov Levin
Yes, this is a pretty common form of interference that has been going on since national-level elections in the 18th century, and even beforehand, in pre-modern elections for pope or for king, which existed in some countries. And I find that this has been a pretty common phenomenon, using various secret or covert, or public and overt, messaging ever since.
Many major world powers have used that method. Between 1946 and 2000, the United States and the Soviet Union or Russia have intervened in one out of every nine national-level executive elections using this method.
Jen Kirby
In your book, you lay out two conditions that have to be present for a foreign power to interfere in an election. Can you explain them?
Dov Levin
The first one is the great power sees one of the candidates or parties in the target country as a threat to some of its key interests, and the foreign power expects it would be really hard to move the target in this regard. So that is one condition.
The other is that there is another local candidate or party in the target country that is willing to accept such assistance — and it’s usually because they are in deep political trouble. They are willing to bear the cost of such interference, which is, when it is secret, the possibility of exposure and delegitimization. When interference is in public, it’s the possibility of a big backlash, or in the longer term, some voters not being happy that their candidate or party is getting assistance from a foreign power, and, as a result, not voting for them in the next election.
So usually the local actor, when they are willing to accept or ask for such interference, [is] in deep political trouble and this request or agreement to accept such foreign interference on their behalf is, in football terms, a “Hail Mary.” They’re in deep political trouble, and this is meant to save them, so to speak.
Jen Kirby
Your thesis would seem to fit with what we know about Russia’s interference activities in 2016, and the Trump’s campaign’s receptiveness to getting help from Russia. Last week, intelligence officials cited both Iran and Russia as engaging in election interference. Russia, of course, looms large. I’m wondering if, based on your thesis, you think Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus is different in 2020 than it might have been in 2016?
Dov Levin
We do not know yet the thinking of Russia while it’s intervening, and we cannot be 100 percent sure in this regard.
But it seems that it’s a very similar calculus. That is, you know, they are very worried that Democrats will come to power in the 2020 elections, and that they will have a very hardline policy towards Russia, given anger among the Democrats about Russia’s behavior in 2016, Russia’s behavior in Ukraine, its behavior in other countries, like poisoning people, and things like that.
So they are clearly pretty worried of the possibility that [Vice President Joe] Biden and the Democratic Party would come to power and push back against various Russian behaviors and shenanigans around the world.
And while we naturally don’t have any evidence yet of any ties in 2020, we have, as you could see from the Mueller report, and other sources, pretty strong circumstantial evidence that someone in the Trump campaign in 2016 was coordinating with Russia either directly or through WikiLeaks.
Again, we don’t have conclusive evidence that Russia is intervening in 2020. But assuming [the suspected Russian influence operation that involved setting up a fake progressive digital news outlet called] Peacedata and things like that are for this purpose, the calculus seems to be pretty similar to what was in 2016: a very deep Russian fear of the possibility of the Democratic presidential candidate coming to power and pushing back against Russia for its behavior, both towards the United States and elsewhere in the world.
Jen Kirby
We do know that Russia wanted to hurt Hillary Clinton and preferred Trump in 2016. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Russia is denigrating Biden in 2020. But baked into that is this idea that Russia really just wants to foment chaos and undermine democracy, and Trump also advances that goal. We see this very specifically with online propaganda. How do you see that idea — that Russia wants to generate chaos — as fitting into this framework?
Dov Levin
I would separate electoral activities and non-electoral activities. Clearly, from what we know about some of their non-electoral activities — those that are not related to any election — some of them are meant to cause chaos in various ways and disrupt and damage. So about non-electoral activities, I would completely agree with this view of Russian behavior. However, when it comes to their electoral activities, the whole Russian intervention in 2016, all of those leaks that were given to WikiLeaks — the idea that that was only done to sow chaos, I see that as the wrong interpretation.
From the point of view of Russia — and I’m giving here the general logic of most interveners in this regard — sowing chaos in an election is not the productive message because it can make their situation worse.
If all they want to do, to quote the Joker, is “see the world burn” — you know, see the United States “burn,” so to speak — then doing that in an election is the wrong way, because you antagonize the side that is suffering from it and incentivize them to harm you even more.
If they’re intervening in elections, it is usually because they don’t want one of the sides to be elected. And only if they see that particular side as so bad from their perspective that they don’t care too much about antagonizing them further will they be willing to do that during the election period.
So I think that the interpretation that Russia intervened in 2016 just to sow chaos and that they didn’t really care who would win is mistaken. They clearly funded activities that were in an organized campaign to lead Hillary Clinton to lose in 2016. They had a pretty clear agenda. They tailored stuff pretty clearly in a way that would help Trump the most.
