Election Day 2016

Recreational marijuana is now legal in California — and that’s a game changer for public health. Though many other states have already legalized weed for medicinal purposes and four for recreational purposes, the size and population of California puts its decision in a different league and it could lead the way to figuring out policy around the drug.

Maine, Nevada, and Massachusetts also legalized recreational marijuana, though the initiative failed in Arizona.

In her concession speech today, Hillary Clinton thanked her supporters, and specifically called out to those who showed their support online, “even in secret, private Facebook sites.”

The line seemed to allude to groups like Pantsuit Nation, which gained late notoriety in the campaign, as thousands posted photos of themselves in Clinton’s trademark outfit. The group was invitation-only, but that did not stop millions from joining.

Earlier today, Facebook rolled out a feature that was supposed to show users newly elected representatives based on their location. Now, that feature already seems to be broken for some users.

Facebook is calling the feature a “civic checkup” — it’s basically just a list of elected representatives in the House and Senate, as well as previously elected local officials, but the page where it lives is currently down. Some Verge staffers have gotten the feature to work on mobile. It looks like this:

In the early hours of June 24th this year, I was sat upright in a hotel room bed, observing UK Brexit votes coming in, with increasing disbelief at the apparent will of the country that’s been my home for 19 years to exit the European Union. As a European migrant residing and working in the UK, I represent the sort of immigration that Brexiters wanted to curtail, so it was hard not to interpret that vote as a rejection of me, personally.

Tonight I got to experience a re-run of that disconcerting event as the United States followed the same trajectory with its democratic choice of Donald Trump as its next president. It was uncanny deja vu, as the buildup to the decision was characterized by the same tone of discord, same echo chambers, and the same contest between a sensible, serious option and a ridiculous cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face choice.

Tens of millions of people in America have elected an authoritarian with no political experience for president, denying Hillary Clinton a historic election in a stunning victory that has defied polls and popular sense. Donald Trump is now the president-elect of the United States, and the implications of this fact are largely unknown.

What we do know about Donald Trump is alarming. He has praised dictators for their authoritarian actions. He has promised to torture enemies of the state, and return to “law and order” at home — a promise based on lies he has continually repeated about crime rates in the US. He has promised to repeal a public health law, the Affordable Care Act, which has expanded health care to millions of uninsured people. He rejects the science of climate change, which is a planetary threat that affects not just Americans but everyone on Earth. He has distinguished himself not in expertise but in ignorance about the issues that the US president will be challenged to resolve.

The New York Times’ presidential election forecast is comprehensive, complex, and captivating. But it’s also giving obsessive viewers heart palpitations with the jittery needles on its forecast dials, wavering between percentage chances in a way that seems to indicate an incoming flow of accurate data, but that is in reality entirely artificial.

The fluctuations are actually built into the site, a fact spotted by writer and analyst Alp Toker. Rather than representing minute changes in percentage chances as election data streams in, Toker shows that the NYT’s forecast has hardcoded jitter on its election coverage page, code that causes the needles to flutter as wildly as our collective hearts are watching the results come in. Lauren Ancona, a data scientist, also explained the situation, arguing that the quivering dials “border on irresponsible data visualization.”

Colorado voters have approved a proposition that makes it legal to help terminally ill patients end their own life.

Colorado becomes the sixth state to have a so-called “right-to-die law,” joining Washington, Oregon, California, Vermont, and Montana. Its citizens have voted to approve Prop 106. The measure allows Colorado residents over 18 to request assistance to die if they are ill and have less than six months to live. They must also be judged competent enough to make their own choice and must voluntarily ask for the medicine that would kill them. Before, helping someone end their life was a crime.

This election cycle has granted us some of our favorite memes of any presidential race, and it seems it still has more to give. Today, ABC news national assignment editor Jason Volack tweeted a photo of a cake being taken into Trump Tower like a Game of Thrones character on a walk of shame.

Twitter quickly descended on the image in a glorious swan song to Trump’s awful campaign. The hashtag #TrumpCake is now full of gems like the following:

The long 2016 presidential election should be coming to an end later today, and the uncertainty over the future that has dominated this election cycle has gotten me thinking about the connections between science fiction and politics.

Politics are woven into the genre’s DNA. Many of the genre’s best novels contain astute political insights that not only analyzed the governments of their time, but have remained politically relevant decades after their original publication. One of the genre’s early works, for example helped set the stage for countless work of political commentary thinly concealed as sci-fi speculation.

