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For U.S. presidential elections, most states use the so-called winner-take-all system, in which the state's presidential electors are awarded to the winning political party in the state after a popular vote phase, regardless of the actual margin of victory. Therefore, election campaigns are especially intense in states where there is no clear direction on which party will be the winning party. These states are often referred to as swing states. To measure the impact of such an election law on the campaigns, we analyze the Twitter activity surrounding the 2020 US preelection debate, with a particular focus on the spread of disinformation. We find that about 88% of the online traffic was associated with swing states. In addition, the sharing of links to unreliable news sources is significantly more prevalent in tweets associated with swing states: in this case, untrustworthy tweets are predominantly generated by automated accounts. Furthermore, we observe that the debate is mostly led by two main communities, one with a predominantly Republican affiliation and the other with accounts of different political orientations. Most of the disinformation comes from the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers and advocates focused significant attention towards reforming the Electoral Count Act—an 1887 law that governs the counting of Electoral College votes in Congress. After almost two years, Congress passed reforms to the Act that will make it more difficult for partisan actors to manipulate the outcome of future presidential elections. While this achievement is no doubt critical to prevent another insurrection, partisan attacks on election outcomes remain most likely to occur at the state and local level where the bulk of election administration takes place, long before Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College results. The 2022 election cycle previewed one such attack with alarming frequency: Rogue officials in several states refused to certify election results or attempted to otherwise interfere with certification—the statutory process by which election officials attest to the accuracy and completeness of election results. While efforts to impede certification are not new, never before have they been deployed on such a large and coordinated scale. For this reason, little academic attention has been paid to the mechanics of state certification frameworks.1 This Article fills that gap to demonstrate why, and how, state certification frameworks can combat the ongoing threats against them. It begins by providing a detailed overview of how election certification works and how recent attacks on the process have targeted and disrupted certification using false claims of widespread election fraud. It then delves into the rich but often overlooked history of certification as a non-discretionary duty to demonstrate that those attacks flouted hundreds of years of well-established American legal history; recognizing that discretion created opportunities for crises and election fraud, early courts and legislatures purposefully shaped certification into a mandatory, non-discretionary duty. The Article concludes with a roadmap for election officials, candidates, and advocates to resolve future attacks on the certification process in eight key battleground states likely to play significant roles in the 2024 election cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a compilation of articles and reports on various Indigenous issues. It covers topics such as increased Native American civic engagement in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the negative impact of the Native American boarding school system, the return of Indigenous children's remains from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, racial inequalities in homelessness, an increase in the infant mortality rate among certain racial and ethnic groups, Harvard University's retention of unrepatriated Native Ancestors and burial belongings, the potential return of ancestral land to the Penobscot Nation, President Joe Biden's support for the Haudenosaunee Nationals lacrosse teams, discussions between the Lumbee Tribe and a local school board regarding Tribal Consultation, inaccuracies in a Barbie doll depicting Wilma Mankiller, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site, a program using Lakota values to teach sexual violence prevention, the Southern Ute tribe's economic development strategy, legislation to strengthen the rights of victims of sexual assault and domestic violence in the Navajo Nation, the Chumash tribe's movement to reclaim their heritage and land, Indigenous-centered land trusts in Oregon, the nomination of Sara E. Hill as the first Native woman federal judge in Oklahoma, webinars and training sessions for small businesses in tribal communities, and a USDA pilot program for Indigenous food sovereignty with ranchers. [Extracted from the article]

Simple Summary: The present study investigated the movement patterns of the sea cucumber Apostichopus japonicus. We found that the swing was an important state in the motion mode of sea cucumbers to regulate the movement direction, and the motion state did not change the direction of movement. In addition, food cues caused changes in the movement state of sea cucumbers, and the movement in the presence of food was directed rather than random and significantly affected swaying behavior. These novel findings provide new insights into the regulation of movement direction in eyeless organisms. Regulating movement direction is essential in the locomotion of animals. Sea cucumbers, as eyeless animals, do not have eyes for the perception of the surrounding environment and food. They have a unique way of swinging their bodies when a food cue is detected, although they lack an important perceptual tool. The present study