So once you successfully vote in person (other than by provisional ballot), your vote is cast and cannot be "revoked". Ditto if you received an acknowledgement that your mail-in ballot was accepted.
There are weaknesses in our election infrastructure, but canceling individuals' ballots once they've been cast is not one of them.
There are rumors spreading on social media about people seeing that their 2024 general election votes were "deleted" or "missing" when they check their voter registration status.
Not every county has updated their online records to reflect who voted last Tuesday. That has nothing to do with whether your vote was counted.
Once a ballot is cast (in person or accepted by mail), it is no longer associated with the voter's identity. It is not possible to delete an individual's vote once cast.
This seems like a good place to re-up an academic job at Georgetown that will be a great opportunity for someone.
We've got an open position for a Professor of Computer Science, Ethics, and Society. This will be a senior appointment (with a named chair) in CS, with a joint research appointment in the recently formed Center for Digital Ethics.
I'm part of both CS and CDE, and I've found Georgetown to be an amazing place for interdisciplinary work (and amazing students).
I'm coming at this as an engineering and law professor. I'm right now using this as a forcing function to ask myself what the role of engineering education is in a world where technology is increasingly harnessed for evil, and of legal scholarship in a society in which the law's role as a protector of the weak and powerless has been greatly diminished.
It's good to ask these questions from time to time. I wish it wasn't quite so urgent.
A friend of mine, an artist, said (paraphrasing) that he's recommitted himself to making art, and to remembering that art is important.
I think it's critical to remember that there are many ways to effectively respond to evil, some direct, some indirect. Our daily mundane work, our art, our culture, can all be acts of resistance.
Trying to find the healthy balance among freaking out, reacting sensibly to what I'm freaking out about, and appreciating and nurturing the things that are still normal.
Also, if you've got this romantic idea that you're going to be some kind of superspy underground resistance operative staying one step ahead of The Man with your clever technology countermeasures, consider that ACTUAL TRAINED CIA SPIES have trouble doing this properly in practice, even for just a few weeks. See this talk from Blackhat 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWtbwMp7Zh8
Also, while I'm as much as gadget freak as anyone, "get yourself a Faraday cage" would probably be very low on my checklist of things to do to prepare for an authoritarian dictatorship.
Three people recently asked me about Faraday cages (to prevent their phones from being tracked), probably because of this blog post from a few years ago: https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/faraday/
Tl;dr:
- You probably don't need a Faraday cage. If you need to use your phone or have it on to receive calls/texts, a Faraday cage won't help you!
- The main use of a Faraday cage is to provide *assurance* that your phone is really off and not broadcasting your location.
- If you *do* need one, get a good one.
One of the less wonderful features of large scale social media is that if you share how you’re feeling or coping with something, some people will use that as an invitation to criticize your character, your intelligence, your perspective, and/or your intentions.
That effect seems to be being amplified by an order of magnitude right now. Some are trolls, others are just people being raw at the moment.
BREAKING: Just like earlier, no one knows anything yet. The polls aren't even closed anywhere yet. Have a nice dinner. Maybe a nap.
Please be extra kind to election workers today. They're doing vitally important work with long hours and low pay, and have to deal with all kinds of crap from irate citizens and, occasionally, fascist thugs.
@gregtitus In some states (not all), you can cast an in-person ballot on election day that overrides your mail-in ballot. In order to allow that, they can't process mail in ballots until they know who voted in person.
I've heard the phrase "nauseously optimistic" several times today, and wow, does that ever nail it.
And we won't know immediately after the polls close, either. In many states, they can't START counting mail-in and early votes until after in-person voting has concluded (for a number of reasons, some sensible, some residual). We might not know who the next president will be until Wednesday or even later.
Anyway, pace yourselves.
Slightly unpleasant reminder: Although early voting has been going on for a while now in many places, and many people have already voted, no state (zero, none, zip) has released any results yet. Everything we know about "who's winning" is based on polling and projections based on turnout so far (we generally know who voted, but not how they voted).
While these polls and projections are often highly predictive, the only thing that actually counts are the votes.
The DC Department of Buildings just issued an emergency stop work order for all construction near Howard University (site of Harris's watch party), apparently at the request of the Secret Service. Notably, they ask that "anything that can be used as a projectile" be locked down.
It's not unusual to have high security near Secret Service events, but I've never seen this specific request before.
Woke up this morning to a bunch of trolls in my mentions calling me "arrogant" for calling myself an "expert" in elections.
Sadly, this place reminds me more and more of Twitter sometimes.
For the record, and without apology, I am, in fact, an expert in election security and election procedures. I'm not the ONLY expert in this topic, and I'm certainly wrong about stuff occasionally, but it's just silly to try to make me hesitant to claim expertise in the area I focus on in my day job.
Four years ago, even before the polls closed, we were bombarded with false and misleading claims of election irregularities and fraud. Most of it was obvious (to experts in elections) BS - vote-flipping satellites and the like - but it was exhausting to deal with from sheer volume. And it convinced enough people that we had a literal insurrection attempt.
This year I expect at least the same volume of disinformation, but that it will be of better quality and less obvious.
Be ready.
When people say "government should be run like a business" I wonder which business they're thinking of. Enron? Lehman Brothers? Pets.com? Boeing?