Here are some words I never thought I’d write: A thing associated with Donald Trump was fun. Here are some worlds I have written ad nauseam over the last few months: Donald Trump ruins everything.

Earlier today, blogger Andy Baio tweeted about a neat trick on Donald Trump’s official website. By swapping over to the site’s press release page and fiddling with the URL, you could turn the site into a mouthpiece for whatever you wanted, like so:

The end is nigh for the 2016 presidential election. We have but one hurdle left: the outcome.

If, like us, you plan to spend your election night in a dark living room hunched over your laptop, we’d like to make the experience a little easier. Here’s how to follow along with the election results at home. We’d recommend pairing your sense of dread with a fine wine, or if you aren’t of a legal drinking age, we suppose La Croix will have to suffice.

As Election Night neared, Donald Trump’s campaign aides reportedly seized his Twitter access to prevent any more missteps. (A fact Barack Obama has been quick to skewer.) But it looks like Trump may be back at the wheel, just in time to send some very inaccurate tweets.

Trump has generally tweeted from a Samsung device, while it’s been postulated — and forensically tested — that his campaign sends tweets from an iPhone. The tweets from @realDonaldTrump have lately come from an iPhone, but this morning, it switched back over to Android.

It’s Election Day, which means your social feeds are likely clogged with the most political of selfies: the “I Voted” selfie. This rare format is, of course, a selfie taken with the “I Voted” sticker given to adults who fulfill their civic duty on Election Day.

Our favorite version of “I Voted” selfie isn’t really a selfie at all — it’s the now ubiquitous “I Voted” pet picture. Look at these good puppers who understand the importance of democracy (or at the least the importance of staying still for a front-facing camera)!

Today, the trash fire known as the 2016 election will finally be doused with the water of our nation’s citizenry. As Americans file out of their polling place, many will leave with a small sticker bearing the phrase “I Voted.”

It’s a cute idea with a long history; stickers are a persistent election tradition that have been around since the ‘80s. Sometimes they can get you free stuff. Mostly they’re a way to show everyone just how patriotic you are.

Today is Election Day in the United States, which means it’s a day set aside specifically for the act of voting. And yet, voting in the US is often more difficult than it could be. Polling places around the country have reported extremely long lines and instances of machines on the fritz. On top of that, voter suppression is a very real threat; Reuters recently obtained emails that proved Republicans in North Carolina were attempting to limit the availability of polling places in locations that leaned Democratic. So, in an effort to make things run a little more smoothly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign team just launched a “digital hotline” where voters can ask questions on Twitter, Facebook, and via text, Wired reports.

More than 50 staffers and volunteers, as well as voting rights lawyers, will be available all day today to answer questions, according to Wired. People can tweet at the @HFA Twitter account, post on the Hillary Clinton Facebook page, or text “question” to 47246.

Last night I sat in front of my computer for hours with a blank page open, trying to think about how I would finally write a presidential endorsement for The Verge. I wanted to be eloquent, sharp, and timeless — to make a poetic stand In Defense Of The Republic. But after a bit of tequila and a lot of writer’s block, I gave up, closed the tab, and went to bed.

Today I saw this video today of Donald Trump getting booed on his way in and out of a voting booth in his home state. It’s better than anything I could have written.

Yesterday, as groups across the country hit the final stretch of their get-out-the-vote campaigns, workers at NextGen Climate noticed some problems with their automated dialer program. As the team started its morning hours, the program used to initiate and monitor voter calls was suddenly clunky, and cut out entirely for crucial hours in the afternoon.

“It was slower in the morning, and then went down for hours at a time,” says NextGen’s Suzanne Henkels. The tool suffered intermittent downtime throughout the rest of the day. The campaign still made calls throughout the weekend, and was able to switch to backup methods of calling and texting to reach the remaining voters. Still, the attack caused significant trouble for the operation on the eve of Election Day.

If you don’t really want to watch the news today, I don’t blame you. It’s going to be a run-on sentence of talking heads, messy data, empty punditry, more messy data, “analysis,” man-on-the-street interviews with people who claim they will “storm the White House” while “armed” if their candidate loses, commercials for Aspirin, numbers, numbers, numbers, and — at some point — a new president who hopefully is a woman.

As an alternative — or just a release valve — I suggest watching News 8 WROC’s Facebook Live of Susan B. Anthony’s grave site in my hometown of Rochester, New York. Anthony was an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the achievement of women’s suffrage. Here are some examples of very punk rock things she did in hopes that someday women would be allowed to vote:

As we roll through Election Day, voters around the country are sharing photos of their ballots on social media. Among those is Eric Trump, who tweeted out a completed ballot for his father this morning. One small problem: the photo was probably illegal.

