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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Big Tech disrupted disruption

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/08/permanent-overlords/#republicans-want-to-defund-the-police

Before "disruption" turned into a punchline, it was a genuinely exciting idea. Using technology, we could connect people to one another and allow them to collaborate, share, and cooperate to make great things happen.

It's easy (and valid) to dismiss the "disruption" of Uber, which "disrupted" taxis and transit by losing $31b worth of Saudi royal money in a bid to collapse the world's rival transportation system, while quietly promising its investors that it would someday have pricing power as a monopoly, and would attain profit through price-gouging and wage-theft.

Uber's disruption story was wreathed in bullshit: lies about the "independence" of its drivers, about the imminence of self-driving taxis, about the impact that replacing buses and subways with millions of circling, empty cars would have on traffic congestion. There were and are plenty of problems with traditional taxis and transit, but Uber magnified these problems, under cover of "disrupting" them away.

But there are other feats of high-tech disruption that were and are genuinely transformative – Wikipedia, GNU/Linux, RSS, and more. These disruptive technologies altered the balance of power between powerful institutions and the businesses, communities and individuals they dominated, in ways that have proven both beneficial and durable.

When we speak of commercial disruption today, we usually mean a tech company disrupting a non-tech company. Tinder disrupts singles bars. Netflix disrupts Blockbuster. Airbnb disrupts Marriott.

But the history of "disruption" features far more examples of tech companies disrupting other tech companies: DEC disrupts IBM. Netscape disrupts Microsoft. Google disrupts Yahoo. Nokia disrupts Kodak, sure – but then Apple disrupts Nokia. It's only natural that the businesses most vulnerable to digital disruption are other digital businesses.

And yet…disruption is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the tech sector itself. Five giant companies have been running the show for more than a decade. A couple of these companies (Apple, Microsoft) are Gen-Xers, having been born in the 70s, then there's a couple of Millennials (Amazon, Google), and that one Gen-Z kid (Facebook). Big Tech shows no sign of being disrupted, despite the continuous enshittification of their core products and services. How can this be? Has Big Tech disrupted disruption itself?

That's the contention of "Coopting Disruption," a new paper from two law profs: Mark Lemley (Stanford) and Matthew Wansley (Yeshiva U):

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4713845

The paper opens with a review of the literature on disruption. Big companies have some major advantages: they've got people and infrastructure they can leverage to bring new products to market more cheaply than startups. They've got existing relationships with suppliers, distributors and customers. People trust them.

Diversified, monopolistic companies are also able to capture "involuntary spillovers": when Google spends money on AI for image recognition, it can improve Google Photos, YouTube, Android, Search, Maps and many other products. A startup with just one product can't capitalize on these spillovers in the same way, so it doesn't have the same incentives to spend big on R&D.

Finally, big companies have access to cheap money. They get better credit terms from lenders, they can float bonds, they can tap the public markets, or just spend their own profits on R&D. They can also afford to take a long view, because they're not tied to VCs whose funds turn over every 5-10 years. Big companies get cheap money, play a long game, pay less to innovate and get more out of innovation.

But those advantages are swamped by the disadvantages of incumbency, all the various curses of bigness. Take Arrow's "replacement effect": new companies that compete with incumbents drive down the incumbents' prices and tempt their customers away. But an incumbent that buys a disruptive new company can just shut it down, and whittle down its ideas to "sustaining innovation" (small improvements to existing products), killing "disruptive innovation" (major changes that make the existing products obsolete).

Arrow's Replacement Effect also comes into play before a new product even exists. An incumbent that allows a rival to do R&D that would eventually disrupt its product is at risk; but if the incumbent buys this pre-product, R&D-heavy startup, it can turn the research to sustaining innovation and defund any disruptive innovation.

Arrow asks us to look at the innovation question from the point of view of the company as a whole. Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" looks at the motivations of individual decision-makers in large, successful companies. These individuals don't want to disrupt their own business, because that will render some part of their own company obsolete (perhaps their own division!). They also don't want to radically change their customers' businesses, because those customers would also face negative effects from disruption.

