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From Vox
Murders are spiking. Police should be part of the solution. -
A police officer watches a crime scene on April 4, 2009, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. | Ross Mantle/Getty Images
There’s solid evidence for the crime-fighting abilities of police. But it requires a close look.
Last year, the US’s murder rate spiked by almost 30 percent. So far in 2021, murders are up nearly 10 percent in major cities. The 2020 increase alone is the largest percentage increase ever recorded in America — and a reversal from overall declines in murder rates since the 1990s.
American policymakers now want answers on this surge. One approach has good evidence behind it: the police.
There is solid evidence that more police officers and certain policing strategies reduce crime and violence. In a recent survey of criminal justice experts, a majority said increasing police budgets would improve public safety. The evidence is especially strong for strategies that home in on very specific problems, individuals, or groups that are causing a lot of crime or violence — approaches that would require restructuring how many police departments work today.
That runs contrary to the push to “defund the police” in progressive circles, which tend to focus on cutting policing to boost alternatives. In the same survey of experts, most said that increasing social service budgets would improve public safety. But experts also say there’s no reason, if the goal is to fight crime, that communities shouldn’t expand both policing and social services — what University of Missouri St. Louis criminologist Richard Rosenfeld calls a “both-and” approach.
One problem for a purely social services approach, which can range from job creation to better schools to mental health treatment, is it generally takes longer to work. Problems like poverty, education, and other underlying issues that contribute to crime can take years, or even decades, to truly address.
The impact of police, meanwhile, tends to happen quickly — almost immediately deterring and intercepting would-be criminals with the presence of officers. For policymakers looking for quick action, that’s an important distinction, suggesting that police have to play a role even if other social services are deployed for longer-term solutions.
“I know people don’t want to hear this, and I empathize with that,” Anna Harvey, a public safety expert at New York University, told me. “[But] as far as the research evidence goes, for short-term responses to increases in homicides, the evidence is strongest for the police-based solutions.”
Part of the explanation is that law enforcement approaches have generally received more research attention than the alternatives. This does not mean that the alternatives to policing don’t work. Some might prove to be even better than the police alone in certain circumstances, but they just haven’t been studied enough to show that yet.
Nor does the evidence suggest that policing approaches are without flaws. There are problems with the research here as well, including that it frequently fails to measure the unintended costs and consequences of policing, like the burden placed on communities of color disproportionately targeted and hassled by the police.
Every criminal justice expert I’ve spoken to has also said that more work needs to be done to hold police accountable — and the survey of experts found that most agreed more accountability would also improve public safety.
So the evidence doesn’t indicate that America should continue the punitive, unaccountable model of policing that’s dominated over the past few decades. To the contrary, much of the research supports changes to how policing is done to focus narrowly on problems, city blocks, and even individuals known to disproportionately contribute to crime — contrary to the dragnet approaches, like “stop-and-frisk,” that end up harassing entire communities.
In short, policing works to reduce crime and violence. But how policing is done can change — and change could even make policing more effective for crime-fighting while addressing some of the problems to which Black Lives Matter protests have called attention.
There’s good evidence police reduce crime and violence
A 2020 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded, “Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per capita terms, effects are twice as large for Black versus white victims.”
A 2005 study in the Journal of Law and Economics took advantage of surges in policing driven by terror alerts, finding that high-alert periods, when more officers were deployed, led to significantly less crime.
A 2016 study published in PLOS One looked at what happened when more New York City police officers were deployed in high-crime areas as part of an effort called “Operation Impact,” concluding these deployments were associated with less crime across the board.
The question, though, isn’t just whether police work to reduce crime, but how to deploy police to ensure that actually happens. There are proven ways, experts say, to make officers more effective than the traditional mode of policing in the US.
