Election Day 2016 – The Verge

This election was a tipping point for marijuana legalization

2016-11-10T16:13:02-05:00

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.

Medical marijuana was also on the ballot for several states. North Dakota, Montana, Arkansas and Florida all approved medical marijuana.

The trend is clear: 60 percent of Americans …

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Clinton asks Facebook supporters to ‘come out’ from secret groups

2016-11-09T12:29:48-05:00

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."

Millions joined the Facebook group

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.

"To the millions of volunteers, community leaders, activists and union organizers who knocked on doors, talked to their neighbors, posted on Facebook - even in secret private Fac …

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Facebook feature that informs users of newly elected representatives is broken

2016-11-09T12:01:49-05:00

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:

For others, it looks like this:

There is a way to access a similar feature through Facebook's election results page.

It's possible there are too …

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Brexit 2.0

2016-11-09T04:04:21-05:00

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, a …

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President Trump is real: this is the darkest timeline

2016-11-09T03:11:44-05:00

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 h …

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The NYT’s election forecast needle is stressing people out with fake jitter

2016-11-08T23:02:30-05:00

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 n …

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Assisted suicide is now legal in Colorado

2016-11-08T22:53:37-05:00

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.

Assisted suicide - sometimes called ph …

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Sad Trump cake is the perfect meme to end his campaign

2016-11-08T20:38:20-05:00

Photo by Jason Volack on Twitter

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.

A Donald Trump cake being wheeled into Trump Tower @abc #ElectionDay pic.twitter.com/HSkHChfUSA
- Jason Volack (@jasonvolack) November 8, 2016

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:

Twist ending. #TrumpCake pic.twitter.com/il5PycHOcB
- Todd S …

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10 provocative political novels to read after the election

2016-11-08T18:53:01-05:00

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.

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin …

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Donald Trump’s website enjoyed a brief democracy

2016-11-08T18:20:59-05:00

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:

Fun with URL hacking. https://t.co/UWU2r69DSL pic.twitter.com/KMdW0GQXQ6
- Andy Baio (@waxpancake) November 8, 2016

But, like all things related to Trump, this too ended in sadness. The site will no lo …

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