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Despite outrage, new state voting laws don’t spell democracy’s end – but there are some threats

Are the election law changes proposed in statehouses across the country really as bad as some say? An election law scholar cuts through the yelling to take a sober look at the new voting landscape.

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Will new election laws being proposed and passed in states limit people's opportunity to vote? Sean Rayford/Getty Images

The sky is falling – that’s what you may believe about a rash of new election laws being introduced, largely by the GOP, in statehouses across the country. Alternatively, you may think these laws are absolutely crucial to ensure election integrity. The Conversation’s Senior Politics Editor Naomi Schalit interviewed election law scholar Derek Muller about how he sees these new laws. Muller provides a surprisingly sanguine interpretation of what’s going on. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

One group has said that “Americans’ access to the vote is in unprecedented peril.” What do you think?

I would not say that. These election bills marginally increase the difficulty for some voters by reducing some of the options, whether it’s voting by mail or early voting. But many of these bills also expand voting opportunities, and many of them are tinkering at the margins of expansions during the COVID pandemic in 2020.

In some circumstances, voters are no worse off than they were in 2018, and in some circumstances, they are better off. So, while there’s a lot of heated rhetoric, I would say the changes to election law so far have been fairly modest.

So, if you compare the new laws to what the status of the laws was before those pandemic era expansions, it’s not that dramatic?

In many states, voting in 2022 and 2024 will not look very much different than it did in 2016. In some cases, there are bigger changes, but many times they’re marginal things not obvious to the vast majority of voters.

Critics say these laws make it harder to vote. Are you seeing any evidence of that?

It depends on how we define “harder.” Let’s pick a law in Iowa. You could request absentee ballots up until 10 or 11 days before the election, and now it’s up until 15 days before the election. Is that harder? You can still show up and vote on Election Day, you can still vote early. It’s just that the window of opportunity to request an absentee ballot has narrowed.

On the flip side, does it really discourage many voters or prevent them from being able to vote? I think those are the open empirical questions that will have to be asked in the future.

Anything that limits or constrains voting days where they used to exist before does make it marginally harder. But the question is how significant the marginal cost is.

Do these laws have measurable effects on turnout?

I’m not a political scientist, so I’m careful about these kinds of questions. But a lot of the empirical literature is quite mixed. There’s some evidence that some kinds of voter identification laws reduce turnout by a point or two. There are others that suggest they have no discernible impact on turnout.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has said the Department of Justice will scrutinize the wave of new laws and take action on any violations of federal law. What does it mean to have the attorney general say this?

The attorney general can investigate and scrutinize those laws. That’s principally the attorney general’s power under the Voting Rights Act, to think about initiating claims alleging that the political process is not equally open to participation on the basis of race.

But scrutinizing laws is very different from bringing a lawsuit, and bringing a lawsuit is very different from a court agreeing that the law does have that effect. Complicating matters is the Supreme Court is considering a case about how the Voting Rights Act should be construed – Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee. The court might make it actually harder for the Department of Justice to bring those claims in the future. But undoubtedly the department investigating what states are doing will put legislators on their toes to think about how to tailor laws in a way that will not subject them to the department’s wrath.

Do we know whether these laws affect election outcomes in terms of partisan politics? The criticism is that “the Republicans are putting measures into law that will help them win elections.”

One question is whether it even affects turnout in the first place. Then the next question is, even if it does affect turnout, does it benefit one political party over another?

Democratic House Speaker and Texas Democratic lawmaker Trey Martinez Fischer in serious conversation.
U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Texas State Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, both Democrats, during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol with Democratic lawmakers from Texas about GOP changes to Texas election laws. Alex Wong/Getty Images

So it’s political parties fighting over this, whether or not it actually has the effects that people think.

Do moves like this actually backfire by upsetting people who feel targeted?

Undoubtedly, actions in North Carolina and Georgia over the last several years significantly mobilized Democratic voters and voters of color to turn out as a kind of backlash. There were significant Democratic victories in North Carolina and Georgia shortly after controversies over voting laws came to the surface. How you measure that backlash is another political science question, but it remains a viable tool for those who oppose the laws to simply mobilize, get out the vote and elect their preferred candidates.

How do these laws comport with the general democratic standard of everyone who is eligible can cast a vote?

We have dramatically expanded opportunities to vote in the last several decades. Early voting was basically nonexistent 20 years ago, no-excuse absentee voting is now the default in many states, several states mail every eligible voter a ballot.

There are benefits to having so many opportunities, but those come with costs: The systems they create are sprawling, they are unwieldy at times, providing many more opportunities for things to go wrong or for people to be skeptical of the outcome. And stretching an election out over six or eight weeks means we’re all voting with different kinds of information at the beginning of an election season versus at the end.

In some of these laws, state legislatures’ involvement in elections has been increased – although I think the public is not necessarily aware of the involvement of partisans in election administration already. Is that a concern?

Most of our elections are run by partisan officials. Secretaries of state have a Republican or Democratic affiliation, and their role in certifying election results has typically been a pro forma task.

A group carrying signs protesting new voting laws on steps inside the Texas Capitol building.
A group opposing new voter legislation gathers outside the House Chamber at the Texas Capitol in Austin on May 6, 2021. Eric Gay/AP Photos

At the same time, especially before the election, there were changes being made by county or state officials, things executive branch officials were doing, that didn’t necessarily comport with what the legislature had expressly provided in non-emergency situations, that caused a lot of friction between the legislature and those officials.

