Month: October 2016

Cities overemphasize population as a measure of economic health and overall vitality. If the population is stable or growing, the logic goes, then certainly there must be enough amenities and jobs to explain why people are moving or at least staying. Population loss certainly is a bad sign, one difficult to explain away. But growing or stable population is not necessarily what it seems.
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If you want to get a sense of the direction an urban area is trending, look at changes over time in population density.

Why does that statistic matter more? Let's look at one of my favorite Rust Belt punching bags. Peoria, IL is a good example, but honestly you could choose from the lengthy list of declining Midwestern and Northeastern industrial cities and prove the same point.

In 1950 the Census recorded 111,856 people in the city proper; 2015 Census estimates were 115,070. If it seems surprising that a city often cited as an example of decline actually grew (slightly) since the often-cited base year of 1950, it is. A closer look at how it managed the feat reveals a serious underlying problem. In 1950 the city covered 12.9 square miles. In 2015, that figure exploded to 50.3 square miles. Population density, then, fell from 8671 per sq. mile to 2288.

That's staggering, but so what? The main problem is that urban infrastructure is expensive, and the more a city spreads out in an effort create the appearance of population growth or stability the more of that infrastructure it needs to provide. Roads, police and fire, utilities, sanitation, and any other costly function of modern urban governing become more difficult to provide over an ever expanding area with a declining number of taxpayers – individuals and businesses – to support them. Leaving aside the fact that economic opportunities in such cities almost inevitably are shrinking, each taxpayer becomes "responsible" for more and more infrastructure. That's not a great formula. Add in the fact that populations in these places almost inevitably become older and more impoverished over time and it's a disaster. Add in the current anti-government hysteria that makes even modest attempts to raise revenue a pitched battle and you have a place where you really don't want to live unless you can't afford to get out.

What happens next is predictable. Services get worse, costs are piled onto the remaining population that is least likely to be able to afford it, and lowest-bidder privatization farms out many essential tasks.
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The few remaining large employers in the area get to write their own ticket after threatening to leave, which often results in further reduced local tax revenues (through various breaks, loopholes, and handouts) and environmental degradation that no one dares try to make them clean up. Eventually the sense of decline becomes pervasive. Signs of crime and urban decay become widespread. Garbage piles up. Streets look like the Luftwaffe just bombed them.

Aging water and sewerage systems fail. 9-1-1 calls go unanswered and fewer police are asked to deal with more crime spread over a greater area. Businesses shutter, and people with marketable skills take them to other places where things are not quite as bleak.

Despite the cottage industry of urban renewal and revitalization schemes, there's very little cities can do to reverse the slide into urban blight once the population density takes an appreciable drop. More accurately, there are some things they can do but hundreds of other dying and shrinking places trying to do those exact same things. Offering tax incentives to lure new businesses there? Great. So is everyone else. The end result is a sort of community-wide torpor, a "who gives a shit" mentality that sinks in after a couple years or decades of looking at empty buildings, driving over crumbling streets, and seeing visible poverty everywhere. Expectations fall and anger rises among people being asked to pay more for public services that seem to get worse every year. They seem to because they are.

If you're curious about where your favorite city is heading over the next 20 or 30 years, look at the historical trend in population density. If it declines consistently there's a good chance that great things are not on the horizon.

One of the great ironies of this insufferable election is that something we all knew was inevitable and only a matter of time – the full, seamless integration of the reality TV / social media paradigm into our elections – was achieved by a highly unattractive 70 year old man. It is as apparent now two weeks out from the election as it was in the summer of 2015 when this nightmare began that Trump has no real interest in being president, a job that is by most estimates rather challenging. Instead this has been one long exercise in building the Personal Brand, of achieving the kind of multi-platform social media saturation that brings entire rooms full of Social Media professionals at SXSW Interactive to instantaneous and powerful orgasm. When a campaign spends more on hats bearing an eminently hashtaggable slogan than it does on polling, it becomes nearly impossible to argue that this is anything other than politics as viral marketing, a painfully long product roll-out for whatever insufferable Web 3.0 media product Trump plans to shove down the throats of his gullible herd of followers. It is a campaign not for votes but for Likes and Follows, the end goal being a list of potential subscribers' credit card numbers rather than accommodations on Pennsylvania Avenue.

