DWW Project 1

Huge Absentee Vote in Key States Favors Democrats So Far

In Wisconsin, about 146,000 people voted by mail in the 2016 general election. This fall, about 647,000 people have already voted absentee, many in Democratic strongholds.

so far. And in the dozens of rural counties where President Trump won huge victories four years ago, ballots are being returned at a far slower rate than in the state’s Democratic areas. The yawning disparities in voting across Wisconsin and several

In Madison, Wis., thousands of people have gone to parks to deliver their ballots during Saturday voting festivals. In Milwaukee, Facebook feeds are inundated with selfies of Democrats inserting ballots into drop boxes. And along the shores of Lake Superior, voters in Wisconsin’s liberal northwest corner still trust the Postal Service to deliver ballots. Of all the mini-battlegrounds within Wisconsin — perhaps the most pivotal state in November for both President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr.

— the mother lode of absentee ballots is coming in Dane County, a Democratic stronghold that includes Madison. As of Friday, the number of submitted ballots there amounted to more than 36 percent of the county’s total 2016 election vote, a sign of significant enthusiasm; that figure is 10 percentage points higher than in any other county in the state. In Wisconsin’s Republican heartland, the suburban counties that ring Milwaukee, the absentee turnout is only at about the state average

other key battlegrounds so far are among the clearest signs yet this fall that the Democratic embrace of absentee voting is resulting in head starts for the party ahead of Election Day. For Republicans, the voting patterns underscore the huge bet they are placing on high turnout on Nov. 3, even as states like Wisconsin face safety concerns at polling sites given the spikes in coronavirus cases. The Democratic enthusiasm to vote is not limited to Wisconsin. Ballot return data from heavily

Democratic cities like Pittsburgh; Chapel Hill, N.C.; and Tampa, Fla., and the long lines of cars waiting at a Houston arena to

drop off ballots, are signs that many voters have followed through on their intentions to cast ballots well ahead of Nov. 3. There is still time for Republicans to catch up in many places, and they are expected to vote in strong numbers in person on Election Day. And untold numbers of absentee ballots could be rejected for failing to fulfill requirements, like witness signatures, or could face legal challenges. But in states that have begun accepting absentee ballots, Democrats have built what appears

to be a sizable advantage, after years when Republicans were usually more likely to vote by mail. Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, said his models showed Democrats with a 10-point advantage among the 275,000 first-time voters nationwide who had already cast ballots and an 18-point lead among 1.1 million “sporadic voters” who had already voted. At the same point in the 2016 cycle, Mr. Bonier said, his model showed Democrats

with a 1.6-point advantage among sporadic voters. “Democrats are highly engaged, and they’re turning out,” Mr. Bonier said. “Republicans can’t say the same.” Across the country, voters in states with little history of casting their ballots weeks before Election Day have embraced the practice as the nation grapples with the eighth month of a pandemic that has so far killed more than 212,000 Americans. As of Friday, more than 8.3 million ballots had already been received by elections officials in the

30 states that have made data available. In six states — including the battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Minnesota — the number of ballots returned already is more than 20 percent of the entire 2016 turnout. The Wisconsin ballot numbers illustrate how much voting has changed in the pandemic era. In the 2016 general election, 146,294 Wisconsinites voted by mail, and 666,035 others voted at in-person early-voting sites. In the current general election, 646,987 people have already voted absentee as of

Friday. Early-voting sites start opening in Wisconsin on Oct. 20. Wisconsin’s municipal clerks can begin tabulating absentee ballots once the polls open on Election Day. As a result, the full results from early voting in Wisconsin as well as some other states may not be known after Nov. 3. Officials from both parties say that Democrats are far more eager to vote early, a consequence of encouragement from party leaders like Mr. Biden and former President Barack Obama to vote as soon

as possible to avoid possibly exposing themselves to the virus at Election Day polling sites. Many Republicans have followed the lead of Mr. Trump, who has regularly castigated voting by mail, while the party’s leadership in some states has offered mixed messages about when supporters should vote. While Wisconsin Democrats have waged a campaign for months to urge voters to request absentee ballots and return them quickly, the Republican Party of Wisconsin recently

sent mail to its supporters urging them to hand-deliver ballots to their local municipal clerks. But in much of Republican-heavy rural Wisconsin, clerks work only part-time, leaving fewer opportunities to return ballots by hand. “The left is very focused on getting their people to request absentee ballots and return them,” said Matt Batzel, the Cedar Grove, Wis.-based executive director of American Majority, a conservative grass-roots training organization. “Democrats are in the lead as

of the ballots that are returned, no doubt.” Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor, said the 2020 presidential election is the first in which Democrats are casting pre-Election Day ballots at a faster rate than Republicans. In Florida, he said, 11.5 percent of Democrats who requested absentee ballots have returned them, compared with 8.7 percent of Republicans. The same pattern emerges in another battleground state, North Carolina, where the return rate for

Democratic ballots is 32.9 percent and the return rate for Republicans is 27.4 percent.

source

His Writing Radicalized Young Hackers. Now He Wants to Redeem Them

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother series has been a young-adult sci-fi bible for teen hacktivists. But with the latest and darkest book in the trilogy, it's all grown up.