A startup, by contrast, has no existing successful divisions and no giant customers to safeguard. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain from disruption. Where a large company has no way for individual employees to initiate major changes in corporate strategy, a startup has fewer hops between employees and management. What's more, a startup that rewards an employee's good idea with a stock-grant ties that employee's future finances to the outcome of that idea – while a giant corporation's stock bonuses are only incidentally tied to the ideas of any individual worker.

Big companies are where good ideas go to die. If a big company passes on its employees' cool, disruptive ideas, that's the end of the story for that idea. But even if 100 VCs pass on a startup's cool idea and only one VC funds it, the startup still gets to pursue that idea. In startup land, a good idea gets lots of chances – in a big company, it only gets one.

Given how innately disruptable tech companies are, given how hard it is for big companies to innovate, and given how little innovation we've gotten from Big Tech, how is it that the tech giants haven't been disrupted?

The authors propose a four-step program for the would-be Tech Baron hoping to defend their turf from disruption.

First, gather information about startups that might develop disruptive technologies and steer them away from competing with you, by investing in them or partnering with them.

Second, cut off any would-be competitor's supply of resources they need to develop a disruptive product that challenges your own.

Third, convince the government to pass regulations that big, established companies can comply with but that are business-killing challenges for small competitors.

Finally, buy up any company that resists your steering, succeeds despite your resource war, and escapes the compliance moats of regulation that favors incumbents.

Then: kill those companies.

The authors proceed to show that all four tactics are in play today. Big Tech companies operate their own VC funds, which means they get a look at every promising company in the field, even if they don't want to invest in them. Big Tech companies are also awash in money and their "rival" VCs know it, and so financial VCs and Big Tech collude to fund potential disruptors and then sell them to Big Tech companies as "aqui-hires" that see the disruption neutralized.

On resources, the authors focus on data, and how companies like Facebook have explicit policies of only permitting companies they don't see as potential disruptors to access Facebook data. They reproduce internal Facebook strategy memos that divide potential platform users into "existing competitors, possible future competitors, [or] developers that we have alignment with on business models." These categories allow Facebook to decide which companies are capable of developing disruptive products and which ones aren't. For example, Amazon – which doesn't compete with Facebook – is allowed to access FB data to target shoppers. But Messageme, a startup, was cut off from Facebook as soon as management perceived them as a future rival. Ironically – but unsurprisingly – Facebook spins these policies as pro-privacy, not anti-competitive.

These data policies cast a long shadow. They don't just block existing companies from accessing the data they need to pursue disruptive offerings – they also "send a message" to would-be founders and investors, letting them know that if they try to disrupt a tech giant, they will have their market oxygen cut off before they can draw breath. The only way to build a product that challenges Facebook is as Facebook's partner, under Facebook's direction, with Facebook's veto.

Next, regulation. Starting in 2019, Facebook started publishing full-page newspaper ads calling for regulation. Someone ghost-wrote a Washington Post op-ed under Zuckerberg's byline, arguing the case for more tech regulation. Google, Apple, OpenAI other tech giants have all (selectively) lobbied in favor of many regulations. These rules covered a lot of ground, but they all share a characteristic: complying with them requires huge amounts of money – money that giant tech companies can spare, but potential disruptors lack.

Finally, there's predatory acquisitions. Mark Zuckerberg, working without the benefit of a ghost writer (or in-house counsel to review his statements for actionable intent) has repeatedly confessed to buying companies like Instagram to ensure that they never grow to be competitors. As he told one colleague, "I remember your internal post about how Instagram was our threat and not Google+. You were basically right. The thing about startups though is you can often acquire them.”

All the tech giants are acquisition factories. Every successful Google product, almost without exception, is a product they bought from someone else. By contrast, Google's own internal products typically crash and burn, from G+ to Reader to Google Videos. Apple, meanwhile, buys 90 companies per year – Tim Apple brings home a new company for his shareholders more often than you bring home a bag of groceries for your family. All the Big Tech companies' AI offerings are acquisitions, and Apple has bought more AI companies than any of them.

Big Tech claims to be innovating, but it's really just operationalizing. Any company that threatens to disrupt a tech giant is bought, its products stripped of any really innovative features, and the residue is added to existing products as a "sustaining innovation" – a dot-release feature that has all the innovative disruption of rounding the corners on a new mobile phone.