investigated the movement patterns of the sea cucumber Apostichopus japonicus in the absence of a food cue (experiment 1) and in the presence of a food cue (experiment 2). In experiment 1, we found that the movement of sea cucumbers was close to a linear motion (motion linearity 0.91 ± 0.01). In experiment 2, sea cucumbers most frequently adjusted the movement direction when being exposed to food (84 times/216 min), indicating that sea cucumbers adjusted the direction of movement in the swing state but not the motion state. In experiment 2, we found significantly lower time in the immobility state in the sea cucumbers in the presence of food cues compared to that of those without being exposed to food cues, and the frequency of the motion state in response to food cues was 1.6 times than that of those without food cue. This suggests that food cues cause the change in motion state in sea cucumbers. Swing frequency was 1.7 times higher in sea cucumbers exposed to food cues than that of those not exposed to food cues. Further, sea cucumbers in the presence of food showed significantly better performances in swing angle and swing velocity compared to those not exposed to food cues. This suggests that food cue significantly affects the swing state of sea cucumbers. Notably, the present study described the movement patterns of sea cucumbers when they detected food cues, and other factors (such as the detection of predators) need to be further studied. The present study provides new insights into the regulation of movement direction in eyeless organisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have shown that individuals' belief sensitivity—their ability to discriminate between true and false political statements—varies according to psychological and demographic characteristics. We argue that sensitivity also varies with the political and social communication contexts in which they live. Both battleground state status of the state in which individuals live and the level of partisan segregation in a state are associated with Americans' belief sensitivity. We leverage panel data collected from two samples of Americans, one collected in the first half of 2019 and the other during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign season. Results indicate that the relationship between living in battleground states and belief sensitivity is contingent on political ideology: living in battleground states, versus in Democratic-leaning states, is associated with lower belief sensitivity among conservatives and higher belief sensitivity among liberals. Moreover, living in a less politically segregated state is associated with greater belief sensitivity. These relationships were only in evidence in the election year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Native American organizations and tribes launched get-out-the-vote campaigns that motivated Native peoples to vote in record numbers and helped flip battleground states. We conducted four studies (total N = 11,661 Native American adults) to examine the social and cultural factors explaining this historic Native civic engagement (e.g., campaigning). Results revealed that the more participants identified as being Native, the more they reported (a) engaging in civic activities, including get-out-the-vote behaviors during the 2020 election (Study 1); (b) civic engagement more broadly across a 5-year period (pilot study, Study 2); and (c) intentions to engage in civic activities in the future (Study 3). Moreover, participants who more strongly identified as Native were more likely to recognize the omission of their group from society and perceive greater group discrimination, which both independently and serially predicted greater civic engagement. These results suggest that leveraging the link between Native identification and group injustices can motivate action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to analyze the factors that determine voting behavior in the rustbelt states during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The rustbelt states are traditionally considered "swing states" and play a crucial role in determining the outcome of the presidential election. The study employs a spatial econometrics model that considers COVID-19-related factors, such as the percentage of people wearing masks and the number of COVID-19 deaths in each county of the rustbelt states. Firstly, the study identifies the most suitable spatial econometrics model. Secondly, the study shows that COVID-19 pandemic-related independent variables had a significant positive impact on the Republican Party's results in the U.S. presidential election while mask-wearing behavior had a significant negative impact. These results suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced voting behavior and altered the political landscape, but it does not have geographical effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether deserved on not, US Presidents often receive the blame or the credit for the nature of the economy and direction of the country. Therefore, the status of the economy and the country in an election year can be a very important factor in election success for an incumbent President (or his party if an incumbent is not running). This is especially true in 'battleground states' due to the presence of the Electoral College system where Presidential candidates need only win different combinations of states in order to become President. However, the 2020 Presidential election was vastly different from past election cycles in that an additional variable, COVID-19, was added to the decision calculus of voters. Eventually, the 2020 election came down to the extremely slim margins in three states (Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin) and thin margins in two others (Pennsylvania and Michigan). This paper shows that deaths from COVID-19 at the