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March 17th, 2019:

Weekend link dump for March 17

Mar 17th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
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“Acknowledging the role of luck is the secular equivalent of religious awakening.”

“What Dollar Stores Tell Us About Electoral Politics”.

Behold Stevie Nicks’ magnificent shawl collection.

“What are you giving up for Lent? Well, instead of giving something up how about doing something positive. How about this: Be kind.”

“A look at history suggests we shouldn’t be surprised that voters care about whether presidents understand them and their problems.”

RIP, Julia Ruth Stevvens, last surviving child of Babe Ruth.

“Hiding in Plain Sight: PAC-Connected Activists Set Up ‘Local News’ Outlets“.

Preview a new film about the decades-long effort to suppress the vote.

“Facebook and Amazon appear to be helping hate groups fundraise through philanthropy tools hosted on their platforms.”

OMG, this college admissions scandal. I mean, seriously. It’s bonkers, and yet it’s a very real kind of thing in 2019.

Oh, and now I know way more about Lori Laughlin’s Hallmark Channel dominance than I ever wanted to know.

“There is no “balance” in giving a platform to peddlers of unscientific and irresponsible notions – climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers or those who call the moon landing a hoax.”

“New Zealand Attack Underscores Social Media Sites’ Tolerance of Anti-Muslim Content“.

Still a “no” on Whitley

Mar 17th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
1 comment

As it should be.

Still the only voter ID anyone should need

Senate Democrats still pledge to block the confirmation of embattled Secretary of State David Whitley, even as a top Texas law enforcement official is taking blame for major errors in a list of suspected non-citizen voters.

“I take full responsibility as the leader of the Department of Public Safety,” Steven McCraw told the Senate Criminal Justice Committee this week. Had the department assigned a “senior level person” to the project, he said, it wouldn’t have turned over bad data that included thousands of people who had already proven their citizenship.

“I can tell you throughout the entire project, the secretary was not involved in any of it because he wasn’t there at the time,” McCraw said.

The mea culpa, however, is being met with skepticism from county election officials, who first identified mistakes in the state list, and from Senate Democrats, who still fault Whitley. He had been on the job about six weeks before launching the attempted purge.

“Ultimately he’s responsible, because he is the secretary of state,” state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville, said Thursday. “I still think he’s a fine gentleman, he just made the wrong decision.”

[…]

Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, said McCraw’s statement this week didn’t change his mind.

“I don’t know that changed anybody’s mind,” Whitmire said. “The harm has been done.”

The Democrats’ resistance is a rare show of force from the minority party this early in the legislative session, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. Abbott’s nominees don’t usually meet much pushback from the upper chamber.

“I can’t remember ever having someone this controversial in my 29 years in the Senate,” Lucio said.

See here and here for some background. All due respect to Sen. Lucio, but I’d argue that the David Bradley and Don McLeroy fiascoes were on par with this one. Be that as it may, the Abbott-McCraw blame-passing pas-de-duex doesn’t pass the smell test.

State Elections Director Keith Ingram acknowledged in federal court that the secretary of state’s office knew ahead of time that issue might pose some problems with the list. Some 50,000 people are naturalized each year in Texas.

“I don’t see why DPS is taking responsibility, other than it’s convenient for the Department of Public Safety to take the fall, rather than the secretary of state,” said Special Assistant Harris County Attorney Douglas Ray, who has said DPS data is notoriously unreliable.

Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis questioned why the secretary of state’s office didn’t spot the errors that were quickly evident to county officials.

“The secretary of state had a duty to vet this information,” said Davis, who is president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators. “So much of this could have been avoided had they done so.”

“I apologize to all of the voters whose citizenship was called into question by this advisory. In our effort to protect the integrity of our voter registration system, my office acted in haste to verify the rolls, and in doing so created unnecessary problems for county officials and many voters. I take responsibility for this, and I promise to take every step to improve and optimize our processes to achieve our goal of ensuring that elections are protected and all eligible citizens have the opportunity to vote.” See how easy that was? If David Whitley had said something like that at the beginning, we wouldn’t be having this discussion now. He’d have been confirmed, and we’d be obsessing about something else. Why hasn’t Whitley taken responsibility for his actions, and why does Greg Abbott insist on coddling him in this fashion?

Letting 17-year-olds vote

Mar 17th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
5 comments

Sort of.

Hoping to fuel the next crop of young voters, state lawmakers filed bills that would allow 17-year-olds to vote in some primary elections if they are going to turn 18 before the general election. The 17-year-olds would only be allowed to vote for state and county offices — not in federal races, such as U.S. congressional or presidential elections.

If the legislation passes, Texas would join nearly 20 states that allow some form of voting at age 17, including Illinois, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia.

Supporters say changing the law in Texas will get young people in the lifetime habit of voting, while critics – including some county elections officials – say implementing the policy could confuse more 17-year-olds than it would empower.

State Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, who is attempting to pass the bill for the third time, said last session it did not even receive a hearing. This year, Howard filed House Bill 512, and state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, filed an identical bill in the Senate.

Since passing similar legislation in 2013, Illinois has seen “an influx of younger voters,” according to Cook County’s March 2018 post-election report. At 29 percent, turnout in the 2018 gubernatorial primary – the second to include the 17-year-old vote – was the highest since 2002 for a gubernatorial primary in the county, Illinois’ largest.

In Texas, however, experts on political participation say allowing primary voting at age 17 would only marginally impact turnout, since a fraction of voters cast ballots in primaries. Statewide, overall turnout was 17 percent in the 2018 primary and 30 percent in the 2016 primary, according to the Secretary of State.

“This wouldn’t spike turnout by any large margin overall, but you might see some improvements or small improvement on the edges,” said Jay Jennings, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life at UT-Austin.

[…]

Chris Davis, president of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators, said the association is opposed to the bills as written because the change would confuse 17-year-olds regarding which elections they can and cannot vote in.

“One of the predominant challenges is that there are quite a few elections that can occur between a primary, where we’re allowing that 17 to vote … and the general election in November later that year where they’d be 18,” said Davis, Williamson County Elections Administrator. “It makes for a complex situation … the implication being that when other elections happen in their county, in their city, in their school district … these voters would not be able to vote, only to be allowed to vote again when they become 18.”

If the legislation passes, Davis said county elections officials and poll workers will have to deal with a “log jam” of confused 17-year-old voters.

“What’s nice and neat and clean about the law as it exists, is when you’re 18, you can vote for any election that you qualify for,” Davis said. “This bill would only allow the 17-year-olds to vote in one election and they’re gonna be confused and they’re gonna think if they voted in that one, they can vote for a whole bunch of other elections when they see campaign signs come up in their neighborhood.”

Here’s HB512. On the one hand, I approve of efforts to expand the franchise, even in a not-all-the-way fashion. Some cities allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in their municipal elections, and I fully support that. That said, the way this is presented I do think it’s confusing and possibly unsatisfying to the very voters it would enable. The hottest primaries last year were for Congress, and none of the 17-year-olds in question would have been able to vote in them under this bill, as that’s a federal race. To me, the best way to do this would be to change the law to allow anyone who turns 18 in a given year on January 1 of that year to vote in all elections. That would require a federal Constitutional amendment, which needless to say ain’t gonna happen. I’m open to discussing what this bill wants to deliver, but I’m skeptical.

Enron’s other legacy

Mar 17th, 2019
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

The company is long gone, its leaders have faded into history, but Enron’s emails are forever.

During its 2002 investigation of the bankruptcy of Enron, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) checked the energy company’s emails: more than 600,000 messages sent from 158 employees, mostly senior management.

The collected missives—a mixture of high-level business negotiations, discussions between managers and their spouses about holiday plans, and many, many requests to be unsubscribed from mailing lists—formed part of the evidence that led FERC to conclude the company had in fact engaged in illegal price manipulation, and the US Department of Justice to press criminal charges against former CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling.

After its investigation, the commission determined the emails were in the public’s interest and dumped them on a website.

Though ostensibly for research and academic use, the trove was so messy and unwieldy that it was effectively useless—until an MIT computer science professor named Leslie Kaelbling bought the data for $10,000 and handed it over to colleagues who cleaned it up, took out duplicates, organized the remaining 200,000 messages into folders, and released it into the world.

“What was weird was that the data itself was in the public domain, but we still had to pay a company for the service of giving it to us on a disk,” Kaelbling said. “After that, we just gave it away for free.”

If Enron went down for defrauding the public, the company has unwittingly repaid a small part of its debt to society through the gift of its emails.

The Enron Corpus, as the collection is known, has been used in more than 100 projects since that research team presented it to the public in 2004. As the biggest public collection of natural written language in an organizational setting, it has been used to study everything from statistics to artificial intelligence to email attachment habits. An online art project by two Brooklyn artists will send every single one of the emails to your personal inbox, a process which (depending on the frequency of emails you request) will take anywhere from seven days to seven years.

Making all this data public has had the benefit of allowing all kinds of research into corporate behavior that just wouldn’t be possible without it. The downside is that as these emails are used as training data for artificial intelligence projects – the Enron Corpus was the training set used for the prototype of Gmail’s “smart compose” feature, though not its final version – they represent a small and atypical slice of society. That’s an entry point for bias to creep into algorithms and other automated processes. I’m sure there’s plenty more to be done with and learned from the Enron Corpus. We just shouldn’t consider it to be the be-all and end-all of how people communicate.

(I found this story while doing a Google news search on Jeff Skilling following the news of his release. So credit the Enron Corpus for finding a way to spread the word about itself, too.)