Hot spot policing, for example, focuses on problem areas, even down to specific city blocks, with disproportionate levels of crime and violence. Police departments send officers to these places with a goal of deterring further disorder. In some versions of this approach, police don’t even have to take action against people on the block, focusing on surveillance instead. The idea is that the mere presence of police should prevent people from committing crimes — a sort of scarecrow effect.
A 2019 review in the Journal of Experimental Criminology looked atdozens of studies and found hot spot policing reduced crime without merely displacing it to other areas, and, in fact, there was evidence of “diffusion” in which crime-fighting benefits actually spread to surrounding areas. The review relied on several strong studies, including randomized controlled trials (generally the gold standard of research), suggesting that the findings were based on solid ground.
Another approach, problem-oriented policing, homes in on a chronic issue — say, shootings in a community — and brings together local resources and agencies, beyond the police, to address that problem. This uses a “scanning, analysis, response, assessment” model, also known as “SARA,” that detects the problem, analyzes the solutions, executes a response, and evaluates those efforts to iterate on them. The goal is not just to treat the problem in the short term but hopefully cure it in the longer term. Depending on the specific problem and the ensuing analysis, police might play a major role or more of a supplementary one.
A 2020 review of the evidence from the Campbell Collaboration, which conducts policy research reviews, estimated that problem-oriented policing produces a nearly 34 percent reduction in crime and disorder relative to control groups. This was based on a few fairly strong studies, including randomized controlled trials — suggesting the research base here is, like hot spot policing, on strong footing.
One strategy that’s drawn a lot of media attention, including at Vox, is focused deterrence. With this strategy, police focus on specific individuals and organizations, particularly gangs, and deliver a clear message: You must stop engaging in violent or criminal activity, and the community will provide resources to make that easier, or the police will come down on you with serious charges. As part of this, the police tend to partner with other groups in and out of government to provide a carrot — job training, education, government benefits, and so on — to help people get out of a criminal life along with a stick in the threat of punishment. Both the carrot and stick, experts said, are crucial to the idea.
As a 2019 review of the evidence from the Campbell Collaboration found, the studies focused on deterrence are largely positive. The problem, the review cautioned, is these studies tend to be of lower quality — there still are no randomized controlled trials, as far as I can tell, on the strategy as a whole.
Given that lower-quality research in criminal justice tends to find more favorable results for the studied intervention, the results are promising but should be taken with some caution. “My personal view is we just don’t know if [focused deterrence] works,” Jennifer Doleac, director of the Justice Tech Lab, told me, acknowledging that other experts disagree.
The research on police isn’t perfect
A big issue with all of these strategies is that they can fall apart as a result of shifting leadership and priorities. Trying something different than a more traditional model of policing requires a strong commitment from those at the top. Princeton sociologist Pat Sharkey, who’s studied policing, went so far to tell me that “passionate, competent, well-funded leadership is way more important than the specifics of any particular model.”
Another major problem with many of these studies, noted in a report on proactive policing by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, is that they often don’t measure the costs of policing — not just the financial costs, but the burden police can often place on a community.
For example, the NBER study that concluded each cop leads to a reduction in homicides also found more officers lead to “more arrests for low-level ‘quality-of-life’ offenses, with effects that imply a disproportionate burden for Black Americans.” That highlights one of the main criticisms of police raised by movements like Black Lives Matter: that officers harass people, particularly those of color, over minor problems, and those incidents can escalate to police killings — as was true in the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd.
This matters for the effectiveness of police at combating crime. If a policing strategy reduces crime and violence but also causes a community backlash due to a sentiment of widespread mistreatment, that approach is likely unsustainable. It could even make crime worse: If a community backlash is strong enough, people will stop cooperating with the police. They may even believe they can no longer trust the law and turn to violence instead of the police to settle their own problems. (This is one potential cause of murder spikes over the last year and over 2015 to 2016.)
So even if, say, New York City’s aggressive stop-and-frisk strategy was successful at reducing crime — though at least some research found it wasn’t — it also inspired a significant backlash, a bevy of legal challenges, and protests. Those costs have to be weighed with the benefits.
