Worried about Election Day? Now if you vote by mail, you can obsessively track your ballot’s every move online.

By Geoffrey A. FowlerTechnology columnist September 18, 2020 (washingtonpost.com)

This story was featured in Drop Me The Link, our one-story election newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox three times a week.

Want to make sure your ballot counts? Track it online like a UPS delivery.

That’s now possible across much of America, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic.

I don’t often get emails from my state government, so I was curious about one recently asking me to check out California’s new election website, Where’s My Ballot. There, I typed in my name, birthday and Zip code — and a minute later, I had signed up for personalized voting updates. Now I’ll get a text when my ballot is in the mail, as it’s on its way back to election officials and, eventually, counted.

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I did a double take: For once, there’s a new use for technology that might build confidence in our democracy, rather than tear it down.

Turns out, California isn’t alone. Gearing up for the largest vote-by-mail election in American history, a patchwork of local officials in all but about seven states have invested in some form of ballot-tracking tech. It will be available in the District of Columbia, most of Virginia, Maryland, Colorado and North Carolina, and parts of Florida, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon and South Carolina, just to name a few. To find out if you’ve got access where you vote, check out The Washington Post’s handy interactive guide to voting in 2020.

There’s one important thing to know: You need to seek out ballot tracking, either by logging into a website or signing up for alerts — likely separate from registering to vote or requesting an absentee ballot.

For an election marked by confusion and deceit about voting, ballot-tracking tech is a win for truth, justice and the American way. It won’t end all our debates about disenfranchisement and election fraud. But the transparency helps us hold local officials and the U.S. Postal Service accountable. And it can take away some of our own uncertainty about voting by mail.

That includes keeping you out of trouble. “Because you’ll have already received information that your ballot counted, you don’t have to jeopardize yourself committing a felony by voting again,” said Tammy Patrick, senior adviser to the elections team at the nonprofit Democracy Fund.AD

That sounds like a big deal, especially since President Trump recently encouraged people to purposely vote twice, which is illegal. “It sure is,” Patrick told me.

How does this work? How do you get it? And most of all, is it secure? Here’s a citizen’s guide based on my conversations with election officials and the companies that make ballot tech.

How it works

Given the misinformation flying these days, I want to be very clear: Ballot-tracking websites do not allow you to vote online. Nor do they track who you voted for. That’s nobody’s business but your own.

In the United States, the envelopes containing our mail-in ballots — not the ballots themselves — have numbers on them associated with individual voters. That’s how local officials make sure you’re only sent one ballot, and how they’ll see if you try to vote twice. In many places, those numbers are also embedded in so-called Intelligent Mail Barcodes, which allows the Postal Service to track the coming and going of the ballot envelope.AD

These codes power ballot-tracking sites. Think of them like the shipping updates you get after placing an online shopping order — except these are delivering democracy. They’re a service of your local election board, though sometimes the sites are lumped together for an entire state. Some places, like Denver, have had a version of it for more than a decade, but a whole bunch signed on or expanded their offerings this year following the pandemic. Business at BallotTrax, the largest service provider for this technology, grew 10 times in 2020.

Since elections are run by local governments, what you get from ballot-tracking sites can vary. Officials who use software from BallotTrax and rival Ballot Scout can potentially provide step-by-step mail tracking and alerts in the form of text messages, emails or even recorded phone calls. Others, like the homegrown Maryland system, around since 2012, are simpler: Just a website you can log in to any time to see if your ballot has been “sent” or “accepted.” In most places, the tracking should work whether you mail your ballot or submit it in an official drop box.

How to prevent your mail ballot from being rejected

For most of us, these services are just a way to know that, yes, even in a bonkers year like 2020, our ballots actually counted. But in some cases, these services help flag that something has gone wrong. For example, sometimes people move and forget to update their address; a tracking site will usually flag when a ballot is marked undeliverable. Sometimes people’s ballots get rejected because they forget to sign them — or even, as my colleague Elise Viebeck has warned, because they scribble on the wrong part of the ballot. Depending on your state, a tracking site could note there’s a problem and give you the chance to fix it before Election Day.AD

Lots of people also forget about mail-in deadlines, and this tech gives counties a targeted way to reach out and let voters who haven’t yet returned their ballots know what they need to do ASAP.

