Tag: Democrats

science in the news

In Georgia, can Biden’s winning coalition deliver the Senate to Democrats?

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Democrats are growing confident they might be able to pull off twin victories in the Senate runoff races in Georgia in January — what would have been a long shot political upset only a few years ago but is now being viewed as a real possibility after massive turnout from suburban voters in the general election helped President-elect Joe Biden flip the state from red to blue.

Biden’s hopes of enacting his agenda rest on the outcome of the Jan. 5 runoff elections, which will determine control of the Senate. 

If Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock beat Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, the Republican incumbents, the Senate would be split 50-50. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, would control the tie-breaking vote, opening the door for the Biden administration to push through legislation on the pandemic, the economy, climate change, and other priorities.

“Georgia

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modern technology

The Technology 202: Democrats warn Big Tech’s extended ad bans could hurt their chances in Georgia

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The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s executive director Scott Fairchild criticized the decisions, saying the bans “amount to unacceptable voter suppression.” 

Tech companies seeking to quash election disinformation are in a bind. 

On the one hand, ads can help candidates on both sides get information to potential voters. Fairchild warned in a statement that the move could actively harm efforts to inform voters about the runoffs. He called for an exemption for ads in Georgia over the next two months. 

But companies are also scrambling to extend what were meant to be temporary changes amid a chaotic and uncertain political environment in which President Trump is refusing to concede and makes baseless claims of election fraud. It’s unclear if the companies can sustain the pace of enforcement they have had in the last week, my colleague Elizabeth Dwoskin reports. 

Facebook and Google initially indicated the ad bans would last about a

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emerging technology

Posts falsify ties between election tech firm and Democrats

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As poll workers tallied votes from the U.S. presidential election, many social media users interpreted a clerk’s error in a small, Republican-leaning Michigan county as vote-rigging because it wrongly favored Joe Biden before being fixed.

A week later, that misinterpreted mistake has snowballed into a deluge of false claims that Democrats have deep ties to Dominion Voting Systems, the company that supplies election equipment to Michigan and dozens of other states nationwide.

Claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the Clinton Foundation have interest or influence in Dominion are all unsubstantiated. But that didn’t stop tens of thousands of social media users from amplifying them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram this week.

Here’s what you need to know about the falsehoods spreading around Dominion Voting Systems.


CLAIM: Prominent Democrats including Pelosi, Feinstein and the Clinton family have a stake in or a deep relationship with Dominion

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technology articles

Spanish-Language Misinformation Dogged Democrats in U.S. Election | Top News

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By Christopher Bing, Elizabeth Culliford and Paresh Dave

(Reuters) – Spanish-language misinformation flourished online in the days surrounding the U.S. election, even as social media companies moved to stem falsehoods that could affect the vote or spark violence.

Spanish-language social media posts from online celebrities, radio commentators and others have repeatedly questioned the reliability of mail-in voting and falsely described presidential candidate Joe Biden as a socialist, according to Spanish-language disinformation experts and posts seen by Reuters.

Other postings have pushed QAnon in Spanish, a conspiracy theory that claims incumbent President Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of “deep state” sex-traffickers, and describe Biden as a “superpredator” or a “pedophile,” these people said.

Social media companies introduced new rules to crack down on election-related misinformation through labeling content, restricting its reach or removing it, but enforcement has been uneven.

While Alphabet Inc’s YouTube, Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc have all

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technology current events

House Democrats’ tensions flare on post-election call

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Ben Popken

16h ago / 8:45 PM UTC

Georgia to conduct its first ‘risk limiting audit’ before certifying election results

Another wrinkle to the closely watched tabulation in Georgia: Before certifying results, Georgia election officials, under a new state law, will begin Friday what they’re calling a risk-limiting audit to ensure the votes were accurately counted.