That’s why the discussion among experts isn’t just whether police can reduce murders but how to use police most effectively. Many believe there is a way to maximize the benefits of police — the homicide reduction — without as many, if any, of the downsides. But that would likely require tapping into approaches that focus on specific hot spots, problems, or individuals that disproportionately contribute to crime or violence instead of casting a wide net that hassles and burdens entire communities.
To put it another way: Evaluating police work, from stops to more aggressive actions, is nuanced, requiring a comprehensive look at the effects on a community. “Stops can be good or bad,” Aaron Chalfin, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “People on the left think [all stops] are bad; people on the right think they’re good. And it’s not that at all.”
The evidence on alternatives to police is weak
Still, the potential harms of policing are why people want other approaches to begin with: What if there’s an alternative to policing — one with the upsides of law enforcement but none or at least fewer of the downsides?
Unfortunately, there’s little evidence for such an approach yet.
One of the problems, as noted by researchers like Caterina Roman and a 2020 report by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center, is that there just isn’t as much research into alternatives to police as there is research on the police. The John Jay report argued websites like CrimeSolutions.gov, which many levels of government rely on, favor policing approaches “because studies of policing interventions (i.e., hotspots policing and focused deterrence) are strongly supported by public and private funding bodies.”
Roman was more blunt in an interview with the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation’s Greg Berman: “I think what’s not understood is that we don’t have good evidence on prevention, because we don’t research prevention.” That’s in part a function of researchers’ interest in policing over alternatives but also due to ease of access — policing strategies are just more prevalent around the world than prevention approaches.
Still, there’s some research into alternatives. One widely publicized approach, violence interrupters, uses locally trusted community liaisons — typically people who previously were part of gangs or took part in criminal activities — to break up conflicts before they escalate into violence. An award-winning documentary threw support behind the idea, and President Joe Biden’s administration has shown support for it.
But the research on interrupters ranges from weak to disappointing. A 2015 review of the evidence published in the Annual Review of Public Health looked at a handful of studies on the model in several American cities. None of the studies had fully positive results. The best result, in Chicago, indicated that the approach perhaps produced positive effects for shootings in four of seven evaluation sites — barely better than a coin flip. One program, in Pittsburgh, was so ineffective that it “appeared to be associated with an increase in rates of monthly aggravated assaults and gun assaults” in some neighborhoods.
The 2020 John Jay report was a bit more positive on interrupters but ultimately concluded the findings were “mixed.” The studies conducted so far are low-quality, with no randomized controlled trials completed to date. “It’s concerning,” Harvey, who helped write the John Jay report, told me. “It really is an example of weak evidence.”
But these other approaches were all evaluated in a world where police exist, so even the positive research can’t demonstrate that these are necessarily true alternatives to police.
Another issue is non-police interventions tend to require a longer-term view rather than promising to reduce crime, especially violent crime, quickly. These interventions help address the root causes of crime and violence, from poverty to drug addiction. But it takes time to lift people and places from poor conditions, hence studies on alternatives producing results over months or years. Policing approaches, meanwhile, tend to produce effects within weeks or months, since it turns out people can be deterred from crime or violence quite quickly once officers are deployed on a block.
This is why interrupters seemed so promising: By breaking up potentially violent conflicts on the spot, they could have more short- term effects. But that simply hasn’t been proven in the research.
That said, a real advantage to the alternatives is they don’t come with major downsides. If a policing approach fails to reduce crime, it can still produce a huge burden on a community through more incarceration and everyday harassment by officers. If an interrupter approach fails, at least no one was directly hurt in the process, though there is a potential opportunity cost if the program crowds out more successful approaches.
“We know Cure Violence [interrupters] are unlikely to do dramatic harm,” Doleac said. “But focused deterrence, if it backfires, could be very bad.”