For example, some of these leaks literally came out a few hours after domestic scandals Trump was involved in like, for example, one of their big leaks [of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s emails] came out hours after the famous Access Hollywood tape.
Those are activities which are not just meant to sow chaos. They clearly are meant to achieve an agenda — in that particular case, to reduce the damage Trump was suffering that day from that Access Hollywood tape. So from the way Russia acted in 2016, and from the overall behavior of such interveners, I think it is very unlikely that they were doing it in 2016 just to sow chaos. If they wanted to sow chaos, they didn’t need to act in such a purposeful way.
Jen Kirby
I agree that they were intervening on the side of Trump in 2016. But take 2020: The Department of Homeland Security has warned that Russia is amplifying misinformation about voting problems, including claims about mail-in voter fraud. This obviously echoes Trump’s rhetoric, so it’s certainly bolstering his position. But that could also potentially create doubt about the election results. That doesn’t necessarily benefit one particular candidate — it undermines the system as a whole.
Dov Levin
We don’t know exactly what Russia’s strategy is when it comes to 2020. It will take us time to know for sure what it is exactly doing in 2020.
But I would say that some of the negative effects on democracy are, from Russia’s point of view, a useful side effect. They have one major goal, which is to help Trump get reelected. If it harms American democracy in some way — which, by the way, I find in other research that such interference, on average, does in many cases — that’s from their point of view a great side effect. Vladimir Putin is not going to cry, and is not going to in any way feel bad about it, so to speak. But that is not their main goal.
And again, it takes time to see how these activities play out in retrospect. There’s a lot of what you could call, in military terms, the “fog of battle.” But from what we know, from 2016, a lot of the stuff was designed very purposefully to help Donald Trump. And my guess is that when we do have a post-2020 estimate of what exactly Russia did, we will see that most of it was stuff that was meant to help Trump in various ways.
Jen Kirby
You say that one of the reasons Russia wouldn’t intervene unless they think one side is so bad it thinks it’s worth the risk, antagonizing them. In 2016, that was Hillary Clinton. But I wonder if Russian interference would have become such a huge part of the public discourse if Clinton had won — for example, it seems unlikely we would have had the full Mueller investigation.
It seems if Russia reprised what it did in 2016 in 2020, the consequences would be even more profound if there is a Democratic administration. Do you think this affects Russia’s calculus at all this year, that they’ve realized they might have pushed the envelope too far already?
Dov Levin
I think there’s a bit of a misunderstanding about the Russian intervention in 2016. The Russian intervention in 2016 was meant to be secret. In other words, Russia wanted to keep all of the activities — or more accurately, the hand behind those activities — completely a secret from the American public and the rest of the world.
If it was up to Vladimir Putin, all of those leaks by WikiLeaks, we’d all have been speculating in the following four years, where could they have come from? Was it some kind of disgruntled employee in the DNC? Was it some Trump campaign mole in the Clinton campaign? And Putin would be, you know, like one of those James Bond villains with their cat, watching people speculating where it came from, and no one would notice Russia. You know what I mean?
Jen Kirby
I do, but I have a lot of trouble believing that. They were kind of sloppy. How could Russia have believed that we — or at least US intelligence agencies — would not have figured that out?
Dov Levin
Most covert interference is usually not caught. In my data, only a handful of covert electoral interventions were actually exposed before the election — you know, clear evidence was found that a foreign power was involved, and then literally caught red-handed, so to speak. Such exposure was relatively rare.
The reason why I think Russia was exposed in this regard was simply that the [military intelligence agency] GRU is not — or the Russian intelligence agencies are not — as good as they used to be. They used to be very good at hiding their tracks, but in the last few years, it has become evident that they became very sloppy.
You know, there’s another report that multiple secret agents of the GRU had forged passports with consecutive numbers. It was more like one of those, you know, parodies of James Bond rather than any effective spies.
So, I would say that the reason why it was exposed both in 2016, and to a certain extent in 2020, is simply that the GRU is not as good as it used to be. They did not maintain operational secrecy in 2016. That’s why they were caught. In 2020, they seem to have tried to put even more effort into keeping it secret, but they have, nevertheless, seemed to have been exposed in various ways.
This is not because Vladimir Putin thought that he would be exposed and was wanting everyone to know that he was behind it, but simply because his intelligence agency is not as good as the KGB was during the Cold War. And the United States government, and its intelligence agencies, clearly, have been able to penetrate it in some ways and detect its activities.
Jen Kirby
That makes sense, but even some of its other activities — like outreach from people with links to the Russian government to the Trump campaign — just seemed destined to get discovered.
Dov Levin
I would just add, as you mentioned, that, if not for the intervention itself being exposed, the chances that there would have been so much digging that we would have detected other stuff would have been very unlikely as well.
