US elections 2020

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      Facebook adds labels to US posts about voting ahead of presidential election

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      Beginning Thursday, US Facebook users who post about voting may start seeing an addendum to their messages – labels directing readers to authoritative information about the upcoming presidential election.It’s the social network’s latest step to combat election-related misinformation on its platform as the presidential election nears, one in which many voters may be submitting ballots by mail for the first time. Facebook began adding similar links to posts about in-person and mail-in balloting by federal politicians, including Donald Trump, in July.These labels will link to a new voter information hub similar to one about Covid-19 that Facebook says has been seen by billions of users around the world. The labels will read, “Visit the Voting Information Center for election resources and official updates.”Despite such efforts, Facebook continues to face widespread criticism about how it handles misinformation around elections and other matters. The company has generally refused to factcheck ads by politicians, for instance, and a two-year audit of its civil rights practices faulted the company for leaving US elections “exposed to interference by the president and others who seek to use misinformation to sow confusion and suppress voting”.The effectiveness of such labels will depend on how well Facebook’s artificial intelligence system identifies the posts that really need them, said Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media. If every post containing the word “vote” or “voting” gets an informational link, he said, “people will start ignoring those links”.Facebook expects the voter hub to reach at least 160 million people in the US, said Emily Dalton Smith, who serves as head of social impact at the company. The primary focus is registering people to vote, she said, but the information people see will evolve throughout the election season.“This is a unique election and a unique election season,“ she said. “Certainly we have never gone through an election during a global pandemic.“Other tech companies, Twitter and Google, which owns YouTube, have undertaken similar efforts around the November election. Twitter said it is working on expanding its policies to address “new and unique challenges” related to this year’s elections, including misinformation around mail-in voting.Looking ahead to November, Facebook said it was “actively speaking with election officials about the potential of misinformation around election results as an emerging threat”.The company did not give details on the potential threats, but said that a prolonged ballot process where results are not immediately clear “has the potential to be exploited in order to sow distrust in the election outcome”.“One way we plan to fight this is by using the Voting Information Center and the US Elections digest in Facebook News to make sure people have easy access to the latest, authoritative information and news on and after Election Night,“ Naomi Gleit, the vice-president of product management and social impact, wrote in a blogpost. More

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      ‘It sends a strong signal’: Black voters respond to Kamala Harris’ nomination

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      China Cochran met Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Detroit last year and was swept away by the California senator’s ambition, charisma and leadership.So when the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate on Tuesday – making her the first Black woman on a major US party’s presidential ticket – Cochran wasn’t just struck by the history.It represented a full-circle moment for Black women, who the Democratic party often refer to as its backbone of support, yet who for generations have fought for their voices to be heard and political aspirations recognized.“It tells Black girls that they can be president,” Cochran, who recently ran for state representative in Michigan, told the Associated Press. “I think it’s important for us to look at that and see other young women of color realize that they can go after their dreams and really make change in our world.”Harris’ selection also marks the first time a person of Asian descent is on the presidential ticket. Born to a Jamaican father, Donald Harris, and Indian mother, she often speaks of her deep bond with her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, whom she has called her single biggest influence.“My mother understood very well she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya [Harris’s younger sister] and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident Black women,” Harris wrote in her 2018 autobiography, The Truths We Hold.It’s important for us to look at that and see other young women of color realize that they can go after their dreamsChina CochranAs they appeared together for the first time as running mates at a high school in Biden’s home town of Wilmington on Wednesday, Biden and Harris reflected on the significance of the moment.“This morning, all across the nation, little girls woke up – especially little Black and brown girls, who so often feel overlooked and undervalued in their communities. But today, today, just maybe, they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way,” Biden said.Paying tribute to the many women that paved the way for her, Harris said she was mindful of all of the “heroic and ambitious women before me, whose sacrifice, determination and resilience make my presence here today even possible”.Harris joins the ticket during a national reckoning on racism in the US. The coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately affected Black Americans and other people of color. Protests against systemic racism and police brutality are prominent in the minds of potential voters. More

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      Herman Cain 'tweets' two weeks after his death to attack Democrats