In fact, the alternatives often come with other benefits. Even if raising the school dropout age doesn’t reduce crime, it can still keep kids in school. Even if drug addiction treatment doesn’t cut crime, it still helps people overcome addiction. And so on.
Ultimately, it’s that lack of harm that makes the alternatives to policing worth trying and investigating. Maybe these experiments will produce a fantastic method for fighting crime in the end. If not, at least no one was hurt and maybe some were helped in another way.
But, at least for now, there’s no good evidence that the alternatives can replace the police, Meanwhile, policing has strong evidence suggesting it really can work to cut crime and violence.
“The idea that we can reduce the violence we’ve been seeing without any use of the police is not evidence-based; it’s an aspiration, and it’s a high-risk idea,” Chalfin said. “A balanced portfolio feels like the lowest-risk strategy to me.”
Congress’s hectic legislative schedule, briefly explained -
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi gives remarks at the US Capitol on September 24. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
Another government shutdown is looming, and the stakes are even higher than usual.
On Monday, Democrats will start one of the most chaotic legislative sprints in recent memory. With a potential government shutdown looming, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on Saturday that three key bills, including President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, “must pass” in the coming week.
That timeline means the next week could be make-or-break for Biden’s legislative agenda, but all three bills face a complicated road ahead in Congress.
“The next few days will be a time of intensity,” Pelosi said in a letter to her caucus on Saturday. “We sent a CR to the Senate and are awaiting their action to avoid a shutdown. We must pass the BIF to avoid the expiration of the surface transportation funding on September 30. And we must stay on schedule to pass the reconciliation bill so that we can Build Back Better.”
PELOSI makes it official. Wants funding, infrastructure and reconciliation passed THIS WEEK.
The proposed continuing resolution, or CR, would fund the government until December, heading off a shutdown in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. Democrats have also attached a crucial measure to increase the debt ceiling to that resolution.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill, or BIF, which passed the Senate last month with the support of 19 Republicans and every Democrat, includes $550 billion in new spending and would direct much-needed funding to roads, public transit, rural broadband, and other areas. And a $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which Democrats have branded the Build Back Better Act, includes major parts of the Biden agenda that were dropped from the bipartisan deal. If passed in its proposed form, the bill would fund new social programs like universal pre- kindergarten, create green jobs to help combat climate change, and expand a child tax credit that has already lifted millions out of poverty.
Even alone, though, each piece of legislation would face a number of hurdles getting through a closely divided Congress. Add to that an intraparty schism between the progressive and centrist wings of the Democratic Party over the ambitious reconciliation bill, as well as the tight deadline outlined by Pelosi on Saturday, and things look even more challenging.
Specifically, the closely linked bipartisan infrastructure bill and reconciliation package have become intertwined in such a way that one may not be able to pass without the other, and the CR faces difficulties of its own in the Senate.
A high-stakes debt ceiling fight
Among the most pressing issues facing Congress this week is the looming prospect of a partial government shutdown. With the federal fiscal year ending September 30, Congress has until then to pass the continuing resolution and prevent a third shutdown in as many years.
However, that could be particularly difficult to achieve this year. The CR that passed the House last week also includes a measure to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling ahead of a separate October deadline — something which Senate Republicans have refused to support, despite voting to raise the debt ceiling three times while former President Donald Trump was in office.
If a resolution fails to pass in time and the government does partially shut down, the ramifications could be especially severe thanks to the ongoing pandemic.
“The worst time in the world we want to shut down the government is in the middle of a pandemic where we have 140,000 people a day getting infected and 2,000 people a day dying,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, told the Washington Post last week. “That’s the time when you want the government working full blast to address this.”
The approaching debt ceiling also raises the stakes of the coming week for congressional Democrats.
“We would emerge from this crisis a permanently weaker nation,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, noting that the US’s good reputation for paying its bills also has geopolitical significance.