The authors present three case-studies of tech companies using this four-point strategy to forestall disruption in AI, VR and self-driving cars. I'm not excited about any of these three categories, but it's clear that the tech giants are worried about them, and the authors make a devastating case for these disruptions being disrupted by Big Tech.

What do to about it? If we like (some) disruption, and if Big Tech is enshittifying at speed without facing dethroning-by-disruption, how do we get the dynamism and innovation that gave us the best of tech?

The authors make four suggestions.

First, revive the authorities under existing antitrust law to ban executives from Big Tech companies from serving on the boards of startups. More broadly, kill interlocking boards altogether. Remember, these powers already exist in the lawbooks, so accomplishing this goal means a change in enforcement priorities, not a new act of Congress or rulemaking. What's more, interlocking boards between competing companies are illegal per se, meaning there's no expensive, difficult fact-finding needed to demonstrate that two companies are breaking the law by sharing directors.

Next: create a nondiscrimination policy that requires the largest tech companies that share data with some unaffiliated companies to offer data on the same terms to other companies, except when they are direct competitors. They argue that this rule will keep tech giants from choking off disruptive technologies that make them obsolete (rather than competing with them).

On the subject of regulation and compliance moats, they have less concrete advice. They counsel lawmakers to greet tech giants' demands to be regulated with suspicion, to proceed with caution when they do regulate, and to shape regulation so that it doesn't limit market entry, by keeping in mind the disproportionate burdens regulations put on established giants and small new companies. This is all good advice, but it's more a set of principles than any kind of specific practice, test or procedure.

Finally, they call for increased scrutiny of mergers, including mergers between very large companies and small startups. They argue that existing law (Sec 2 of the Sherman Act and Sec 7 of the Clayton Act) both empower enforcers to block these acquisitions. They admit that the case-law on this is poor, but that just means that enforcers need to start making new case-law.

I like all of these suggestions! We're certainly enjoying a more activist set of regulators, who are more interested in Big Tech, than we've seen in generations.

But they are grossly under-resourced even without giving them additional duties. As Matt Stoller points out, "the DOJ's Antitrust Division has fewer people enforcing anti-monopoly laws in a $24 trillion economy than the Smithsonian Museum has security guards."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/congressional-republicans-to-defund

What's more, Republicans are trying to slash their budgets even further. The American conservative movement has finally located a police force they're eager to defund: the corporate police who defend us all from predatory monopolies.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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capricorn-0mnikorn · 3 months

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Summary: Tracking 99 of Biden's most important campaign promises (listing in the order presented on the website)-- what promises he's kept, what promises he's compromised on, which he's broken outright, which promises are delayed/postponed, and which promises are in the works.

TL;DR (listing in my own order, 'cause it's what makes sense to me):

27% Kept* 34% In the Works 31% Postponed / Stalled (Note Well: most of the promises in the two categories above are taking so long because he has, by law, to work with Republicans who are actively hostile to his agenda, and are doing everything they can to sabotage his efforts -- which is why it's so important to vote "down ticket," as well, and not just focus on the Presidential race; case in point: just look at how much trouble Texas Governor Abbot is causing for the whole nation, right now, re: Immigration and Asylum-seekers' rights) 5% Compromised On 1% Promises Broken**

Also, Pay attention to what the promises he's made actually are, and whether you want him to keep them

(Compared to, say, the promises / threats Donald Trump and Nikki Haley are making)

*A big promise kept listed is: "Get COVID under control;" YMMV on whether that's true, or not, or if it's even possible (in other words, 'define your terms')

**Just one broken promise: No new fracking on federal lands. And I am angry about that. But not angry enough to risk Trump getting back into power.

#biden presidency #campaign promises record #politifact #not the same

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reasonsforhope · 9 months

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"Two years ago, the biggest battles in state legislatures were over voting rights. Democrats loudly — and sometimes literally — protested as Republicans passed new voting restrictions in states like Georgia, Florida and Texas. This year, attention has shifted to other hot-button issues, but the fight over the franchise has continued. Republicans have enacted dozens of laws this year that will make it harder for some people to vote in future elections.