Jen Kirby
Yes, that’s a good point. As you mentioned in your book, the Soviet Union, and later Russia, and the US have intervened in one out of every nine national-level elections between 1946 and 2000. That obviously peaked during the Cold War. But after the Cold War, I think it’s fair to say that the US and Russia weren’t exactly on equal footing. It seems much more risky for Russia to meddle in the US, than for the US to meddle in Russia. So I’m curious about that calculation — what are the risks for powers when they’re not on equal footing with their intervention target?
Dov Levin
From the point of view of Russia, I would guess that one of the reasons it chose to work covertly was to reduce, a bit, the risks involved. If it isn’t exposed, it is less risky. If you don’t know where it’s coming from, you cannot do something in retaliation.
The second reason is that retaliation in response to such meddling, when it’s known, is relatively rare. Russia’s gamble was probably that they would get away with it.
As I mentioned, in most cases, this type of covert election interference is not detected. And if they would have been detected, they would not be likely to be very severely punished. This probably would have been Vladimir Putin’s calculus.
Jen Kirby
Why is punishment so rare?
Dov Levin
Because of two major reasons. One reason is basically that if the side that was being assisted wins, they have no incentive to punish the side that aided them. Why should they bite the hand that just gave them an election victory? I find in my book that in many cases, such interventions are effective and bring to power the assisted side.
And if they lost, again, in many cases, this is done covertly. So if a foreign power leaked incriminating documents, but you don’t know that a foreign power was behind it, you won’t punish them. And in the few cases where it is known [who meddled], the winning party decides to let bygones be bygones and try to open a new page. That is why it usually doesn’t happen.
Jen Kirby
Given this long history of election meddling between the US and Russia, I’m curious if you found that Russia relied on a similar “playbook” in past interventions as they did in 2016. Does Russia revisit the same sort of strategies over and over again, or do they tailor it based on the political climate, the candidate, or political interests?
Dov Levin
I would divide the answer into two parts. What they did in 2016, and what they probably did in 2020, follows tools and techniques that they have used in many countries in the past, including beforehand in the United States and outside of the United States. There’s nothing new about the strategies.
However, when it comes to what they chose, you know, why they chose this method and not that method — that was very well-tailored to the political climate.
Particularly in the United States, in my opinion, that’s one reason why they chose in 2016 to look for emails from the DNC and the Clinton campaign and to leak them. Clearly they believed that such supposed “dirt” on Hillary Clinton would be especially effective.
Jen Kirby
So they figure out what will be the most effective to damage a candidate, and then tailor their methods from there.
Dov Levin
Foreign powers, when they intervene in elections — both Russia and the United States — they tend to tailor very carefully their interventions to the needs of their “client,” or the side that they are assisting, to give them the the maximum assistance they believe is possible, given the circumstances and their capability.
Jen Kirby
In your research, did you come across a tool or method for election interference that tended to be the most effective in swaying an electoral outcome?
Dov Levin
I actually tried to investigate that in my book. I found some preliminary evidence that the size of the intervention matters. If it’s very large, and you’re using multiple methods at the same time, basically throwing the kitchen sink, so to speak, at this particular country, it is more likely to work.
I found also that when it’s done overtly, or in public, it is usually much more effective than covertly, increasing the vote share of the preferred side by 3 percent on average more than a covert operation. As for specific methods, giving money or various dirty tricks like what Russia did in 2016, I could not find conclusive evidence that there is any particular method that is more effective than others.
Jen Kirby
Why is overt intervention more effective?
Dov Levin
I basically argue that overt would usually be more effective because of the way in which it is closely coordinating with the local actor, and the fact that in an overt intervention, a country is able to bring more of its power to bear.
Think about an election as a contest in competitive promise-making. One candidate says, “If you vote for me, you will get a chicken in every pot.” The other candidate says, “No no no, if you vote for me, you’ll get two chickens in every pot.” And basically a great power, because it usually has a resource advantage over any of the other two candidates, it can basically outbid the two sides. The foreign power comes in and says, “If you vote for this guy, all of you get two chickens in every pot, a brand new stove, and a brand new car.”
In other words, a great power can use its resource advantages in order to move the needle by communicating with the voters directly, and bringing all of its resource advantage to bear.
With covert operations, in contrast, you’re trying to intervene ineffectively. You are giving money to the preferred side. But then, they’ll run more ads that hopefully people will watch, or you are hacking and leaking documents that you hope some people will read.
In those cases where there’s a possibility of a backlash, they do it in secret. They only intervene overtly when they know that there will not be a backlash, and it’s likely to be effective.