As an adult old enough to remember the world before the internet, it isn't difficult for me or anyone else of my generation to see this for exactly what it is. We have been through enough elections and seen enough political campaigns to know what campaigns look like. We recognize, consequently, that this is not one. What I worry about a lot lately, especially given my constant contact with people in the 18-22 age range, is what long term effects this will have on the attitudes of people of different generations who have grown up with the internet and social media. Someone born in 1998 has never lived in a world without clickbait, viral videos, shitposting, memes, Facebook, Reddit, apps, and the idea of life as incidental things that happen so one can post pictures of it on the internet. It is not that today's college-aged voters are incapable of answering the question, "Is this a real campaign or is this all just a publicity stunt?" – what is troubling is that it would never occur to young adults to ask that question. When you've lived since infancy in a world in which saying outrageous and offensive things is a standard part of the repertoire for attracting valuable attention in a the internet's competitive marketplace of self-promoting assholes, this very well could appear to be normal. You can feel the collective shrug, the sense that nothing about what happened this year is in any way out of line with one's expectations about how the world of 2016 works.

One valuable Teaching Moment from this campaign was the vice-presidential debate. Students were able to see for one evening what, for most of recent history, a presidential campaign has looked like: two extremely boring older white guys using a lot of words to say very little. It contrasted sharply with the WWE Monday Night Raw spectacle of the presidential debates, which they view primarily through the lens of what they can provide in entertainment value. Much is said about the shrinking attention spans of younger generations, and I think there is a real element of truth to those fears. It's not surprising that today's young people, just like young people of years past, would find a Kaine-Pence type election extremely boring. What's worrying is the idea that, rather than considering this year's presidential election appalling and embarrassing, it not only seems normal but even desirable because it holds their interest. If they find this funny and entertaining we are likely to do it again in the future, and it will only be "funny" until one of these candidates – some media hog less personally repugnant than Trump – wins, at which point the joke will be on all of us.

All year long I've felt (and voiced privately, because it's a bit salty to put it out there in public even by my standards) that Trump has been taking it strangely easy on The Jews.

Hold on. Don't make angry comments yet.

I'm not saying that Trump or anyone else SHOULD be blasting The Jews for any particular reason. It is merely that given the campaign's regular recourse to racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and in general the basest kinds of bigotry, it was unexpected and somewhat surprising that anti-Semitism would not be present as well. I hope that makes sense. I'm not advocating anti-Semitism; it merely struck me as bizarre that we were seeing far less anti-Semitism from him than one would expect given his neolithic attitudes toward every other group defined as The Other by white protestant male America.

It turned out, as it so often has throughout this campaign, that I only had to be patient and that with time things would indeed get Much Worse. When Trump announced on Oct. 13 (in PALM BEACH of all places, I mean what the hell, maybe he can book the Apollo Theater in Harlem and rip on black people for an hour) that "international bankers" were to blame for many of the ills, real or imagined, that his supporters bemoan, I realized that he had merely been keeping anti-Semitism in reserve as kind of a closing act. Jew-bashing would be to Trump 2016 what Beyonce and Jay-Z would be to a long music festival: the big finish. The crescendo. The climax.

There is not a sentient adult who fails to recognize references to Bankers, particularly of the International variety, as a crystal clear euphemism for Jews dating back to the Renaissance.

It is almost literally the oldest trick in the book.
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The wink is implied. In his inaugural address, even FDR – a friend of Jews in general and reliant upon dozens of Jewish individuals in his administration – sunk to the level of telling Americans that "wicked moneylenders" and "bankers" were responsible in dark but unspecified ways for the Great Depression.
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True, the banking system as a whole was at its heart; nonetheless the choice of language is a clear appeal to baser attitudes.