But this year, voting-rights advocates got some significant wins too: States — controlled by Democrats and Republicans — have enacted more than twice as many laws expanding voting rights as restricting them, although the most comprehensive voter-protection laws passed in blue states. In all, 39 states and Washington, D.C., have changed their election laws in some way this year...

Where voting rights were expanded in 2023 (so far)

Unlike two years ago, though, we’d argue that the bigger story of this year’s legislative sessions was all the ways states made it easier to vote. As of July 21, according to the Voting Rights Lab, [which runs an excellent and completely comprehensive tracker of election-related bills], 834 bills had been introduced so far this year expanding voting rights, and 64 had been enacted. What’s more, these laws are passing in states of all hues.

Democratic-controlled jurisdictions (Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island and Washington) enacted 33 of these new laws containing voting-rights expansions, but Republican-controlled states (Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming) were responsible for 23 of them. The remaining eight became law in states where the two parties share power (Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia).

That said, not all election laws are created equal, and the most comprehensive expansive laws passed in blue states. For example:

New Mexico adopted a major voting-rights package that will automatically register New Mexicans to vote when they interact with the state’s Motor Vehicle Division, allow voters to request absentee ballots for all future elections without the need to reapply each time and restore the right to vote to felons who are on probation or parole. The law also allows Native Americans to register to vote and receive ballots at official tribal buildings and makes it easier for Native American officials to get polling places set up in pueblos and on tribal land.

Minnesota followed suit with a law also establishing automatic voter registration and a permanent absentee-voting list. The act allows 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to vote too. Meanwhile, a separate new law also reenfranchises felons on probation or parole.

Michigan enacted eight laws implementing a constitutional amendment expanding voting rights that voters approved last year. Most notably, the laws guarantee at least nine days of in-person early voting and allow counties to offer as many as 29. The bills also allow voters to fix mistakes on their absentee-ballot envelopes so that their ballot can still count, track the status of their ballot online, and use student, military and tribal IDs as proof of identification.

Connecticut became the sixth state to enact a state-level voting-rights act, which bars municipalities from discriminating against minority groups in voting, requires them to provide language assistance to certain language minority groups and requires municipalities with a record of voter discrimination to get preclearance before changing their election laws. The Nutmeg State also approved 14 days of early voting and put a constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot that would legalize no-excuse absentee voting.

No matter its specific provisions, each of these election-law changes could impact how voters cast their ballots in future elections, including next year’s closely watched presidential race. There’s a good chance your state amended its election laws in some way this year, so make sure you double-check the latest rules in your state before the next time you vote."

-via FiveThirtyEight (via FutureCrunch), July 24, 2023

#voting rights #voting matters #united states #us politics #new mexico #Minnesota #Michigan #Connecticut #voting rights act #ballot box #civil rights #elections #election 2024 #election law #constitutional amendments #felon voting #native american #first nations

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soberscientistlife · 5 months

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Republican vote tracker

#vote blue #vote democrat #vote biden

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odinsblog · 1 month

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🗣️Republicans are funding conservative Democrats to primary progressives

Republican megadonor Jeff Yass recently gave to a super PAC that is trying to topple a progressive incumbent in Pittsburgh.

The Moderate PAC, an outside group that aims to support centrist Democrats, has been boosting a primary challenge to Rep. Summer Lee, a member of “The Squad.” Lee and her supporters are quick to point out that Yass, a Pennsylvania businessperson, donated $1 million to the PAC in 2022, when it spent in support of Democratic Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Don Davis of North Carolina.

Yass is a major donor to the conservative Club for Growth. He has also been in headlines recently amid the congressional push for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company — which Yass has investments in — to sell the app. Strong said that Yass “has no lean in this other than he likes a moderate Democrat, as opposed to a far-left Democrat.”

Moderate PAC released its second ad on Tuesday, accusing Lee of “opposing” President Joe Biden. The group has placed more than $500,000 on television and digital advertising since the beginning of the year, according to ad tracker AdImpact. (Patel’s campaign has spent around $150,000.) Strong said that future investments will be dependent on fundraising, but the group will “stay in the race and keep up at the same pace as long as we can.”