Should the nation default when its cash reserves and borrowing capacity are exhausted in mid-October, borrowing would become more expensive — and that burden would fall on ordinary Americans, many of whom are already struggling due to the economic crisis brought on by Covid-19.
Experts have also warned that a US default could provoke a new financial crisis: The ensuing recession could see unemployment surge to 9 percent and as much as $15 trillion in household wealth wiped out, according to the Washington Post.
Despite the catastrophic implications of a potential US default, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has signaled that he intends to force Democrats to go it alone on the debt ceiling, even at the cost of precipitating a government shutdown by withholding support for the proposed funding resolution.
“We do not have divided government. Democrats do not need our help,” he said in a statement earlier this month. “They have every tool to address the debt limit on their own: the same party-line process they used to ram through inflationary spending in March and already plan to use again this fall.”
McConnell reiterates that GOP senators oppose extending the debt limit if Democrats “go it alone” on the multi-trillion-dollar bill. “They will not get Senate Republicans’ help with raising the debt limit.”
“We do not have divided government. Democrats do not need our help.”
While that’s technically true — Democrats could use the same reconciliation process they’re pursuing to pass the $3.5 trillion spending bill in order to pass the CR with only Democratic votes — a key Democratic House member has already indicated that that option may be off the table.
According to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman, Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), the chair of the House Budget Committee, said last week that “his staff has come to the conclusion there is not enough time to alter the reconciliation bill OR write a stand alone bill to lift the debt ceiling.”
NEW: House Budget Chair @RepJohnYarmuth told me and @mkraju his staff has come to the conclusion there is not enough time to alter the reconciliation bill OR write a stand alone bill to lift the debt ceiling
This could complicate next month as we inch closer to deadline
That means the current CR, which has already passed the House, could be the only viable mechanism to both fund the government and avert a debt ceiling crisis before the deadline.
Still, McConnell appears poised to block any CR that also includes an increase to the debt ceiling, though he has said his conference would support a “clean continuing resolution” without the debt ceiling. That alternative still leaves Democrats with the question of what to do about the debt ceiling increase, however, considering Yarmuth’s position that it may now be too late to pass it through other avenues, and that could make for a uncertain week on Capitol Hill.
Nonetheless, Pelosi has signaled that the CR will get done in time. “Whatever it is, we will have a CR that passes both houses by Sept. 30,” she said at a press conference Thursday.
A lot could still go wrong for congressional Democrats
In addition to the complications posed by McConnell’s stance on the debt ceiling, Democrats are facing an intraparty struggle over the linked bipartisan infrastructure bill and the proposed reconciliation package that could make the coming week particularly difficult.
In the Senate, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) have both balked at the $3.5 trillion figure, with Manchin saying unequivocally in a Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this month that he wouldn’t vote for a bill with that price tag.
All 50 Democratic votes in the Senate are needed to pass the reconciliation measure, however, making their support critical.
For her part, Sinema made her opposition known in July, but indicated then that she was open to negotiations. In recent weeks, Sinema has met with Biden to discuss the bill — and signaled that her continued support for reconciliation depends on the House’s passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Monday.
Sinema’s position puts congressional Democrats in a distinct bind, since progressives in the House say they will not support the infrastructure bill until Congress moves forward with the larger, more progressive reconciliation bill as well, and Pelosi is working with an exceedingly narrow Democratic margin in the House.
That means the votes to pass the bipartisan deal might not be there if the reconciliation bill doesn’t come along with it — or at least that’s what House progressives are betting. Progressive leaders, such as Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are hoping to use their support for the bipartisan deal as leverage to keep the more ambitious reconciliation bill moving along as well.
As of Sunday, it’s unclear exactly when the House will vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package. Jayapal has said she does not believe there will be a vote Monday, and Pelosi declined to offer a specific day in a Sunday interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, saying that “we’re going to pass the bill this week.”