The more I thought about Trump's remarks of Oct. 13 it became apparent that in the modern era, anti-Semitism is the final stage of the growth cycle of demagoguery. It used to come earlier in the process of Idiot Mitosis because it used to be more socially acceptable and Jews were generally a powerless underclass in any society they inhabited in numbers. Today Jews have more social and political power as a group and thus the first stages of bigoted demagoguery focus on groups against whom prejudice is more socially acceptable: blacks, Hispanics, immigrants in general, and so on. So it makes sense to start there. It is not until a group or individual has made peace with dwelling on the fringes and has accepted marginalization that he or they embrace good old fashioned Jew-bashing. An unsettling percentage of Americans don't much mind politicians dumping all over blacks (referenced by any number of dog-whistle euphemisms), immigrants, the poor, and people identifiably "foreign" living among us. Anti-Semitism, once as popular among the upper crust as among the lowest classes, is now too obviously gauche, too lower class to be accepted in Ivy League schools and corporate board rooms. This is not to suggest that anti-Semitism no longer exists, but that it is today more likely to be frowned upon in the same settings in which slanders against "thugs" and "welfare queens" and "the Mexicans" would still receive an approving nod.

When someone goes after The Jews in 2016, that is a person preparing for a life beyond the fringes of respectability in polite society. It is the difference between Ben Carson and Alex Jones; the former lives on the fringes of range of acceptable opinions, the latter is comfortably beyond them. Embracing the language and theories of The Protocols and Henry Ford (callback to Monday's post!) is a signal that post-Election 2016 Donald Trump is not going to be a figure welcome anywhere in polite society.

He is about to be shunned as if he is toxic and he knows it, so like a smart, savvy self-promoting narcissist he is ensuring that the path is clear between his current place on the fringes and his future pandering to neo-Nazis and selling books and media programming to white nationalists.

Most Americans who are reasonably well informed about history know that Henry Ford was at least as important and influential to the development and popularity of anti-Semitism in the United States as he was to the automobile. That's saying a lot, given that it is almost impossible to overstate Ford's contributions to the latter industry. He can be credited with very few actual innovations in automotive engineering, as the Germans and French can claim most of the world's automotive "firsts" (which explains, incidentally, why so many French terms like chassis, limousine, chauffeur, coupe, garage, and carburetor made it into English). But like his friend Thomas Edison, where he excelled was not as an inventor but as someone who could apply ideas on a grand scale successfully. He took ideas available to him – both automotively and with anti-Semitism – and really made them work on a scale other proponents could hardly have imagined let alone executed.

The Dearborn Independent, Ford's anti-Jewish rag, was a source of friction (obviously) between Ford and his Jewish friends and colleagues.

Most abandoned him without hesitation. One, powerful Detroit rabbi Leo Franklin, had been a friend of Ford long enough to attempt to appeal to him on a personal level. Franklin believed, as was undeniably the case, that Ford was a fundamentally decent person who simply wasn't very bright and was easily led to support wacky ideas outside of his narrow range of mechanical and organizational talents. During a libel trial, for example, Ford received great ridicule for being unable to answer grade school level questions about the world, such as the significance of the year 1776 to American history.

Alas, Franklin eventually gave up. When Ford representatives sent the rabbi a new Ford in 1920, as they did annually, he returned the gift. Informed of this by his underlings, Ford asked incredulously and sincerely, "What's wrong Dr. Franklin? Has anything come between us?"

Ford believed, as many people do, that he could be virulently anti-Jewish without that fact interfering with his personal relationships with Jews. He argued in essence, I don't like Jews in general or as a whole but of course I like YOU in particular, Jewish Friend. It's the classic soft racist "I'm not against all ______, just the bad ones. You're one of the good ones" tactic.

A few weeks ago a generally very good sports journalism website ran this piece, "Donald Trump is Tearing the NFL Apart," to offer an interesting look at how personal friendships are being strained by the current political climate. Certainly the clickbait title is alarmist and the "data" of the voting preferences of 25 black and 25 white players is useless in any meaningful sense, but despite that the underlying issue here is real. It turns out that when one supports a political candidate who is so outspokenly derogatory toward anyone who isn't a white Christian male and whose election would represent real, tangible threats to women, Hispanics, African-Americans, and other demographics, people might re-evaluate their friendship with you. And it is not difficult at all to imagine many of the white Trump supporters in that article being genuinely surprised that black players might not feel particularly close with them anymore after learning that they like a guy who has employed literally every form of coded racism known to man in his campaign, along with some of the more explicit type.

Americans – white ones in particular – are in love with the idea that politics and religion can be segregated neatly into a separate reality that does not have to interfere with friends and family relationships. And in many cases, it works well enough. I find it very difficult but not impossible to imagine someone breaking off a friendship because Joe decided to vote for the lukewarm hole in the atmosphere that was Mitt Romney. Sure, there are people whose lives would be worse off had he been elected (and others whose lives would be better, namely the super rich) but he was hardly a polarizing figure. Most people probably struggle to remember his name right now.

