• Shoring Up Ports to Withstand Cyberattacks

    There are more than 300 ports in the United States, employing an estimated 31 million Americans, and contributing about $5.4 trillion to the country’s economy The White House is moving forward with reforms aimed at shoring up cybersecurity at U.S. ports, some of which may already be in danger of falling under the sway of hackers linked to China.

  • AI and Election Integrity

    We don’t yet know the full impact of artificial intelligence-generated deepfake videos on misinforming the electorate. And it may be the narrative around them — rather than the deepfakes themselves — that most undermines election integrity.

  • Compulsory Voting Can Reduce Political Polarization in the U.S.: Study

    Introducing compulsory voting in the United States and other majoritarian democracies, with meaningful and enforceable penalties for abstention, has the potential to reduce political polarization and protect democratic institutions from anti-democratic threats, according to a groundbreaking paper.

  • Disinformation Threatens Global Elections – Here’s How to Fight Back

    With over half the world’s population heading to the polls in 2024, disinformation season is upon us — and the warnings are dire. Many efforts have focused on fact-checking and debunking false beliefs. In contrast, “prebunking” is a new way to prevent false beliefs from forming in the first place. Polio was a highly infectious disease that was eradicated through vaccination and herd immunity. Our challenge now is to build herd immunity to the tricks of disinformers and propagandists. The future of our democracy may depend on it.

  • AfD’s Remigration Agenda: Germany’s Challenge of Far-Right Extremism

    In November 2023, the German populist, far-right AfD organized a covert meeting in Potsdam which featured the leader of the ethnonationalist Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner. The attendees, adherents of a conspiracy theory commonly known as the Great Replacement, which claims that there is a deliberate attempt to replace the white European population with migrants of color, debated ways forcefully to deport migrants who failed to assimilate, had non-German lineage, or demonstrated support for asylum seekers.

  • Seeking Protection: How the U.S. Asylum Process Works

    Record numbers of migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border are challenging the Joe Biden administration’s attempts to restore asylum protections. Here’s how the asylum process works.

  • FBI Foils 2022 Plot by Militiamen to “Start a War” at the Texas-Mexico Border

    A Tennessee man arrested Monday hoped to travel to the southern border with a militia group that allegedly plotted to go “to war with the border patrol,” believing that the country was being invaded by migrants.

  • If SCOTUS Won’t Enforce the 14th Amendment, We Should Worry How They’ll Handle the 22nd

    Some voters complain that that the Colorado Supreme Court is limiting voters’ choices by denying Donald Trump a place on the Colorado ballot because of Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection. But if the Supreme Court refuses to uphold the Colorado court’s ruling, how would it rule if a popular president wants to run for a third term? It can be argued that enforcing the 22nd Amendment, which limits a president to two terms, also limits voters’ choices.

  • Two Scholars Revisit Trump’s Election Fraud Claims

    Donald Trump’s ongoing claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him occupy a curious position in our current political discourse. They are plainly of the highest importance, and yet they are seldom scrutinized with much empirical or statistical care. For all the centrality of these fraud claims to the election coming up this year, they don’t get exposed to much ongoing critique of a detailed, systematic or rigorous nature. Until now.

  • Case Closed: Trump’s Election Fraud Claims are Baseless, Empirical Analysis Confirms

    Between the November 2020 election and the 6 January attack on the Capitol, Trump’s legal team filed 62 lawsuits contesting the election results, and each one of them was dismissed – in many cases, by Trump-appointed judges — or dropped. “In each instance, we find that these claims fail to provide any evidence of fraud, illegality, or even an abnormality. One reason that the claims fail is that they are not based on facts,” write two experts who examined the claims of election fraud by Trump and his legal team.

  • Mexico’s Lawsuit Against U.S. Gunmakers Has Cleared a Big Hurdle

    A federal law protects American gun manufacturers against most lawsuits, but an appeals court has allowed Mexico’s case to move forward. The Mexican government accusing America’s largest gunmakers of aiding and abetting the trafficking of weapons across the border.

  • Police Departments Are Turning to AI to Sift Through Millions of Hours of Unreviewed Body-Cam Footage

    Body camera video equivalent to 25 million copies of “Barbie” is collected but rarely reviewed. Some cities are looking to new technology to examine this stockpile of footage to identify problematic officers and patterns of behavior.

  • Why Treason Is a Key Topic in Trump’s 14th Amendment Appeal to the Supreme Court

    Someone who gives a weapon to a person knowing they intended to commit treason is a traitor, not an accessory to treason. Treason is treason, and a person either engages in treason or does not. In the Constitution’s Article III, and in the 14th Amendment, there are two ways a person can commit treason: by “levying war” – which in the 14th Amendment is replaced with “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” – or by giving “aid and comfort” to people determined to be “enemies” of the United States. The people Trump urged to march on the Capitol and said kind words to may have been enemies of democracy, but as American citizens, constitutionally speaking, they could not be enemies of the United States. Rather, they were insurrectionists, and the constitutional law of treason does not differentiate between supporting them and being among them.

  • Want to Solve the Border Crisis? Legalize Immigration

    Migrants aren’t the problem and the country is not “overwhelmed.” Nativist politicians and impossible barriers to legal entry caused (and maintain) the chaos. In other words, immigration restrictionists create the problems and then demand ever more restrictions to fix them.

  • U.S. Supreme Court Says Texas Can’t Block Federal Agents from the Border

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ordered Texas to allow federal border agents access to the state’s border with Mexico, where Texas officials have deployed miles of concertina wire. The high court’s order effectively maintains long-running precedent that the federal government — not individual states — has authority to enforce border security.