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      Herman Cain, one-time Republican presidential candidate and enthusiastic Trump supporter, sprang an unsettling surprise on Wednesday when his Twitter account abruptly began publishing posts – two weeks after Cain died from coronavirus.The @THEHermanCain account had lain dormant since Cain contracted coronavirus in June, having posted details of Cain’s memorial service and links to tributes.When it abruptly came to life, one of the first posts was to attack Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who was unveiled as Biden’s running mate on Tuesday.“Just in case you thought Biden’s candidacy was going to be anything other than completely nuts, team Trump has released a new video,” the @THEHermanCain account tweeted just after 4pm.The post linked to a Trump campaign video which accused Biden of having “a racism problem”.At 5am on Thursday morning, Cain – seemingly – tweeted again, criticizing Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor who was also in the running to be Biden’s vice-presidential candidate.The posts unnerved many other Twitter users, but shortly before the account began tweeting pro-Trump messaging, it had also posted a little-seen pinned tweet which linked to a clarifying post on Cain’s website as to what was going on.In the website statement, Cain’s daughter Melanie Cain Gallo said: “We’ve decided here at Cain HQ that we will go on using this platform to share the information and ideas he believed in. He often talked about the site going on once he was ready to step away from it. We had hoped he could enjoy reading it in his retirement, but he made it clear he wanted it to go on.”Cain Gallo said posts from her father’s accounts “will now go under the name The Cain Gang”, a name Cain apparently chose himself. Though his Twitter handle has not yet changed its name.The social media accounts of other public figures, including David Bowie, have continued after their deaths, but have tended to adopt more of a third-person tone.The first-person messaging of Cain’s Twitter account makes it less clear whose views the tweets are expressing. Some also took issue with @THEHermanCain having only begun posting after Harris became the first black woman to run on a major party presidential ticket.Cain died on 30 July, having been ill with coronavirus for several weeks. The former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza had attended a Trump rally in Oklahoma on 20 June, where Cain was photographed not wearing a mask and not observing social distancing guidelines.A vocal supporter of the president, Cain was co-chair of Black Voices for Trump and was in Tulsa as a surrogate for Trump’s campaign.He ran for president in 2012, and briefly led the polls, but dropped out of the race after three women accused him of sexual misconduct and a fourth woman accused Cain of sexual assault. More

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      Postal service changes pose threat to voting, says former USPS deputy

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      A former top official at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has warned that recent changes at the agency, now led by a Trump ally, could “disenfranchise” voters as they are implemented just months ahead of an election in which a record number of Americans are expected to vote by mail.Amid reports of significant mail delays, Ronald Stroman, who stepped down earlier this year as the second in command at USPS, said he was concerned about the speed and timing of changes that appeared to be implemented after Louis DeJoy, the new postmaster general, took office in June. USPS faces a financial crisis and every postmaster general is interested in cost savings and efficiency, Stroman said, but the question was how to balance those changes with the public’s needs.“The concern is not only that you’re doing this in a pandemic, but a couple of months before an election with enormous consequences,” said Stroman, now a senior fellow at the Democracy Fund. “If you can’t right the ship, if you can’t correct these fast enough, the consequence is not just, OK, people don’t get their mail, it’s that you disenfranchise people.“Making these changes this close to an election is a high-risk proposition,” he added.Some delays this year have been because USPS workers have been unable to work during the Covid-19 pandemic. But fears increased after DeJoy, a major Trump donor with no prior USPS experience, took over the agency. Shortly after he started at the postal service, the Washington Post and other news organizations obtained internal documents saying the agency was prohibiting overtime and that postal workers should leave mail behind at processing plants if it would cause them to leave late.Mark Jamison, a former postmaster in North Carolina who retired from the agency in 2012, said the idea of leaving first class mail – which includes letters with a regular stamp – was anathema to the culture of USPS. “The rule has always been you clear every piece of first class mail out of a plant every day, period,” he said. “There has never been, never, in the 30 years I worked for the post office, there has never been a time when you curtail first class mail.”Philadelphia residents have reported going upwards of three weeks without mail and postal workers told the Philadelphia Inquirer mail was piling up in local offices. Veterans and employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs have reported mail delays in fulfilling prescriptions. In Minneapolis, USPS temporarily stopped mail-delivery to a high-rise building, home to many low-income and immigrant residents, over concern of Covid-19 spread. In April, some Wisconsin residents reported never receiving ballots they requested for a statewide election. Democrats in Congress have opened an investigation into the delays and asked the USPS inspector general to probe the matter as well.“I mean come on, we’ve got a pandemic, you’re social distancing, people are calling in sick, you’re going to cut out overtime now? That just makes no sense,” Jamison said. “It’s unconscionable what they’re doing.”David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, said there was no blanket ban on overtime. The agency declined to say whether employees were being instructed to leave mail behind.There is concern the delays could last into November and disenfranchise many Americans. The majority of US states require absentee ballots to arrive by election day, regardless of when the voter puts them in the mail, in order to be counted. USPS has long advised voters to put their ballots in the mail a week ahead of election day to ensure they arrive in time to be counted (some states continue to allow voters to request a ballot up until days before the election). At least 65,000 ballots were rejected in primaries this year because they arrived too late, according to NPR.USPS denies it is slowing down the mail and DeJoy said the agency had “ample capacity” to deliver mail ballots on time. “While I certainly have a good relationship with the president of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the president, or anyone else in the administration, is wholly off-base,” he said on Friday at a meeting of the USPS board of governors.There is also some concern about the cost different states will have to pay to send ballots. Some states send ballots as marketing mail, which is less expensive than first class mail and has an expected delivery time of three to 10 days (first class mail is typically delivered faster). In the past, USPS has quickly moved official election mail regardless of the class of service, but in recent weeks the agency has signaled it will not expedite election mail and election officials will get the service they pay for.Some Democrats have suggested this amounts to a USPS threat to raise postage on mail-in ballots, a characterization USPS strongly disputes.“There are currently no pending changes to the rates and classes of mail impacting ballots,” Martha Johnson, a USPS spokeswoman said in a statement. “The baseless assertion that we intend to raise prices in advance of the upcoming presidential election in order to restrict voting by mail is wholly without merit, and frivolous. The Postmaster General and the organization he leads is fully committed to fulfilling our role in the electoral process.” More