The Trump campaign has so openly embraced the style and message of European far-right nationalist parties, the white power movement, and other groups whose popularity derives from racism, xenophobia, or other Neanderthal sentiments from the bottom of the political barrel that it's not hard to understand why someone not defined as a Real American by Trump would take it personally that friends and family support him. We're never supposed to take politics personally. We're supposed to "leave those differences aside" and carry on while avoiding the subject for the sake of maintaining good relations. That concept works alright if we support different candidates in the usual narrow window of political disagreement found in American politics. We're not going to come to blows because your guy supports repealing the Estate Tax, even though I find that idea both stupid and immoral.

This is a long way of saying to the people who support Trump (and therefore would never read this) that "Let's agree to disagree and keep being friends" is a poor strategy this year.

However you've managed to rationalize it in your head, supporting someone so openly and enthusiastically racist, xenophobic, and flat-out mean says a lot about you. White America already asks quite a lot of people we define as Not One of Us: that they protest, dress, behave, talk, think, act, and generally live in a way that makes us feel comfortable. And it is a deep irony that the same people most likely to cry "White privilege isn't real!" are the ones who expect black and Hispanic people in their lives (not to mention women, LGBT people, and a host of others Trump Cretins define as the enemy) to laugh off their Trump support or ignore it so that a bunch of angry white guys don't have hurt feelings and don't have to spend any time reflecting on what their endorsement of a de facto white supremacist says about them. If that isn't privilege, then nothing is.

A lot of people who have experienced it as a tactic of emotional abuse react negatively to applying the term "gaslighting" to politics, but this Jamelle Bouie article about the VP debate makes a convincing case that it is the best description for one of the Trump campaign's main strategies and, in the future, most toxic legacy.

I've been in two relationships where this has happened to me. It hits me hard and in an exaggeratedly personal way when I see this happen in a political context. As a tactic, there's no doubt that it works.
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After weeks and months of being told that you're crazy, that you're imagining things, that things that happened did not happen, that things that were said were not said…it's not much of a leap to questioning your own sanity and perception. And it's not easy to bounce back from, either. It has been several years since I got away from it and I'm not completely over thinking that way.
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The way I hold onto things, there's a decent chance I'll never be completely over it.

Only very rarely do I write about even the most trivial personal matters on here, so it feels very uncomfortable to throw this out there.
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But I bring it up to underscore the viscerally negative reaction I have to watching Trump and Pence use a calculated strategy of lying blatantly and assuming – correctly, in most cases – that Americans are too lazy, too uninterested, or too short of attention span to remember to check their statements for accuracy. There is no other explanation for why a candidate would repeatedly insist "I/he never said that" when it is so remarkably easy to verify in this day and age that it was in fact said. Hillary Clinton's campaign, just for example, had videos of Trump saying many of the things Pence asserted he never said circulating online before the debate even concluded.

To formulate a campaign strategy around a technique of abuse and manipulation says a lot about the kind of human beings we are dealing with here. Politics has always treated the truth somewhat casually. Interpretations of facts, statements, and events are often creative to say the least. But simply to insist that a verifiable fact, statement, or event is not true or did not happen is rarer than our cynical view on politics might conclude. Imagine if George H.W. Bush had campaigned in 1992 insisting that he never said "Read my lips" or if Bill Clinton continued to insist that he had no "sexual relations with that woman" even after evidence was brought to light that it did. People lie a lot in politics, but rarely do they continue to perpetuate a lie that can be so easily disproved.

It takes a remarkable amount of gall to do that on a worldwide television broadcast. Or it takes a total lack of respect for the dupes you perceive to be watching. Or it takes being a fundamentally abusive, manipulative, narcissistic person. The Venn Diagram of those three circles has Trump and Pence in the middle.