“It’s the most popular tool we offer voters,” said Tim Scott, the director of elections for Multnomah County, Ore., which has offered ballot tracking since 2015. But still, it’s underutilized: About 10 percent of voters there have signed up. “I think that will change this year,” he said.

Election officials also told me the tech lets their understaffed offices run better. “Just helping stop some of the incoming phone calls, that is very helpful,” said Matt Kelly, the absentee voting manager in Franklin County, Ohio.

Officials also get dashboards that help them know when ballots are heading back their way and spot problems, such as a pallet that gets lost in a corner at the post office. It happens.

How you sign up

To find out if you have access to ballot tracking, visit your state or county’s voter website — a good place to start is The Post’s interactive voting guide, which is full of links.AD

Signing up for a tracking service is remarkably simple for government tech. (You paying attention, DMV?) You don’t have to be a computer or smartphone expert. On a voter portal website, registering usually requires entering a few very simple pieces of information, such as your name, date of birth and Zip code. Sometimes when voters have similar names, the sites might ask for a little bit more, such as a voter ID number or driver’s license number.

The additional information these sites collect to send you alerts, including how to contact you, is usually treated as confidential and can’t be sold, including political parties.

I downloaded America’s first coronavirus exposure app. You should too.

It’s also possible you don’t have access to ballot-tracking where you live. Why not? In some places, mail-in voting has previously been too niche. Others just didn’t have time to set it up before this election. Others don’t have the money. BallotTrax, for one, says its service costs can range from 2 cents to 5 cents per voter.

If your local election board doesn’t have the service — or you just want the fullest picture possible — there’s another free option available to most Americans called USPS Informed Delivery. If you sign up for this service, you can get a daily email with photographs of the mail that’s headed your way. This way, at least, you can know when your ballot is going to arrive and be on the lookout for it.

Is it safe?

There’s reason to believe ballot-tracking is less of a security concern than other election-related systems. But these services could be abused to confuse voters, so there are some things you should be vigilant about.AD

Both BallotTrax and Ballot Scout say they’ve taken important measures to shore up cybersecurity, including working with outside firms to test and audit their systems and getting help from the Department of Homeland Security.

The best thing they’ve got going for them is that the data they control isn’t particularly valuable. They’re largely built on information from voter rolls that many local governments already make public. (Yes, whether you voted can be public record.) The info that goes into ballot-tracking sites is kept separate from systems that tabulate votes and adjudicate questionable ballots.

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But anything connected to the Internet is vulnerable, and we know foreign adversaries are looking for any possible way to sow distrust. Foreign adversaries could try to shut down ballot-tracking websites at important times, or even set up fake ones to lure voters through phishing, said John Sebes, the chief technology officer of the OSET Institute, a nonprofit that helps develop election tech.AD

And if ballot-tracking sites do get hacked, he said, “they could become a really powerful channel for disinformation.”

In a worst-case scenario, a breached tracking system could be abused to erroneously report to voters that their ballots didn’t count and they need to vote in person. If that happened, voting places could get jammed up on Election Day as they try to sort out who should and shouldn’t vote again.

“It isn’t a very good target because it isn’t going to change any votes,” said Patrick from the Democracy Fund. “But it could potentially change the way in which a voter acts, and whether they think they need to make a remedy on their ballot.”

There’s no evidence of that happening with ballot-tracking in any past elections, knock on wood. And the alternative is voters not getting any information about their ballots at all, which could also undermine election confidence. “I’m a lot more worried about social media misinformation,” said Scott, in Oregon.AD

Still, it’s a good reminder to be suspicious of any election communication you get via text, email or social media.

One Post reader in Maryland wrote to me about a suspicious-looking email about her mail-in ballot that claimed to be from the state’s election department, but came from an address that ended in “marylandelections.us” rather than the state’s official “elections.maryland.gov.” Turns out that email was legitimate: State officials tell me they use the .us address for bulk email communication.

Now that state and local governments are communicating more online, we all need to adopt defensive communication standards. That includes making all communications come from official .gov addresses, and making it easy for citizens to tell if they are legitimate. California, for one, posts copies of its bulk election emails to its social media accounts, so you can compare your inbox to the real thing.