Jayapal: “I don’t believe there is going to be a vote” tomorrow on infrastructure in the House. (Everyone agrees with this but remember the goal was to consider, not vote, starting tmw.)
“A deal’s a deal,” Jayapal tweeted on Sunday. “We don’t pass the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act, investing in child care, climate action, paid leave, housing, health care, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.”
Arizona finished its “audit.” Other states are just getting started. -
Contractors working for Cyber Ninjas examine and recount ballots from the 2020 general election in Phoenix, Arizona, May 8, 2021. | Courtney Pedroza for the Washington Post
Ten months later, the GOP is still trying to dispute the 2020 election.
Arizona’s spurious election “audit” concluded on Friday, confirming yet again that President Joe Biden won Maricopa County, and the state of Arizona — but not putting an end to former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud, which are now fueling similar efforts to relitigate the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas.
The results of the “audit” — a haphazard GOP review of ballots with no legal force behind it, done by a group called Cyber Ninjas in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix — found the vote totals virtually unchanged from the actual election results, which were certified by Arizona officials in November of last year.
While the ballot review didn’t turn up Trump’s nonexistent election fraud, the process has caused a legion of problems for Arizona elections officials, who are currently facing death threats and will now have to spend millions to replace voting machines in Maricopa County.
It also hasn’t quieted some of the most aggressive proponents of voter fraud conspiracies in Arizona, including state Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, who is now calling for a “full signature audit” in Maricopa County, and Trump himself, who used a Saturday interview with right-wing outlet One America News to push debunked claims of election fraud.
And, perhaps most worryingly, Arizona’s attempt at a recount has provided a clear roadmap for pro-Trump officials around the country — specifically, in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — to pursue their own “audits” and sow further distrust in American elections.
The Arizona recount was never credible
On the surface, the Arizona audit’s findings this week approximated Maricopa County’s actual, certified 2020 election results. The vote totals in the final report only differed by a few hundred votes out of about 2.1 million, with Biden actually picking up votes.
The Arizona “audit” coming out tomorrow didn’t just confirm Biden won. Biden actually gained votes in their recount, while Trump lost hundreds, according to a draft report. https://t.co/vSflCtllnipic.twitter.com/9JuLNtYbeW
That, combined with the process behind the audit — partisan, slipshod, and conspiratorial — makes for a deeply concerning precedent, particularly as other states take up similar efforts.
From the start, the recount was a partisan enterprise, supported by Arizona’s Republican Senate majority. The company hired to conduct the audit — Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based security firm — had no experience conducting an election audit, and its CEO, Doug Logan, openly promoted pro-Trump election conspiracies on Twitter before deleting his account in January, according to the New York Times.
Cyber Ninjas also hired a group called Wake TSI to complete the hand count of Maricopa County ballots, adding to the chaos of the process. According to a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, Wake TSI has ties to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement and had previously been contracted by pro-Trump group Defending the Republic to review the results of the election in one Pennsylvania county.
Cyber Ninja’s methods were also wildly out of line with normal audit procedures, which prioritize the security of ballots and voters’ personal information, and the group performed its review without the transparency typical for such processes, insisting to reporters and other observers that their procedures were “trade secrets.”
As Vox’s Ian Millhiser reported in May, Cyber Ninjas also pursued a long list of nonsense audit methods, including examining ballots under ultraviolet light and considering their “thickness or feel.”
After a state court ordered Cyber Ninjas to disclose how it is conducting this so-called audit, a subcontractor revealed that the process involves weighing ballots, examining them under a microscope, and examining the “thickness or feel” of individual ballots in order to identify “questionable ballots” that need to be examined by a “lead forensic examiner” and then “removed from the batch and sent for further analysis.”
“Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” the official Maricopa County Twitter account noted. “Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.”
Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election.
Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin are following the Arizona model
Although the Arizona audit didn’t produce the result Trump wanted — an impossible about-face from the certified results that would give him further pretense tocall into question the entire 2020 election — the effort is already serving as a model for Republicans looking to promulgate election fraud conspiracies.