At the end of the summer I made some predictions about the general election, some of which were very specific and clearly aren't going to work out (e.
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g., Trump "firing" Pence as a publicity stunt now seems farcical, while Pence quitting the ticket in a desperate attempt to salvage his political future seems marginally more plausible). But we've reached a stage in this campaign that I've feared was coming since Trump became the presumptive nominee: The point at which he, a man psychologically incapable of accepting the idea of losing anything, realizes that there is not a chance in hell he is going to win. In fact, the odds are improving that he may receive a drubbing the likes of which we haven't seen since the Franklin Roosevelt years.
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Trump, in short, is dead in the water. It doesn't matter that everyone knows it; I'm not looking forward to what happens now that he knows it.

With one tweet, the Republican nominee for president essentially kicked off a month of what promises to be pure scorched Earth politics. If he can't win, then causing as much misery and destruction as possible on his way to the losers' podium is the next best thing. I still expect this to culminate with an insistence shortly before Election Day – timing the announcement to cause maximum damage to the GOP he now hates as much as the Democrats – that his supporters shouldn't bother voting, that he never really wanted to be president anyway, and that he's come to the conclusion that America does not deserve his genius. He's been laying the groundwork for his post-defeat narrative since the summer, creating a "Stab in the Back" legend before the ballots even had his name printed on them.

It appears that the Vagina Grabbing tape was the last straw for some of his less ardent supporters, and certainly we could have a field day talking about why that was a bridge too far when they had been willing previously to condone all the racist, xenophobic, proto-fascist things he has said. His chances of winning hover around statistical zero. People and organizations who haven't supported a Democrat for half a century or more are giving at least grudging support to Hillary Clinton. Her myriad flaws as a candidate don't even seem to matter at this point; the country is willing to settle for her strictly on the basis that she appears to be largely sane and not openly displaying most of the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy.

I do not for a moment relish the opportunity to see "unshackled" Donald Trump. If this has been him behaving, trying to appear likable, attempting to play within some kind of set of rules, then it strains the imagination to think of how much worse he can get. I feel like Sunday night's debate was a preview of the rest of the campaign; he made not the slightest effort to talk about any of the political issues where he makes some people think he sounds reasonable, instead going full Yahoo Comment Section. We're in for four weeks of Vince Foster, Benghazi, 33,000 emails, Sidney Blumenthal, and basically every idiotic right-wing conspiracy theory to enjoy any popularity on the internet at any point in the last 10 years. He's done with "We need to bring jobs back to the United States" and is casting his entire lot in with the revenge fantasies of the white underclass.

Without even a passing effort to connect anything he says to reality or the truth, expect that any and every email forwarded to you by your least intelligent friends and relatives over the past few months to become a fully fledged talking point until November when this mercifully ends.

We are unaccustomed to uncompetitive presidential elections. The last real blowout took place in 1988, and 1984 before it was the last time the map was essentially one color. The Republican Party is going to come face to face with the hardest of the hard core of its base, and it's unlikely to like what it sees – a group of people whose views are medieval, inarticulate, and unmovable, and a group of people rapidly shrinking in this country. But that problem is not ours to solve. We need merely to find out a way to hold on for another month and then begin the process of purging this entire embarrassing, enraging experience from our collective unconscious.

I'm not much for providing practical information here unless splenic venting is suddenly practical. That said, my research on voter turnout requires me to keep up with changes in the processes of registration and voting, so it seemed worth the time to put together a short guide to ways that They are trying to make voting more difficult and what you can do about them. I can't lie: following these steps will take about five minutes of your time. I can't make it any easier than that, because registration and voting rules vary by state and I can't (OK, don't want to) type out the rules for every state in the union right here. Meet me halfway?

As a foreword, regardless of what ID requirements exist in your state, bring a valid photo ID with you – a passport, driver's license, State ID, or equivalent. This will be your best asset in any attempt to challenge your identity or residency. If you're a US citizen and reading this, my guess is you have one of these.

Now, onto the specifics:

1. Issue: You are not registered properly. Have you moved since the last time you voted? Has your state passed a totally not-racist law that kicks voters off the rolls if their name in the state system is not an exact match for the Social Security database? That's right, in some states like Georgia voters are being purged now if one database says, for example, "Jose" and the other says "José". Do you have a "hard" name, especially one that is hard for old white people? Do you sometimes go by Denise Hall-Smith and sometimes as Denise Hall? If any such conditions apply, it is worth it to double-check.
What to do about it: Contact your state board of elections now to verify your registration. Google your state board. The website may have a tool that allows you to search and verify your registration, but most SBOE websites are intentionally difficult to use. Canivote.org directs you to the relevant website in your state. If a phone call is necessary, call. If you have not yet registered, deadlines for most states occur within the next 10 days. Do it now. The NAACP offers this print-and-mail form, but most state websites have an easier process in place now.