Outside players are also coming to Lee’s aid. Working Families Party, the Muslim advocacy group Emgage and Justice Democrats are planning to spend $500,000 combined on TV and digital advertisements boosting the incumbent, said Ari Kamen, mid-Atlantic regional director at the Working Families Party.

Lee in a statement decried “super PACs bankrolled by Republican billionaires,” saying they “have no place in our Democratic primaries or our democracy.”

“I am never going to stop defending our abortion rights, protecting our public schools, or demanding billionaires pay their fair share, so I welcome being an enemy to an extremist like Jeffrey Yass,” Lee said.

(continue reading)

#politics #summer lee #moderate pac #centrism #the squad #jeff yass #clintonism #conservadems #conservative democrats #conservative democrats = republican lite

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festeringfae · 1 year

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How to tell how threatening a bill is

Ya go to Congress dot gov. Ya type in the name of the Bill. It comes out like this:

Ya look at the "tracker" section and "latest action" sections. Then ya scroll down a little to the text of the bill, and right at the top will be the list of Senators who are currently co-sponsors.

Count the names. In this example, it's 13. Out of 100.

That's all the facts-only stuff I'm teaching in this post. For personal conjecture: you can look at things like ""not only Republicans introduce threatening, racist, shitty ideas" and "oh these are mostly Senators in one party whose constituents often accuse them of being too moderate; probably this bill was created with the expectation that it would immediately die, but the press reporting on it would make it seem like we were taking a decisive, not-moderate action."

A fun way to not let politicians get away with this misleading PR bullshit is to use the steps mentioned above to make sure a thing that seems important or powerful actually is! Introducing a bill is nothing, most bills die, even the famous, decades old School House Rock song says so:

youtube

Assholes want you to be afraid and miserable; being afraid and miserable preemptively "just in case" because things "might" get worse is not the same thing as being better safe than sorry, it is not preparing or bracing you, it is not motivating you, it is harmful to you, and you deserve not to be harmed. You are good.

#don't make me tap the sign #restrict act #tiktok ban #trans ban #Youtube

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mariacallous · 4 months

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Despite the overwhelming scale of former president Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have already claimed that the vote was rigged because he lost one single county.

“After it was reported that President Trump won every county in Iowa tonight, Democrat shenanigans ensued and now it’s being reported that Johnson County in Iowa, which is a Biden +40 county, flipped to Nikki Haley by ONE VOTE,” Laura Loomer, a far-right activist who has been embraced by Trump, posted on X in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Other Trump supporters on far-right online platforms also claimed electoral conspiracies, even though Trump won 51 percent of the vote in Iowa, with Florida governor Ron DeSantis a distant second at 21 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley in third place at 19 percent, according to results shared by the Iowa Republican Party and AP’s election tracker.

“We need a recount in Johnson County RIGHT NOW!” an X account named Red Eagle Politics wrote.

On Trump’s own platform Truth Social, Seth Keshel, a retired US army captain who has become a leading voice in the election denial movement in recent years, wrote: “Haley by one vote in Johnson County screws my prediction of 99/99 to Trump. Audit!”

Some of Keshel’s followers claimed those who voted for Haley had been “paid” to vote against Trump, but provided no evidence to back up this claim.

On pro-Trump message board The Donald, where a lot of the online organizing of the January 6 riot took place, users took issue with Haley’s Monday night claim that Iowa voters made the presidential election a “two-person race.”

“They rigged that county by a single vote just so she could say this,” one user wrote.

Others said the one vote loss was the work of the so-called deep state. “To win by ONE vote is just too conspicuous,” a user wrote. “It looks like a ‘Fuck You’ from the Deep State.” Responses in the same thread urged Trump to call for a recount in order to “trigger” his opponents.

Some Trump supporters also claimed that tens of thousands of Democrats were being paid to switch allegiances for the caucus and vote for Haley.