We have to stay vigilant like democracy depends on it.

Voting in the 2020 U.S. Election

Updated September 18, 2020

What you need to know: How to make sure your vote counts in November | Absentee ballots vs. mail-in ballots | How to track your vote like a package | How to prevent your mail ballot from being rejected | More than 500,000 mail ballots were rejected in the primaries | Where Biden and Harris stand on voting issues | Google allows ads with ‘blatant disinformation’ about voting by mail

U.S. Postal Service: Postal Service backlog sparks worries that ballot delivery could be delayed in November | Why the USPS wanted to remove hundreds of mail-sorting machines | Can FedEx and UPS deliver ballots? | The cash-strapped Postal Service | Overhaul in USPS leadership | Newly revealed USPS documents show the agency’s 2020 ballot pressures, uncertainty

Map: Which states can cast ballots by mail77 Comments

Geoffrey Fowler Geoffrey A. Fowler is The Washington Post’s technology columnist based in San Francisco. He joined The Post in 2017 after 16 years with the Wall Street Journal writing about consumer technology, Silicon Valley, national affairs and China.

(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

Science denialism is not just a simple matter of logic or ignorance

• By Adrian Bardon, The Conversation US on June 26, 2020 (scientificamerican.com)

Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their “amazing” refusal to listen to science.

It is Fauci’s profession of amazement that amazes me. As well-versed as he is in the science of the coronavirus, he’s overlooking the well-established science of “anti-science bias,” or science denial.

Americans increasingly exist in highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own information universes.

Within segments of the political blogosphere, global warming is dismissed as either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, the science of vaccine safety, fluoridated drinking water and genetically modified foods is distorted or ignored. There is a marked gap in expressed concern over the coronavirus depending on political party affiliation, apparently based in part on partisan disagreements over factual issues like the effectiveness of social distancing or the actual COVID-19 death rate.

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.

But things don’t work that way when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview. In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue.

“Motivated reasoning” is what social scientists call the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers. As I explain in my book, “The Truth About Denial,” this very human tendency applies to all kinds of facts about the physical world, economic history and current events.

DENIAL DOESN’T STEM FROM IGNORANCE

The interdisciplinary study of this phenomenon has made one thing clear: The failure of various groups to acknowledge the truth about, say, climate change, is not explained by a lack of information about the scientific consensus on the subject.

Instead, what strongly predicts denial of expertise on many controversial topics is simply one’s political persuasion.

A 2015 metastudy showed that ideological polarization over the reality of climate change actually increases with respondents’ knowledge of politics, science and/or energy policy. The chances that a conservative is a climate science denier is significantly higher if he or she is college educated. Conservatives scoring highest on tests for cognitive sophistication or quantitative reasoning skills are most susceptible to motivated reasoning about climate science.

Denialism is not just a problem for conservatives. Studies have found liberals are less likely to accept a hypothetical expert consensus on the possibility of safe storage of nuclear waste, or on the effects of concealed-carry gun laws.

DENIAL IS NATURAL

The human talent for rationalization is a product of many hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation. Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system – regardless of whether it was grounded in science or superstition. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s “in-group” and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology.

A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens the worldview of groups with which they identify. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence – that is, we engage in “confirmation bias,” giving credit to expert testimony we like while finding reasons to reject the rest.

Unwelcome information can also threaten in other ways. “System justification” theorists like psychologist John Jost have shown how situations that represent a perceived threat to established systems trigger inflexible thinking. For example, populations experiencing economic distress or an external threat have often turned to authoritarian leaders who promise security and stability.

In ideologically charged situations, one’s prejudices end up affecting one’s factual beliefs. Insofar as you define yourself in terms of your cultural affiliations, your attachment to the social or economic status quo, or a combination, information that threatens your belief system – say, about the negative effects of industrial production on the environment – can threaten your sense of identity itself. If trusted political leaders or partisan media are telling you that the COVID-19 crisis is overblown, factual information about a scientific consensus to the contrary can feel like a personal attack.

DENIAL IS EVERYWHERE

This kind of affect-laden, motivated thinking explains a wide range of examples of an extreme, evidence-resistant rejection of historical fact and scientific consensus.