2. Issue: Long lines. In some jurisdictions – I'll let you guess which ones – underproviding voting equipment and reducing the number of polling places is a passive-aggressive tactic to reduce turnout. People see a line out the door and get back in the car. In Maricopa County, Arizona, for example, the March 2016 primaries saw only one polling station per 20,000 voters (one per 1000 is considered average).
What to do about it: Two things. One, vote before Election Day. Two, if you cast an in-person Election Day vote (EDV), go in the morning if at all humanly possible. Every state now offers some kind of alternatives to in-person EDV. Does your state offer no questions asked absentee ballots? Request one now. Is early voting at a central location, usually your county courthouse, offered? If so, what dates? Are "Voting Centers" (as in New Mexico) available throughout your city, and if so, can you plan to visit one in a less crowded area? As far as voting on Election Day, polling places are like airports; the problems accumulate throughout the day and eventually choke the system to a halt. Just like that 6 AM flight is most likely to depart O'Hare on time, your vote at 8 AM is much, much less likely to encounter delays than a 6:30 PM vote. If your personal situation permits, vote early.

3. Issue: You don't know where to vote. Polling places are moved, and not infrequently. You may know where you voted in 2012 and 2014; is that the same place to vote in 2016?
What to do about it: Both your state's website and national databases like this one will show you the correct voting location for your registered address. In most states you must vote at this location. If your state uses "Voting Centers" you may have options, but assume that the polling place for your specific address is where you must plan on voting.

4. Issue: Someone tries to stop you from voting. This is 100% clear. Whether "poll watchers" are with an organized group or self-appointed vigilantes, no individual can prevent you from being able to vote. Being prepared to verify your identity and registration status is a good idea.
What to do about it: If someone challenges you, DO NOT LEAVE. Remain calm. You do not have to follow any orders that do not come from a law enforcement officer or a properly credentialed state or county election official. If available, use your phone to take pics or video of the person interfering with your rights. Provide ID documents to properly credentialed election officials. Call 866-OUR-VOTE and speak with an attorney for free to receive advice and report voter intimidation. Do. Not. Leave. Repeat firmly and calmly to properly credentialed election officials that you are entitled to a ballot until you are done voting.

5. Issue: OK, you screwed up. Now what? Sometimes people with good intentions do something wrong. Maybe you go to the wrong polling place or you got dropped from the registered voting rolls for some technical reason without your knowledge. Don't give up just because you are informed that something has gone wrong.
What to do about it: request a provisional ballot and instructions on how to fix whatever registration issue exists. This varies by state, but in most states you can cast a ballot that will not be counted until you have fixed your issue. Doing so often requires only some easy steps like signing an affidavit certifying that you are who you claim to be. If you visit the wrong polling place, a provisional ballot can be sent to your correct precinct after Election Day in most states. Do not be aggressive; you may be the one who made an innocent mistake here. The poll workers are volunteers following a set of rules. They should be prepared for the procedure of issuing a provisional ballot. If they are not, insist on speaking to someone who can. Call your state board of elections if necessary.

So, in summary, to ensure that none of the many efforts to trip citizens up in their efforts to vote are effective against you, do the following today. Not soon, not next week, but today.

1. Confirm your proper registration and polling place location.
2. Investigate alternatives – Can you vote early? Get an absentee ballot? Vote at a location other than your polling place?
3. Plan ahead. If you must vote on Election Day, go early in the morning rather than after work if at all possible. Confirm your polling hours, which vary by state.
4. Bring photo ID and phone numbers to report problems. 866-OUR-VOTE, the local chapter of the ACLU, the Justice Department voting hotline, and your state/county Boards of Election can all help in an emergency. Expect them to be very busy on Election Day.
5. Report any malfeasance you witness to one of these resources.
6. Help others if you see them being challenged.

You will spend 30 minutes watching Netflix and YouTube videos today. You certainly can devote a few of those minutes to following these simple steps to ensure that nothing stands between you and voting.