Jen Kirby
What do you think is the future of foreign meddling?
Dov Levin
Well, I see two directions. One direction is an attempt to “digitize” more traditional intervention techniques and make them more usable in cyberspace. What was done in 2016, when it comes to those leaks and hacks, was basically taking an analog technique and making it digitalized.
I expect other methods of interference would also become digitized. For example, it is possible that, in the future, when a foreign power wants to give campaign funding on the side, they will use cryptocurrencies for this purpose. It makes it much easier to transfer it without anyone in the target country detecting it, and it also reduces the number of meetings needed for this purpose.
Usually for [illicit] campaign funding you need to meet up in some hotel room in secret and give the money in a suitcase or something like that. That’s literally how it was done in some cases, like in one of those crime movies.
Cryptocurrencies make it easier to transfer the money without detection and with less meetings. All you would need to do is be a foreign agent, come into the country with a USB with some cryptocurrency on it, buy a brand-new laptop in a local store, go to your local Starbucks, connect the USB drive with the cryptocurrency on it to your new laptop, log on to the Starbucks wifi, and transfer the money.
So that could be one possible future intervention. Another “digitization” of these interference techniques — not just fake news and then leaks and hacks — would be the return of a very ancient interference technique that existed in the pre-modern world. That would be directly changing the vote tallies.
Before the modern era, for example, if you are, say, the Holy Roman Empire and you wanted to determine who would be the next pope, in some cases, you literally bribed the cardinal in charge of counting the votes, and in that way determined who would be the next pope.
That stopped being possible when we started to have elections with millions of people and thousands of ballot places around the country. But with digital election machines becoming increasingly common, it’s possible that one day a foreign power may try to hack into a voting machine or a central computer in charge of tallying the votes coming all across the country, and literally change the vote count directly.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/2020/11/2/21540208/russia-interfere-in-us-2020-elections
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From pizza to playlists, here's how to help people standing in line to vote
So, you've cast your ballot. Maybe you've already logged some hours phone banking, you've made donations to candidates and advocacy organizations, and you've checked on the people in your life to make sure they participate in the election.
Still feeling antsy, nervous, powerless? If you're like me, you're thinking about all the people in states where politicians have made it harder, not easier, to vote amid this pandemic. The people in places where few polling locations, and the long lines that result — frequently in minority and lower income communities — work as a hurdle for people to cast their ballots. Many view long lines as a form of voter suppression. Read more...
More about Voting, Social Good, Politics, and Activismfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/help-people-standing-in-line-to-vote/
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Voting for Biden or Trump? Either way, you're not on the right side of history.
We have reached a moment in American history when everything seems to be at stake in a single presidential election: equal rights, democracy, the country's future.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump voters alike believe that it'll spell doom if their opponent wins. Putting aside for a moment the legitimacy of those fears, consider the voter who casts their ballot believing they're on the right side of history.
This phrase provides comfort at times of deep uncertainty. It's how people feel more confident in their convictions: They believe that when the history of this chapter is written, their views will be vindicated, even if they were controversial or disputed at the time. After all, no one wants to be on the wrong side of history. Read more...
More about Joe Biden, Donald Trump, 2020 Election, Social Good, and Politicsfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/right-side-of-history-election-2020/
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How to watch and listen to Election Day results online
While it's likely we won't know the results of the presidential election until after Election Day, as soon as the polls close Tuesday evening, we'll at least start getting some preliminary info.
You can blame the pandemic for the probable delay, since a lot of voting was done through mail-in ballots.
You can still turn to the more "traditional" Election Day viewing option: Turn a TV on to the news. All major cable and broadcast news networks will have Election Day coverage blaring deep into the night. Alternatively, you can use your smartphone, tablet, or streaming stick to watch the initial returns come in. Read more...
More about 2020 Election, Tech, Streaming Services, and Politicsfrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/election-day-results-how-to-stream-online/
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Internet Archive rolls out fact-checking on archived webpages
Even the Wayback Machine is getting into fact-checking now.
In a blog post on its website, the Internet Archive announced it was rolling out fact-checking annotations on certain webpages archives by its Wayback Machine.
According to Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, the organization felt the need for this feature after noticing a number of fact-checking groups linking to archived versions of pages.
“We are attempting to preserve our digital history but recognize the issues around providing access to false and misleading information coming from different sources,” Graham wrote in the post. “By providing convenient links to contextual information we hope that our patrons will better understand what they are reading in the Wayback Machine.” Read more...
More about Fact Check, Wayback Machine, Tech, Social Media Companies, and Web Culturefrom Mashable https://mashable.com/article/internet-archive-wayback-machine-fact-check-labels/
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Sunday, 1 November 2020
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