Specifically, as of this week, Republican legislators in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin have all embarked on a mission to implement recounts or investigations of their own, though the election is long over and certified.
On Thursday, the Texas secretary of state’s office released a statement that it would perform a review of the election results in four large counties — Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin — adding that they expect the Texas legislature to pay for the process, but failing to disclose any further details, or a reason why the audit is necessary. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to conduct an audit earlier on Thursday, despite the fact that Trump won the state by a sizable margin in 2020.
In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, Republican legislators in the Senate’s Intergovernmental Operations Committee voted earlier this month to subpoena voters’ personal information — including addresses, driver’s license numbers, and partial Social Security numbers — in preparation for a new review of the state’s 2020 election results.
Previous election audits, judicial determinations, and both Republican and Democratic election officials have already concluded that Biden won Pennsylvania, according to NPR.
Previously, the Trump campaign paid about $3 million for a review of the votes in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee and Dane counties, falsely alleging that “15-20% of absentee ballots in Milwaukee County were tainted” by poll workers. That recount, which was completed in November 2020, found no evidence of Trump’s claims and confirmed Biden’s victory in the state.
In addition to these new audits, it’s possible that pro-Trump recount efforts in Arizona aren’t over yet either: On Friday, Trump-backed Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem tweeted out a call to conduct a recount in Arizona’s Pima County.
Arizona’s “audit” is bad news for US democracy
On the surface, the Arizona audit didn’t work out for Trump or the Arizona GOP — that is, it didn’t find the election fraud they’ve alleged exists, contrary to all evidence. On another level, however, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump pointed out Friday, Trump and company got exactly what they wanted.
“The Cyber Ninjas appear to have done exactly what they were hired to do,” Bump wrote ahead of the release of the final report. “They were not hired to recount ballots that had already been counted. They were, instead, hired to slather some semblance of authority on top of conspiracy theories. To anchor irrational assumptions about fraud to something resembling rationality.”
The problems with that are obvious — despite the complete lack of evidence, claims of voter fraud have taken root with a broad portion of the Republican electorate, election workers are facing a barrage of death threats and harassment, and a CNN/SSRS poll conducted earlier this month found that a slight majority of Americans, 56 percent, now feel that American democracy is “under attack.”
The prospect of more recounts to come in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Texas also means that problem isn’t likely to abate any time soon — and as the immediate calls for more “audits” by pro-Trump officials in Arizona underscore, the goal isn’t so much to confirm the accuracy of the 2020 election as to confirm a preconceived, false belief that the election was stolen from Trump.
“Though many may experience a short burst of schadenfreude at the Republicans’ failure here, the result isn’t really funny,” the Atlantic’s David Graham wrote on Friday. “All is not well that ends well. Faith in elections is essential to a functioning democracy, and Trump and his allies have sought to undercut the belief that the election system is accurate.”