county level played a small role in demotivating voters to turnout in 2020 to cast their vote for Joe Biden as President. In other words, without Covid-19, President Trump's losses within these five states would have been even larger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the mechanisms humans use to stabilize walking is vital for predicting falls in elderly. Modeling studies identified two potential mechanisms to stabilize gait in the anterior-posterior direction: foot placement control and ankle push-off control: foot placement depends on position and velocity of the center-of-mass (CoM) and push-off covaries with deviations between actual and predicted CoM trajectories. While both control mechanisms have been reported in humans, it is unknown whether especially the latter one is employed in unperturbed steady-state walking. Based on the finding of Wang and Srinivasan that foot placement deviates in the same direction as the CoM states in the preceding swing phase, and assuming that this covariance serves the role of stabilizing gait, the covariance between the CoM states and foot placement can be seen as a measure of foot placement accuracy. We subsequently interpreted the residual variance in foot placement from a linear regression model as "errors" that must be compensated, and investigated whether these foot placement errors were correlated to push-off kinetic time series of the subsequent double stance phase. We found ankle push-off torque to be correlated to the foot placement errors in 30 participants when walking at normal and slow speeds, with peak correlations over the double stance phase up to 0.39. Our study suggests that humans use a push-off strategy for correcting foot placement errors in steady-state walking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional narratives of the 2020 presidential election typically overlook the growing importance of voters of color in suburbia, especially in battleground states such as Georgia and Virginia. Using novel precinct-level voting data for twenty-two states for the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, we analyze the relationship between precinct-level Democratic vote shares and the racial composition of suburban precincts. Predominantly White suburban precincts turned modestly toward the Democratic Party in 2020 relative to 2016, but had the election been decided in the precincts in which most White suburban voters live, Donald Trump would have won both elections handily. The outcome in 2020 depended on turnout in heavily Black suburban precincts, which voted overwhelmingly for Biden, and in Asian and Latinx precincts that also supported Democrats, though less strongly. As the suburbs become increasingly diverse, the new racial demography of suburbs should change conventional understandings of voting behavior in these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fibroblasts are known for their ability to make and modify the extracellular matrix. However, there is more to them than meets the eye. It is now clear that they help define tissue microenvironments and support immune responses in organs. As technology advances, we have started to uncover the secrets of fibroblasts. In this Essay, we present fibroblasts as not only the builders and renovators of tissue environments but also the rheostat cells for immune circuits. Although they perform location-specific functions, they do not have badges of fixed identity. Instead, they display a spectrum of functional states and can swing between these states depending on the needs of the organ. As fibroblasts participate in a range of activities both in health and disease, finding the key factors that alter their development and functional states will be an important goal to restore homeostasis in maladapted tissues. Fibroblasts have traditionally been thought of as structural cells, but technological advances have started to uncover important roles for fibroblasts in immune function. This Essay looks at why understanding the biology of fibroblasts really matters for health and disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the many sites on the battleground of the United States in which racism and classism rage is the all-too-overlooked mental health industrial complex. Over the past four decades, the mental health industrial complex has used the biomedical explanation for mental suffering. This focus on diagnoses that result from problems of the brain and not from social factors has contributed to an exponential increase of consumed medications and total revenue earned from the mental health and addiction services provided in the United States. Moreover, this specific ontology of subjectivity—that humans are solely defined by their material brains—helps serve the interests of the dominant hegemony. It is the assertion of this article that today as persons are conditioned to understand mental illness as a result of a purely individual problem, they become unaware of the ways in which the structural problems of race and class contribute to their mental illness. As a therapist who works with marginalized populations, I have seen firsthand how the biomedical model can be used to reinforce the illnesses that it aims to treat. The following article will illustrate the complex dynamics of the mental health industrial complex by way of analyzing three case studies of Black, male patients who I treated while working at a mental health facility in the Northeastern United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on one form of election subversion that affects Democratic areas in swing states like Georgia. The subversion involves state and local election administrators who abuse their discretion and commit fraud to achieve their desired partisan outcomes. It describes the political landscape in the U.S., the blue-metropolitan area/red-state paradigm, and state policymaking.