He has since the deleted the tweet.

It’s hard to imagine my grandparents endured election cycles with nothing more than drawings of animals accompanied by a couple words explaining the metaphor. How grateful I am to live in a time in which one can grab a smartphone, hide under the covers, and wait out the electoral storm with missives from internet strangers.

What a cycle it was! In the 20-month race to determine the new leader of the free world, we spent time with a boastfully racist puddle of orange Jell-O; a booger-eater; the human version of a long, drawn-out sigh that ends with an accidental fart; a hoarder of dank memes; and plenty of other variations on Judge Doom.

One of the most important elections in history has finally arrived. This year, the number of millennial voters has caught up to baby boomers in the electorate, each accounting for roughly 31 percent of the voting-eligible population. Politicians have looked to social media as a method of attracting young voters’ attention, but if you’re hoping to encourage young folks to vote by sharing your ballot selfie, take pause.

In many states, taking a selfie or a photo at a polling place is considered illegal — regardless of intention. What’s in your selfie and where you take it are also something to consider: Illinois, for example, considers showing your marked ballot to another person a felony, while others like Missouri and Ohio say it’s only illegal if you are purposely trying to coerce another person’s vote. States like New York and Michigan were still scrambling at the last minute to define their stance on ballot selfies. Both states upheld the ban, but Colorado on Friday declared selfies are a part of a voter’s First Amendment rights.

Voters in California will make an unprecedented decision on Tuesday about whether to deputize themselves as condom police. The ballot measure is called Proposition 60, and if it passes it will require adult performers to wear condoms in scenes with “vaginal or anal penetration by a penis.” If they don’t, adult film producers, distributors, and anyone with a financial stake in the film could be fined, or even sued by California residents.

The measure reflects years of work by Michael Weinstein, president and founder of a $1.3 billion nonprofit organization called the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. In the 1980s, Weinstein fought against attempts to quarantine AIDS patients and founded the AIDS Hospice Foundation. But recently, his fight has shifted to porn. Since 2009, Weinstein has been petitioning the state to require better safeguards against sexually transmissible infections in the adult film industry. With several hearings, but no resolution, Weinstein pushed for a Los Angeles city law called Measure B that would require adult film performers to wear condoms. LA residents voted it into law in 2012, and in 2015, Weinstein and the AIDS Health Foundation went statewide, spending nearly $5 million dollars to get Prop. 60 on the ballot and in front of voters.

President Obama warned that democracy is on the ballot this year, but there’s even more at stake — Americans could also be voting to protect the future of our entire planet. Climate change is the biggest story in science policy, and this year we’re faced with a stark choice. On one hand, in Hillary Clinton, we have someone who considers climate change an “urgent threat” and wants to invest in clean energy.

And then there’s Donald Trump, who called climate change a “hoax” and said that he would “cancel” the Paris climate accord. Trump also said he would eliminate the Department of Environmental, which in fact doesn’t exist. (We do have the Environmental Protection Agency, however, and its job is to protect the environment.) So tomorrow, we will be deciding whether to protect our planet or to elect someone who doesn’t even believe in the basic science of climate change.

Friday afternoon, US election officials got an unpleasant surprise. The security firm Cylance released a report disclosing a new attack on the popular Sequoia AVC Edge voting machine, potentially compromising both the machine’s public vote tally and a backup known as the Protective Counter. An accompanying video showed how the attack would take place, attacking the underlying software through a firmware port on the front of the machine. In the home stretch of election season, the result was an alarming reminder of how vulnerable many voting machines still are.

Researchers have been raising concerns about the AVC Edge since 2007, but it’s still in use in over 100 counties, including in much-watched swing states like Florida and Nevada. Cylance’s attack is limited, requiring sustained physical access and a full power cycle to alter the cartridge containing the machine’s final vote tally. Still, it’s an alarming sight for anyone concerned about the integrity of the election, and leaves election boards with little time to respond.

As the 2016 election enters the home stretch this weekend, each candidate is working to make their final plea to the electorate by honing their respective messages. In a profile published by The New York Times, it seems that Donald Trump has relinquished the outlet for which he is best known, and which is most likely to land him in trouble: Twitter.

Over the course of the campaign, Trump has become known for his Twitter rants and statements, which have caused controversy more than once. As his campaign works to catch up with Hillary Clinton’s narrow lead, it seems that the candidate’s aides have been able to take control of his Twitter account.