From The Hindu: Sports
IPL 2021 | Kuldeep Yadav back from UAE after sustaining knee injury, may miss most of domestic season - Out-of-favour India spinner Kuldeep Yadav who was with KKR is expected to go through a long rehabilitation process before attempting a comeback to competitive cricket
IPL 2021 | Struggling Mumbai Indians face inconsistent Punjab Kings - Skipper Rohit Sharma scored 33 and 43 in the last two games but couldn’t capitalise on the starts
Moeen Ali to retire from Test cricket: reports - He is currently in U.A.E. playing for Chennai Super Kings in the IPL
IPL 2021 | Virat Kohli becomes first Indian to reach 10,000 runs in T20 cricket - Virat Kohli is the second man after Chris Gayle to reach the landmark in both T20 and one-day international cricket
IPL 2021 | Selection not in my hand, says Harshal Patel on not making T20 World Cup squad - Harshal Patel is not losing his sleep over his failure to make the Indian team for the upcoming T20 World Cup
From The Hindu: National News
Kerala High Court adjourns hearing on Centre’s appeal against single judge verdict on Covishield dose gap - Single judge’s directive allowed those willing to take a second paid dose of Covishield vaccine four weeks after the first jab instead of the stipulated 84-day gap
Bharat Bandh | Farmers hold mass rallies across the country - If there is bill wapsi, only then there will be ghar wapsi, says Bharatiya Kisan Union leader Rakesh Tikait
2 arrested for inciting violence during Assam eviction - Two persons were killed in police firing and a dozen others, including nine security personnel, sustained injuries during the eviction drive on September 23
International expo to attract investment to tourism sector in Karnataka - State government aims for ₹5,000 crore from global investors
Rajani Patel to get Cong. RS seat from Maharashtra - BJP withdraws candidate for by-poll
From BBC: Europe
Germany elections: Centre-left claim narrow win over Merkel’s party - The Social Democrats beat the party of outgoing Chancellor Merkel and may need weeks to form a coalition.
German elections usher in political change with a small ‘c’ - While voting patterns are changing, none of the front-running parties can be described as radical.
German election: Seven things we learned - Seats, Schleswig and an ex-spy: here are some of the sidelights from Sunday’s vote.
Switzerland same-sex marriage: Two-thirds of voters back yes - Nearly two-thirds have voted yes to the proposal, already law in most of western Europe.
Iceland misses out on Europe’s first female-majority parliament after recount - A recount dashes Iceland’s belief that it had Europe’s first parliament with 50% of seats held by women.
From Ars Technica
Iké Boys review: If you love kaiju so much, why not just be one? - Clever use of animation, deep affinity for shows that inspired it carry this indie genre film. - link
N64 on Switch: Reading the tea leaves on future game prospects - Previous NSO support, third party relations, Virtual Console history: We dive in. - link
It’s not easy to control police use of tech—even with a law - A key backer of a 2018 Oakland law says the city is not following the rules. - link
The 2022 Kia Carnival is a handsome minivan, but it needs a hybrid option - Despite Kia’s expertise with electrification, the Carnival only comes as a V6 for now. - link
A new formula may help Black patients’ access to kidney care - Algorithm made it harder for Black patients to qualify for transplants, other treatments. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Two prostitutes were riding around town with a sign on top of their car that said -
“TWO PROSTITUTES $50.00.” A policeman stopped them and told them they’d either have to remove the sign or go to jail. Just then, another car passed with a sign saying, “JESUS SAVES.” One of the girls asked the cop, “Why don’t you stop them?” Well, that’s a little different," the cop smiled. “Their sign pertains to religion.” The two ladies frowned as they took their sign down and drove off.
The following day the cop noticed the same two ladies driving around with a large sign on their car again. This time the sign read: “TWO ANGELS SEEKING PETER $50.00.”
I tried having my mother’s phone disconnected, but customer service told me that since the account was in my dad’s name, he’d have to be the one to put in the request….. -
The fact that he’d been dead for 40 years didn’t sway the rep. Then a solution hit me: “If I stop paying the bill, you can turn off the service, right?”
“Well, yes,” she said reluctantly. “But that would ruin his credit.”
A congressman was seated in first class next to a little girl on an airplane. -
He turned to her and said, “Do you want to talk? Flights go quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger.” The little girl, who had just started to read her book, replied to the total stranger, “What would you want to talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said the congressman. “How about global warming, universal health care, or stimulus packages?” as he smiled smugly. “OK,” she said. “Those could be interesting topics but let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same stuff - grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty but a horse produces clumps. Why do you suppose that is?”
The legislator, visibly surprised by the little girl’s intelligence, thinks about it and says, “Hmmm, I have no idea.” To which the little girl replies, “Do you really feel qualified to discuss global warming, universal health care, or the economy when you don’t know crap?” Then she went back to reading her book.