“The Iowa Democratic party has reportedly pushed for and paid TENS OF THOUSANDS of its registered voters to temporarily switch their party registration from Democrat to Republican so they can caucus for Nikki Haley,” Joshua Hall, who was once convicted of threatening to kill Democratic congressperson Eric Swalwell, posted on X.

While there was no evidence anyone was paid to vote, CBS reported that in at least some Johnson County precincts, election officials ran out of forms printed to allow people to switch party affiliations on the night.

As has been the case since the first false claims of a stolen election emerged in the wake of Trump’s loss in 2020, none of those claiming wrongdoing on Monday night provided any proof to back up their claims. With a long primary season now underway, those peddling lies about election integrity are just getting started.

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justinspoliticalcorner · 28 days

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Matt Shuham at HuffPost:

Last summer, a candidate for the New Mexico state House showed up on Nathan Jaramillo’s doorstep. Jaramillo, the Bureau of Elections administrator in Bernalillo County, said Peña had previously sent threatening emails to both himself and to others in the county. Jaramillo brushed it off, annoyed at the personal intrusion but unconcerned. Five months later, Peña, a Trump supporter who lost his election and rejected the results, was arrested and charged with organizing a string of brazen drive-by shootings targeting public officials. Jaramillo thought back to five months earlier, when the man had shown up at his doorstep. The severity of the situation “really hit me,” Jaramillo told HuffPost. “In hindsight, it was a lot more scary.” Now, Jaramillo’s office assigns ticket numbers to emails they receive, organizing them by sender and keeping tabs on the office’s responses, in the hopes of anticipating anyone who could escalate their complaints into something more serious.

But the incident with Peña — who has pleaded not guilty, and whose attorney did not respond to a request for comment — is just one scene representative of an increasingly tense era of American politics. Fueled by Trump’s lies about election theft, supporters of his have spent years threatening election workers and the democratic process — and acting upon those threats. Now, as the 2024 presidential campaign charges toward November, election offices are taking steps they’d never dreamed could be necessary. Several election officials HuffPost spoke to laid out laundry lists of upgrades — everything from ballistic windows, doors and walls to new security cameras, electronic access badges and location trackers on ballot boxes. And as the Republican Party continues to push lies about election integrity — a scripted Republican Party call last month falsely claimed there was “massive fraud” in 2020 — election officials are gearing up to protect what promises to be an even more tense presidential contest this year.

[...] Around the country, election officials are working on evacuation and “quick containment” drills for future potential envelope attacks — even just using a bucket to contain a suspicious envelope — and stocking up on masks, gloves and naloxone, just in case, said Jennifer Morrell, a former elections official in Utah and Colorado and co-founder of an election consulting group during a recent call hosted by the National Task Force on Election Crises.

[...] “Prior to 2016, it was a pretty sleepy industry. People trusted their election officials and the process,” she said. Then, Hall said, “everything changed: When you have rhetoric coming from the top, it empowers and activates people all the way down the food chain.”

[...] But election workers’ preparations for 2024 are complicated by the sheer range of security issues that could come up: Since 2020, for example, Trump supporters across the country have tried — sometimes successfully — to copy data from sensitive equipment like voting machines and ballot tabulators. In Michigan, for example, several prominent Republicans, including a former GOP nominee for state attorney general, have been charged with felonies for their roles in an alleged conspiracy to improperly gain access to ballot tabulators. In Colorado, a former county clerk faces felony charges for allegedly allowing a computer technician to get into election machines under false pretenses; information from the machines was subsequently shared at an election fraud conspiracy theory summit. The answer to these growing threats, according to election officials, is a mix of background checks, digital protections like phishing training for staff and multi-factor authentication for accessing databases, in addition to physical measures like electronic badges that allow different levels of access to observers, volunteers, election workers and government employees.

[...]