SET THE FIRST and last books in Cory Doctorow’s epic, three-book Little Brother cypherpunk saga side-by-side, and they read a bit like a creative writing master class on telling two starkly opposite stories from the same prompt. The common premise: Islamist terrorists bomb the Bay Bridge. Thousands die. The Department of Homeland responds by turning San Francisco into a fascist, total-surveillance police state. The protagonist, a digitally gifted, troublemaking teen, must decide how to respond.

In the first Little Brother installment, which Doctorow published in 2008, the answer seemed righteously inevitable: The hero uses his hacker skills to fight back. Specifically, he and his plucky hacker friends figure out how to jailbreak their Xboxes and channel the video game consoles’ encrypted comms over the Tor network to create Xnet, a cheap, anonymous, surveillance-proof system for organizing protest and foiling the panopticon cops by injecting false data into their totalitarian schemes.

In Doctorow’s third work in the series, publishing this week and titled Attack Surface, the protagonist takes an altogether different path. And while that path threads through the same alternate-world timeline of events, it’s tinted with all the shades of gray that the world has accumulated in the dozen long years since the series’ first, wide-eyed story.

This time the hero—or anti-hero, more like—instead chooses to go work for the DHS. After all, she’s angry, itching to use her prowess in digital exploitation, and someone needs to help hunt these terrorists who actually knows what she’s doing. To get the job, she breaks into her friends’ Xnet system—it was riddled with hackable bugs, of course—and uses information cascade modeling to identify all of the resistance’s leaders, then serves up the map to the authorities. Not long after, she swaps her DHS job for a contract position in Iraq where she uses those same tricks to identify insurgent leaders, hack their devices, find them, and target them for killing.


The money is very good, and keeps getting better. She’s transferred to Mexico City, switches contractors, and becomes accustomed to first class flying, room service in Japanese-themed hotels, and aged scotch on the corporate account. Eventually she finds her employer is offering her exploitation skills to a kleptocratic Eastern European government that’s using them to suppress a “color revolution”-style movement. To assuage her guilt, she starts helping the dissidents, too, building surveillance systems by day and advising idealistic young rebels on how to defeat them by night—even while knowing that they’re almost certainly doomed, that the technological terrain has put them at an impossible disadvantage.

In Little Brother, the series’ first book, Doctorow’s narrator was the idealistic and ultimately naive crypto-rebel Marcus Yallow. In Attack Surface, the latest, it’s the realist, cynical, ethically compromised spy, Masha Maximow. But Doctorow doesn’t want the reader to choose between the two. He wants you to see yourself in both Marcus and Masha, equally, to live out his morality tale from both perspectives. And he argues that second perspective may be far more relatable: His latest book is designed not for the fresh-faced Marcuses who are still ethically unblemished, but for the far larger population of Mashas who have already made moral compromises in their tech careers—who already work at a privacy-invasive social media giant, an adtech firm, a surveillance contractor, or an intelligence agency.

“I want to reach people who are maybe belated Robert Oppenheimers, who are thinking about whether or not it's a good idea to be running this Manhattan Project to manipulate people or spy on people or control people,” Doctorow told WIRED in an interview last week ahead of Attack Surface’s release. “If you found yourself in tech because you were excited by how much self-determination and power and pleasure you got from mastering technology, and then found your entire professional life devoted to ensuring that no one else ever felt that, this is the time for your moral reckoning.”

source

How to Watch Apple's iPhone Event Tomorrow

The company is expected to debut the iPhone 12 during a streaming presentation Tuesday. Here's how to tune in.
EVERY FALL, LIKE clockwork, a new iPhone is birthed unto the world. Apple invites us all to join its executives at the company's campus in Cupertino, California, for the big reveal. The new custom silicon. The "better-than-ever" camera. The shiny, shiny chamfers.

If it feels like you just watched a socially distanced presentation about new Apple hardware, it's because you did. Mid-September brought us a pair of new Apple Watches, some iPads, and the launch of the Apple One services bundle. The iPhone news was held for a future showcase; that's what we'll see Tuesday. Whispers of some other rumored products have been in the air since summer. When a few highly anticipated items—like some rumored over-the-ear headphones, or a newly revamped HomePod speaker—didn't show up at the September event, they quickly got shunted onto the wishlist for the October event.

Apple's iPhone show-and-tell will be livestreamed for free, so anyone can tune in. We should be treated to prerecorded segments featuring Apple executives walking us through the new products and demonstrating the features for the cameras. There will be no audience—just you and whatever pets you've adopted during quarantine.

How to Watch

Apple's presentation will start at 1 pm Eastern, 10 am Pacific, on Tuesday, October 13. You can stream it right here on this page. You can also view the stream on Apple’s website, in the Apple TV app, or on the company’s YouTube channel.

That Apple TV option is new this year, by the way—now that Apple has its own streaming service, it also has a dedicated video app on mobile devices, Apple TV boxes, Roku boxes, and in some smart TVs. You can open that app and find the option to stream Tuesday's event whether or not you subscribe to the monthly Apple TV+ streaming service.

We'd recommend launching the stream on your television using either your YouTube app or the Apple TV app. The company's slickly produced showcases feature lots of high-impact visuals that look good in the larger format. Besides, if you watch it on your television, that frees up your laptop for browsing all the stuff on sale for Amazon Prime Day (which also starts Tuesday morning).

Expect Apple's presentation to last around 90 minutes. Once the event ends, come back to WIRED for coverage that rounds up the announcements and highlights the industry trends that Apple is both responding to and advancing with its latest release.
source