• U.S. Officials Reassure Americans: Upcoming Election Will Be Trustworthy

    Top U.S. officials are ramping up efforts to convince Americans that the upcoming midterm elections will be safe and that the results can be trusted – but officials note the election threat environment is “more complex than it has ever been.” The head of U.S. Cyber Command told an audience Tuesday that “we are seeing no significant indications of attacks that are being planned right now.”

  • Risk-Limiting Audits: Efficient Means of Confirming Accuracy of Election Results

    Risk-Limiting Audits refer to a process by which humans can ensure within a specified risk tolerance that the computerized tallies of paper ballots are correct by examining a random sample of paper ballots by hand.

  • Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality

    Activists and academics have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in studies when claiming that illegal immigrants have relatively low crime rates. These studies fail to appreciate the fact that it can take years for Texas to identify convicts, while they are in custody, as illegal immigrants. These studies thus misclassify as native-born a significant number of offenders who are later identified as illegal immigrants.

  • Processing Backlogs in the U.S. Immigration System: The Scale of the Problem

    Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. immigration system is broken – but the issue is not who should be admitted legally, for how long, and what about their families. Rather, a defining way in which the system is broken is that the current system is unable to implement the policies that Congress and the administration have already chosen. This article summarizes the basic facts about the immigration backlogs, which comprise roughly 24 million cases across the U.S. government.

  • DHS Revokes Trump-Era Asylum Reforms That Were Tied Up in Court

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently canceled reforms made in 2020 to modernize the asylum system. DHS should have at least considered lawful alternatives before revoking.

  • Will DHS Again Leave H‑2B Winter Industries Short Workers?

    The H 2B program allows employers to hire foreign workers for seasonal or temporary nonfarm jobs. USCIS recently announced that employers had already reached the H 2B cap of 33,000 visas for the winter months before the start of the season. The H 2B program is filling jobs in relatively niche areas or positions where the shortages are most severe. DHS should immediately raise the cap to allow more H 2B workers to enter these positions.

  • Making Each Vote Count

    MIT Ph.D. candidate Jacob Jaffe uses data science to identify and solve problems in election administration. A key takeaway from his ensemble of studies is that “while it’s relatively rare that elections are bad, we shouldn’t think that we’re good to go,” he says. “Instead, we need to be asking under what conditions do things get bad, and how can we make them better.”

  • Local D.C. Elections: Measure to Allow Illegal Immigrants to Vote Advances

    A Washington, D.C., council committee voted unanimously on Tuesday to advance a measure allowing illegal immigrants to vote in local elections. In June, a judge struck down a similar law in New York City, arguing that allowing legal permanent residents to vote in local elections would be in conflict with the state constitution.

  • Importing Even More Crime

    The number of encounters with illegal immigrants recorded by the Border Patrol in FY2020 was 458,088. In FY22021, that number increased to about two million. The number of encounters with illegal immigrants who already had criminal records in FY2020 was 2,438. In FY2021, it rose to 10,763.

  • Getting Serious About the Threat of High Altitude Nuclear Detonation

    The ongoing commercialization of space with cost effective bulk electronics presents a tantalizing target for nations with a space disadvantage to target long-before a conflict could escalate to nuclear exchange. Robert “Tony” Vincent writes “the Department of Defense should get serious about planning for and countering the threat of high altitude nuclear detonations, starting with its various science and technology funding organizations.”

  • Venezuela Committing Crimes Against Humanity to Crush Opposition: UN

    The UN says President Maduro is directing security agencies to arrest and torture political opponents. Abuses are also rife in the south, where gold mining profits have put a target on the backs of indigenous peoples

  • The Inflation Reduction Act Is the Start of Reclaiming Critical Mineral Chains

    One important component of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed by Congress and signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden on Aug. 16, has been largely overlooked. “Built within the IRA is a commitment to increasing the domestic U.S. supply of critical minerals—lithium, nickel, manganese, and graphite, among others—to provide the materials necessary for a vast expansion in electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, and renewable power production infrastructure,” Morgan Bazilian writes. “The United States needs more wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars. But to make that possible, it will need more mines.”

  • Heading Off a Future Constitutional Calamity

    The Electoral Count Reform Act offers the opportunity to address a potentially existential national security threat with a relatively small number of keystrokes revising the U.S. Code—but time is short to get it done.

  • Let’s Stop Being Cavalier About Civilian Control of the Military

    The message of a remarkable open letter by former secretaries of defense and former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, published last week, is straightforward: The United States needs to review the basic principles of civilian control of the military and recommit to best practices in civil-military relations. Peter Feaver and Michèle Flournoy write that the statement dismisses what might be called the naïve theory of civilian control — the idea that every whim of the president should be immediately executed as a direct order without any further thought. “In a democracy, that can be as dangerous as rank insubordination, if a president is reckless,” they write. “It is hard not to think of President Trump and the way his impulsive, idiosyncratic approach to the commander-in-chief role made this rearticulation of first principles necessary.”

  • How the Midterms Could Weaken U.S. Election Security

    Candidates who support former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election would, if elected in November, gain the power to open up access to their states’ voting machines. Eric Geller writes that this is a prospect which election security experts and cybersecurity analysts describe as potentially catastrophic for American democracy.