Have tax cuts been shown to pay for themselves in terms of economic growth? Do communities with high numbers of immigrants have higher rates of violent crime? Did Russia interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Predictably, expert opinion regarding such matters is treated by partisan media as though evidence is itself inherently partisan.

Denialist phenomena are many and varied, but the story behind them is, ultimately, quite simple. Human cognition is inseparable from the unconscious emotional responses that go with it. Under the right conditions, universal human traits like in-group favoritism, existential anxiety and a desire for stability and control combine into a toxic, system-justifying identity politics.

Science denial is notoriously resistant to facts because it isn’t about facts in the first place. Science denial is an expression of identity – usually in the face of perceived threats to the social and economic status quo – and it typically manifests in response to elite messaging.

I’d be very surprised if Anthony Fauci is, in fact, actually unaware of the significant impact of politics on COVID-19 attitudes, or of what signals are being sent by Republican state government officials’ statements, partisan mask refusal in Congress, or the recent Trump rally in Tulsa. Effective science communication is critically important because of the profound effects partisan messaging can have on public attitudes. Vaccination, resource depletion, climate and COVID-19 are life-and-death matters. To successfully tackle them, we must not ignore what the science tells us about science denial.

Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here. And read coverage from our international network of magazines here.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Adrian Bardon

Adrian Bardon is a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University.

June 14, 1970 – Thane

Excerpt : “You simply can’t have God on one hand and an enemy god on the other and be sane. Because having God on one hand and an enemy god on the other is the same as having God on one hand and a gun in the other.

“The truth of the matter is that if you are going to seek Truth it usually is anywhere but where you look; if you’re going to find Truth it’s where you never look. And it cannot be described in words.”

Link to audio: https://www.theprosperos.com/trsm02

(Contributed by Hanz Bolen, H.W., M.)

Alexis and Lilian Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/alexislilian and enter promo code alexislilian for 83% discount and 3 extra months for free! A while back, we did a video on how to come to terms with your sexuality, and figuring out whether you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual or straight. Well, we missed some essential information in there, which is why many of you may still be confused. Here it is – the missing piece – romantic attraction vs sexual attraction, asexuality, and the many other types of attraction you can feel for others… We hope this clears things up a bit more! How to figure out your sexuality: https://youtu.be/-gZ2q8RZZ5U Love, A + L https://www.instagram.com/one99fourhttps://www.instagram.com/liliangessner

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”

― Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Joseph Conrad (December 3, 1857 – August 3, 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. Wikipedia

The rules–based international order can generally be described as a shared commitment by all countries to conduct their activities in accordance with agreed rules that evolve over time, such as international law, regional security arrangements, trade agreements, immigration protocols, and cultural arrangements.

—United Nations …www.unaa.org.au

This image shows a rap battle between two young rappers in Tehran in 2019.RAP / IRAN– 09/16/2020

The young people gathered are in their twenties, dressed in oversized tee-shirts, hoodies, chains and durags. In short, they look like any young people immersed in rap and hip hop culture. But when they launch into their flow, the words are in Persian. Rap has been popular in Iran for the past twenty years but, recently there has been an increasing number of rap battles staged in quiet streets and parks, and videos are popping up online.

This battle between two young rappers was filmed in Tehran in 2019. “You come in here like a gangster and the rap becomes a bit like gossip. You come around here, but you see that I’m the best,” (noise) says one. “I talk and I make noise (….) You pretend that you’re a man but you are just… you can’t do anything,” says the other. According to our Observers, the rapper wearing a black tee-shirt was later arrested during a protest against an increase in the price of gas in late 2019.

Most Iranian rappers never get approval from the Iranian Ministry of Culture to broadcast their songs and have to record in underground locations. Several well-known rappers have been arrested, including Bahram (who was arrested and held in detention for a week in 2008), or exiled, including Pishro (who fled the country after authorities released an arrest warrant with his name on it in 2018) and Hichkas (who continues to record while living abroad). Even so, rap has been on the rise for the past 20 years in the Islamic Republic and many say that it is the most popular style of music amongst young people today.