So, some of the proposed or enacted laws try to rein in local officials’ discretion. In Georgia, the legislature will choose one of the members of the Board of Elections to certify elections, instead of allowing the secretary of state to serve on that board. These tweaks happening in states reduce the amount of discretion that election officials have, or allow the legislature to have some say – not a total say – in that election process.

Is the legislature having “some say” a threat to election integrity?

It seems like it would increase the threat. For the most part, we’ve seen election administrators be professionals who view this as their full-time job, who see all the inner workings, from day to day, in the two years before an election is held and know what’s going on. As opposed to the legislature, which might view something – after the fact, or when its attention is stretched in other directions – as dubious and wanting to revisit what happened. So, there is that concern.

Now, if the legislature wants to pick its own representative to serve on a board with multiple other people and it’s not going to overwhelm the board, maybe that’s okay. But undoubtedly it does increase the risk of the legislature choosing to meddle as a political branch, in a different way from the election officials who – despite their partisan affiliation – often rise above that.

What about the proposals to further empower poll watchers?

I’ve worked many elections as a precinct election official in multiple states and many counties. And I had extensive training before doing that – there’s a bipartisan group that supervises the process and we all take our job very seriously. We want to make sure that eligible voters participate, that we can ensure that only eligible voters cast a ballot, that we count everything carefully at the end of the night.

Poll watchers might not have that training, might be disruptive, might not know what is going on or have a total context of what’s happening. There’s an increased risk from poll watchers, if they show up already skeptical that the precinct election officials are doing their job properly, then that starts to undermine some of the confidence in the electoral process.

You want the campaigns to be confident that the election is being run smoothly and properly, and there should be opportunities to observe and ensure that there are no irregularities happening. But given the rarity of irregularities actually happening in the United States, increasing the power or number of poll watchers might lead to some unintended consequences, particularly friction at the polls in future elections.

Do any of these laws concern you as an electoral scholar?

I’m concerned about changes that appear more to be appeasing the 2020 losers rather than picking the best laws for administering elections going forward. It’s prompted state legislators to be reactive. I’m not a fan of reactive legislation in that sense.

It concerns me that there’s a candidate who loses an election, and many of that candidate’s supporters question the legitimacy of the election itself. I don’t know that these laws, or really any laws, are ever going to restore the public’s confidence in elections. If it’s just the loser doesn’t want to believe in the legitimacy of the outcome, obviously when the candidate himself is undermining those results, that is a much more serious concern.

[The Conversation’s Politics + Society editors pick need-to-know stories. Sign up for Politics Weekly._]

Derek T. Muller does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Aging at AACR Annual Meeting 2024

BUFFALO, NY- March 11, 2024 – Impact Journals publishes scholarly journals in the biomedical sciences with a focus on all areas of cancer and aging…

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BUFFALO, NY- March 11, 2024 – Impact Journals publishes scholarly journals in the biomedical sciences with a focus on all areas of cancer and aging research. Aging is one of the most prominent journals published by Impact Journals

Credit: Impact Journals

BUFFALO, NY- March 11, 2024 – Impact Journals publishes scholarly journals in the biomedical sciences with a focus on all areas of cancer and aging research. Aging is one of the most prominent journals published by Impact Journals

Impact Journals will be participating as an exhibitor at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2024 from April 5-10 at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California. This year, the AACR meeting theme is “Inspiring Science • Fueling Progress • Revolutionizing Care.”

Visit booth #4159 at the AACR Annual Meeting 2024 to connect with members of the Aging team.

About Aging-US:

Aging publishes research papers in all fields of aging research including but not limited, aging from yeast to mammals, cellular senescence, age-related diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s diseases and their prevention and treatment, anti-aging strategies and drug development and especially the role of signal transduction pathways such as mTOR in aging and potential approaches to modulate these signaling pathways to extend lifespan. The journal aims to promote treatment of age-related diseases by slowing down aging, validation of anti-aging drugs by treating age-related diseases, prevention of cancer by inhibiting aging. Cancer and COVID-19 are age-related diseases.

Aging is indexed and archived by PubMed/Medline (abbreviated as “Aging (Albany NY)”), PubMed CentralWeb of Science: Science Citation Index Expanded (abbreviated as “Aging‐US” and listed in the Cell Biology and Geriatrics & Gerontology categories), Scopus (abbreviated as “Aging” and listed in the Cell Biology and Aging categories), Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, EMBASE, META (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative) (2018-2022), and Dimensions (Digital Science).

Please visit our website at www.Aging-US.com​​ and connect with us:

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Click here to subscribe to Aging publication updates.

For media inquiries, please contact media@impactjournals.com.


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Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…

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Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

Credit: source: https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312

Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.

The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.

The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.

Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.

“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”

Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.

Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.

Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.

The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.

Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.

“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”

The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.

Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”

Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.

“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”


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International

There will soon be one million seats on this popular Amtrak route

“More people are taking the train than ever before,” says Amtrak’s Executive Vice President.

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While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.

Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall. 

Veronika Bondarenko

Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’

Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.

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According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.

“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”

Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see

Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.

To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.

As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.

The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.

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