Under a risk-limiting audit (RLA), a statistically meaningful sample of ballots are examined by hand to see whether the declared winner truly won. The audit is mathematically designed to catch anomalies that would arise from misconfigured machines, procedural errors or intentional attack.

But in a lawsuit filed by election technology activists, University of California, Berkeley, statistics professor Philip Stark, who helped pioneer the concept of RLAs, said in an affidavit the state’s procedures are more of a “pilot” than a true RLA. That’s because of lax chain of custody procedures, the use of “duplicated”

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technology

Latam FX to edge up initially if Democrats sweep U.S. vote

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By Gabriel Burin



a stack of flyers on a table: FILE PHOTO: Mexican peso banknotes are pictured at a currency exchange shop in Ciudad Juarez

© Reuters/JOSE LUIS GONZALEZ
FILE PHOTO: Mexican peso banknotes are pictured at a currency exchange shop in Ciudad Juarez

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) – Latin American currencies are poised to edge up briefly against a weaker U.S. dollar with a potential Democrat sweep in the U.S. elections, but domestic challenges will continue holding them back after any initial bounce, a Reuters survey showed.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden’s lead over Republican U.S. President Donald Trump has widened in the final days of the 2020 campaign in three critical Rust Belt states that Trump narrowly won four years ago, according to Reuters/Ipsos opinion polls.

The Mexican peso and the Brazilian real are set to gain in the event of a solid Democrat victory that would open a path to a swift fiscal stimulus package and gains for sectors such as green energy, adding downward pressure on the

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technology

Warren and Other Democrats Push ‘Fundamental’ Reform of Capitalism

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On Nov. 17 and 18, DealBook is holding our first Online Summit. Join us as we welcome the most consequential newsmakers in business, policy and culture to explore the pivotal questions of the moment — and the future. Watch from anywhere in the world, free of charge. Register now.

Just days before Election Day, four Democratic senators — Tammy Baldwin, Tom Carper, Mark Warner and Elizabeth Warren — are banding together to “fundamentally reform” capitalism. DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch got a first look at their working group, which will be announced today. Above all, it suggests growing Democratic unity around pushing corporate America to focus less on shareholders and short-term profits. And it signals an early priority for lawmakers if their party performs as well as the polls imply.

Why this matters: Attention is growing on who would have Joe Biden’s ear about steering the

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latest technology

Data should enfranchise people, says the Democrat’s head of technology

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Nellwyn Thomas cut her chops in campaign technology as the Deputy Chief of Analytics for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Outside politics, she’s had her foot in Big Tech, working on business intelligence and data science for both Etsy and Facebook before becoming the Chief Technology Officer of the Democratic National Committee in May 2019. 

The Democrats were the first party to bring big data to politics, but they came under serious criticism for a crumbling technology stack that may have contributed to Clinton’s 2016 loss. Thomas will be under extreme scrutiny in the coming weeks and in the subsequent election post-mortems.  

Attempts to return to parity with Republicans seems to be paying off. On Wednesday, FEC filings show the Biden campaign holding a serious cash advantage on the Trump campaign which can be attributed, in part, to improved technology. Combined with a new system for sharing information on voters,

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new technology

FBI says Iran behind threatening emails sent to Florida Democrats

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Iranian intelligence was responsible for a recent campaign of emails sent to intimidate Florida voters, the FBI announced Wednesday night, adding that Russia was also working to influence the election.

The emails, which ominously instructed Democratic voters in Florida to switch to the Republican Party, purported to come from the Proud Boys, the right-wing group of Trump supporters that became a flashpoint during the first presidential debate.

But the emails were actually “spoofed” and had been designed “to incite social unrest and damage President Trump,” said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. Ratcliffe did not explain how the emails were damaging to Trump, because they were urging Democrats to switch to the Republican Party.

Ratcliffe didn’t provide any evidence for the attribution.

Many states, including Florida, make voters’ information, including their names and party affiliations, easily accessible to members of the public who request it.

Both Iran and Russia

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