The rapper “Hossein Spy” participated in this rap battle in Ispahan in September 2019. “I live my life and I rip up the tarmac with my shoes and my evolution, life is like that. This here is Ispahan and its flag flies high.”
 More and more rap battles are being posted on Instagram and Telegram. Ama is the administrator for “Rapid,” an instablog about Iranian rap. He’s been keeping close tabs on the scene for the past 14 years.

“Persian rap is extremely rich because we don’t rap just to talk about one girl or another” Young Iranians hear rap all of the time and, like young people around the globe, they try to write their own lyrics. The bravest ones, who believe the most in themselves, take part in battles.

The two major towns where battles take place are Tehran and Mashhad [Mashhad is one of the most religious cities for Shi’a Muslims]. Rap fans know the battlegrounds in their town. Most of them take place in parks. Some of them are pretty spontaneous. If you go to a specific place, you know you’ll find other rappers there and you just go for it, pairing up with someone and launching into a battle. There are also more organized battles that are invitation only. You go to a specific place at a specific time and see two rappers face off.

Rapper Ezzat takes part in a battle in December 2018 in Tehran. “Everyone gathers here. It doesn’t matter if you are from east Tehran or west Tehran, we’re all friends. Here, it’s 021” [The area code for Tehran]”.

Most of these rappers are between the ages of 15 and 30. Most of them are men. There aren’t a lot of female rappers, which is pretty typical in rap scenes around the world. But often there are girls in the audience.

Some Iranian rappers have been arrested, while others have been exiled. But it is hard for police to control freestyle rap. What are they going to do– station an officer at all the park entrances? To date, we don’t know of any freestyle rappers who have been arrested.

“There’s no money in rap here, you do it out of pure love.”
READ ALSO ON THE OBSERVERS: “Taxi Driver,” rap song vents about poverty in Iran Rap battles have become fairly established over the past five or six years. Everything you rap during a battle has to be improvised. At first, people would show up with scripts already written, but, more and more, we have real battles where people create in the moment. In my opinion, Iranian rap is more advanced and more comprehensive as compared to the other countries in the region, including the Persian gulf countries and Afghanistan. 

In his freestyle, rapper “Big head” makes fun of a conservative teacher who thinks that women are to blame if their husband cheats on them. “Maybe it’s you that isn’t doing well / Maybe it’s how you behave, he doesn’t want you / (…) you can’t go out often / Call your “marja” [A high official within the Shi’a clergy] and see which side he chooses / They won’t say if your husband is a good guy, they won’t even say anything if he is a thief, they won’t say if he’s an ass (can we say that?), they won’t say if he has a fiery temperament / Maybe it’s your fault”. This video was filmed in Tehran in 2019.

Iranian rappers talk about the world around them, about liberty, equality and politics. They don’t hesitate to criticize the regime and religious conservatives. I think Iranian rap is truly rich because we don’t just talk about one girl or another or about drugs or the theme of “look at how great I am and how bad the others are.” Even if we do of course talk about those things, too… like all rappers in the world!

There’s no money in rap here. There aren’t official concerts and you can’t sell albums so you have to have pure love for rap to do it.

“A better day will come,” a track by the exiled rapper Hichkas, was written in 2009 during a time when the government was violently cracking down on the protest movement demonstrating against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s contested presidential victory.RAP /  IRAN /  YOUTH CULTURE

Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Krishnamurti’s Last Public Words

Craig Hamilton Attend Craig’s FREE 90-minute audio workshop: https://EvolveBeyondEgo.com In this 8-minute guided meditation excerpted from one of his virtual meditation workshops, Craig illuminates what it really means to be free from the mind. Rather than asking you to quiet your mind, he guides you to the discovery of who you are beyond the mind and invites you to rest in the depth and freedom of your true nature.

Alice Pailhès|TED2020

Are you in control of your choices? Magic tricks might reveal otherwise, says scientist and illusionist Alice Pailhès. Watch closely as she performs magic tricks that unveil how your brain works, how you can be subtly influenced and what that means for free will and your day-to-day life. Did she guess your card right?

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alice Pailhès · Scientist, illusionistFascinated by quirks of the human mind, Alice Pailhès transmits scientific knowledge through magic tricks.