Brain Drain

For veteran election administrators, the Trump era has brought with it a troubling wave of resignations. Workers at all levels have decided they’d rather not participate in a process that, in recent years, has led some of their neighbors to think they’re part of an anti-democratic cabal. What used to be considered sleepy “clerk work” is now heavily scrutinized — and, as the Republican attacks against Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss showed, may make people vulnerable to nationwide defamation campaigns. In North Carolina, there’s been a “huge increase” in directors of elections retiring, Bowens said. And Jaramillo described “individuals that were with our office for 20-plus years [who] made the determination that they weren’t in it for the 2024 ride.” Mast said he’d seen an “incredible” number of election workers retiring or changing fields. Among elected clerks, Mast said the position has gone from one filled largely by career administrators who served lengthy tenures to one with roughly 30% turnover every four years. After the “environmental changes” of 2020, experienced clerks have begun leaving the field more often, he said. “It’s incredible to see.”

Election administration was once a sleepy nonpartisan industry, but with rampant election denialism instigated by Donald Trump and fellow right-wing bad actors, election administrators are looking to make safety upgrades before this fall's election.

#Election Administration #Elections #Donald Trump #The Big Lie #Election Security #Election Denialism

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beardedmrbean · 1 month

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MADISON – Wisconsinites convicted of multiple counts of a sex offense will be required to register as sex offenders for life even if the counts were part of the same incident, under a bill signed by Gov. Tony Evers.

The law effectively nullifies a 2023 state Supreme Court ruling holding that multiple convictions stemming from the same criminal complaint do not necessarily classify someone as a repeat offender. The governor's signature brings resolution to a question officials have debated for years.

In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled in May 2023 that "the plain and ordinary meaning of 'separate occasions' does not refer solely to the number of convictions" in consideration of whether lifetime registration is required for an offender.

"It is undisputable that all sex offenses covered by the sex offender registration statutory scheme are heinous in nature, thus necessitating the use of the registry for the protection of the public. However, within that scheme, the legislature, not this court, made policy decisions regarding which offenders are categorically required to comply with registration requirements for life and which are required to comply for 15 years," Justice Jill Karofsky wrote in the majority decision.

The case involved Corey T. Rector, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to five counts of possession of child pornography. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and 10 years of extended supervision on each of the five counts, to be served concurrently, and was ordered to register as a sex offender for 15 years.

The case made its way to the state's high court after the state Department of Corrections requested in 2019 that Rector's sex offender status be changed to a lifetime registration because he had been convicted of more than two sex offenses, relying on a formal opinion issued in 2017 by Republican then-Attorney General Brad Schimel.

Schimel issued the opinion in response to a request from then-DOC Secretary Jon Litscher, who had asked whether the state's "special bulletin notification" statute applied to offenders with multiple criminal convictions that occurred at the same time or stemmed from the same criminal complaint.

State law requires people who are convicted of a sex offense (or found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect) on two or more separate occasions to be classified as "special bulletin notification" (SBN) offenders, who trigger notification of law enforcement when they change addresses. These offenders are subject to lifetime GPS monitoring.

Schimel's opinion was that "separate occasions" referred to the number of convictions, "including multiple convictions imposed at the same time and based on the same complaint."

Evers' signature codifies Schimel's interpretation in state law, negating the court's 2023 ruling. It will apply retroactively, and offenders who were previously released from the registry will be notified that they must re-register.

The bill's opponents included a number of prison reform groups and the State Public Defender's office.

The agency's legislative liaison, Adam Plotkin, argued judges should have the discretion to determine whether an offender should be required to register for 15 years or for the rest of their life.

In testimony before a Senate committee last month, Plotkin noted that malfunctioning devices or poor cellular service expose offenders to potential felony charges for removal or tampering with a GPS tracker, and argued the policy would ultimately reduce the public safety benefit of registration and monitoring.

"If everyone is considered a risk to the point of lifetime monitoring, it dilutes the efficacy of tracking those that a court determined are of higher risk based on the individual facts of that case," he said.

The proposal was drafted in consultation with the Department of Corrections, whose legislative adviser Anna Neal testified that the agency was concerned the Supreme Court's Rector ruling "is not reflective of communities' and law enforcement's expectations regarding notice and monitoring of sex offender registrants."

"The Rector decision may limit or reduce the notifications law enforcement agencies receive from the Department regarding the release of individuals who have been convicted of multiple counts and the Department's ability to require GPS tracking of these individuals," Neal said.

#nunyas news #worried that someone busted for #something dumb like public urination #will be on for life #unless there's degrees and I didn't see it

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