We examine the notion of a "bellwether" location in the electoral political context. Bellwethers are thought to have predictive power because they supposedly signal how the entire electorate will move on election day. We consider how the number of bellwether counties—defined in several ways—has fluctuated since the 1930s. We also explore the extent to which bellwethers successfully predict future elections. With the proliferation of geographic polarization, few counties can successively and successfully pick the winner of presidential elections. Other bellwether measures fare slightly better or worse, but as Tufte and Sun (1975) found nearly half a century ago, bellwethers today continue to be poor predictors of future performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But even if the high expected utility of a swing state vote grounds a duty to cast a swing state vote, this consideration could not ground a I general i duty to vote. Jason Brennan argues that defenders of a duty to vote must solve the I particularity problem i - why must a citizen honor their duty to contribute to justice and the common good by voting in particular? Julia Maskivker's I The Duty to Vote i is an outstanding contribution to the ethics of voting literature. Maskivker writes, "Voting as a collective effort is in principle instrumentally valuable because - if done carefully - it will result in the promotion of welfare and justice for the general population as a result of citizens choosing governments that care about such things" (p. 47). [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the memorialisation of the Battle of Dumlupınar (30 August 1922) in K€utahya, Turkey. Through an investigation of landmarks, literature and oral history, we explore the post-war imaginings and settings of this battle. We observe three major practices of war memorialisation in the battlegrounds of Dumlupınar: state, public and local. State and public practices are largely intertwined and embody themselves in the form of highly visible landmarks and regulated acts of commemoration. The local practices are subtler and represent counter narratives of war entangled with the conflict landscape, myths, and local politics. By looking into this dichotomy, this article scrutinises the present role of battlegrounds in the memorialisation of the Battle of Dumlupınar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Miscelanea Comillas is the property of Universidad Pontificia Comillas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Political advertising on digital platforms has grown dramatically in recent years as campaigns embrace new ways of targeting supporters and potential voters. We examine how political campaign dynamics have evolved in response to the growth of digital media by analyzing the advertising strategies of US presidential election campaigns during the 2020 primary cycle. To identify geographic and temporal trends, we employ regression analyses of campaign spending across nearly 600,000 advertisements published on Facebook. We show that campaigns employed a new strategy of targeting voters in candidates' home states during the "invisible primary." In contrast to earlier studies, we find that home state targeting is a key strategy for all campaigns, rather than just for politicians with existing political and financial networks. While all candidates advertised to their home state, those who dropped out during the invisible primary tended to spend disproportionately more than the candidates who outlasted them. We also find that as the first wave of state caucuses and primary elections approach, campaigns shift digital ad expenditures to states with early primaries such as Iowa and New Hampshire and, to a lesser extent, swing states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This article examines recent moral panics over sex education in Uganda from historical perspectives. Public outcry over comprehensive sexuality education erupted in 2016 over claims that children were being taught "homosexuality" by international NGOs. Subsequent debates over sex education revolved around defending what public figures claimed were national, religious, and cultural values from foreign infiltration. Methods: This paper is grounded in a survey of Uganda's two English-print national newspapers (2016–2018), archival research of newspapers held at Uganda's Vision Group media company (1985–2005), analyses of public rhetoric as reported in internationally and nationally circulating media, textual analysis of Uganda's National Sexuality Education Framework (2018), formal interviews with Ugandan NGO officers (3), and semi-structured interviews with Ugandan educators (3). Results: Uganda's current panic over sex education reignited longstanding anxieties over foreign interventions into the sexual health and rights of Ugandans. We argue that in the wake of a 35-year battle with HIV/AIDS and more recent controversies over LGBT rights, both of which brought international donor resources and governance, the issue of where and how to teach young people about sex became a new battleground over the state's authority to govern the health and economic prosperity of its citizens. Conclusions: Ethno- and religio-nationalist rhetoric used to oppose the state's new sexuality education policy was also used to justify sex education as a tool for economic development. Policy Implications: Analyzing rhetoric mobilized by both supporters and detractors of sex education reveals the contested political terrain policy advocates must navigate in Uganda and other postcolonial contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some immigrant groups succeed in influencing the U.S. government to impose economic sanctions on their former dictators, while others do not? This paper begins by noting that the president is the pivotal player in sanctions policy and that presidents cater to voters in swing states. Therefore, a diaspora's proportion of the swing-state electorate should determine whether the American government imposes sanctions on their former homeland. Considering dictatorships from 1946 to 2005, this paper finds that a one-percentage-point increase in the diaspora's proportion of the swing-state electorate increases the probability of regime-change sanctions by 11 percentage points. It then calculates causal estimates of the effectiveness of these sanctions on regime change. Using the diaspora's proportion of the swing-state electorate as an instrumental variable for the presence of economic sanctions, it finds that sanctions do not have a positive, statistically-significant impact on regime change while a negative impact is plausible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to bring together the factors of resilience, regime stability, and foreign penetration into one research project based on the example of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which marked the one-hundredth anniversary of its statehood in 2021. Even though it exists in a neighborhood that is in turmoil, the Jordanian monarchy has managed to survive all the spillover effects from such regional conflicts. This study argues that external influences have played an increasingly significant role in political developments in Jordan since the beginning of the New World Order in 1989. Scholars of international relations often argue that foreign penetration may cause state vacuums like those that have arisen in Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iraq. Yet, this has not been the case with other states in the Middle East. One important factor behind this resilience and regime stability is related to the behavior of foreign actors. With respect to the Hashemite Kingdom, the United States has historically been the main provider of state security. Nonetheless, at the same time the European Union (EU) has adopted a pragmatic view toward Jordan and its new resilience-building approach also helps to maintain the status quo. Moreover, the regional hegemons and swing states of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region do not have an interest in altering the existing order save for a few radical groups. The author argues that the convergence of the national interests of the major regional stakeholders also contributes to regime stability and that outside support has increased the resilience of its political system despite the growing frustrations of many of the country's citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election by securing a very large share of the rural vote. In the 2020 election, his margin of victory in rural America was even greater. This time, however, voter turnout in urban areas was much higher, an even larger share of these urban voters cast their ballot for Biden, and Trump lost the election. Analysis revealed that two variables were especially important predictors of county-level voting behavior. Counties that Trump won had a large proportion of non-Hispanic white residents and a low proportion of college graduates. When controlling for other independent variables, the effects of rural/urban residence largely disappeared. Thus, Trump's dominance in rural counties is explained by the fact that rural counties have large numbers of non-Hispanic white residents and lower levels of educational attainment than urban counties. These same variables were important in explaining the vote in five key battleground states. The relevance of these findings for the future of U.S. democracy in an era of deep political division is discussed. • The rural vote was instrumental in Trump's 2016 election victory. • In 2020, Trump's margin of victory in rural areas was even greater. • Trump's 2020 election loss was a consequence higher voter turnout in urban areas. • Trump's greatest support came from white, working-class counties. • Relevance of rural/urban variable generally disappeared in multi-variate analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the past decade, voter fraud has emerged as a salient issue in American politics and elections. Despite minimal evidence of fraud cases and non-existent effects on election outcomes, Americans continue to believe in the existence and impact of voter fraud on elections. In this paper, we examine a potentially key source of this disconnect – the U.S. news media. How the media cover voter fraud likely affects citizens' beliefs and opinions on the subject. However, little research exists exploring voter fraud coverage. In this paper, we examine the patterns and themes of voter fraud coverage in local newspapers for each of the 50 states during the 2012 elections. Amongst the results, we show that voter identification and registration were dominant topics in coverage. Further, battleground states and states that recently passed restrictive voting laws affected which topics related to voter fraud received the most attention. Finally, we find that the number of fraud cases in each state was unrelated to voter fraud news coverage. From an agenda setting and framing standpoint, our results suggest Republicans may have been successful in making voter identification and fraud a salient issue in the news during the 2012 elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]