National News Roundup – October 29, 2024
Election Officials, Law Enforcement on Alert
Department of Homeland Security, others report rise in threats.
In elections offices across the country, a formerly routine bureaucratic function of administering elections and tallying votes has become shrouded in threats of violence in a politically divided country. Threats of election-related violence directed at civilians have been reported, too.
Local elections officials have been forced to respond in ways previously unimaginable, with some installing bulletproof glass in the public-facing areas of their offices. Law enforcement officers and drones will be present at elections offices in some jurisdictions on election night.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security issued an internal memo warning that some domestic extremists were “engaging in illegal preparatory or violent activity that they link to the narrative of an impending civil war.” Federal officials have not released data on the volume of violent threats and incidents of intimidation reported by local governments, but experts say it has increased substantially since the summer. Nevertheless, the threat level has been manageable thus far. Federal law enforcement officials say that for the moment there are no indications of an organized effort to disrupt the electoral process.
A special federal task force has been investigating election-related threats and they have made some arrests, which may be having some deterrence benefit. “I should have been putting my kids to bed, locking the doors and whatnot,” Francis Goltz, 52, said in court recently after pleading guilty in August 2023 to threatening election officials in Arizona. “I wasn’t there because of the stupidity that I displayed.”
Many veteran police officials recognize the noteworthiness of the new role law enforcement may need to take in the election process. “I remember back in the 1990s, the police department would direct traffic on Election Day,” said W. Wade Yates, the police chief of Fulton County, Georgia. “That’s really all we did.”
(Sources: New York Times, USA Today, The Atlantic, Wired, CNN)
Some Election Offices to Livestream Ballot Count
Debate over whether it will lead to transparency or confusion.
There’s no plot line, no dialogue, and not much action. But it may be must-see TV for anyone who questions the integrity of counting the ballots in an election. A growing number of cities and counties are deciding to “livestream” their vote tabulations on election night.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Maricopa County in Arizona, Los Angeles County in California, and King County in Washington State are among the many districts that plan to livestream their ballot counting process. Arizona is an outlier because it has a state law requiring its counties to livestream the elections process.
Cities and counties are turning to livestreaming to emphasize transparency in the election process, but some wonder if it may make the problem worse instead of better. Viewers unfamiliar with the ballot-counting process might misunderstand what they are watching and reach misleading or erroneous conclusions.
“When you are transparent, it does not mean that individuals will necessarily know what they’re seeing or understand what they’re seeing,” said Tammy Patrick, chief program officer for the National Association of Elections Officials.
(Source: Associated Press)
Fentanyl Street Presence, Drug Overdoses Decline
Experts are unsure of the exact reasons for unexpected trends.
This summer, Dan Ciccarone, a physician and street drug researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, sent a team to gather data on the city’s streets in areas where illicit fentanyl has been a killer for years. They found something unexpected.
“The fentanyl supply is drying up for some reason,” Ciccarone said. “The drugs are hard to find and more expensive.”
Ciccarone says that, over the past six months, he has been hearing from street drug experts from Ohio to West Virginia, from Maryland to Arizona. “They’re all telling me the same thing: [there is] some sort of supply shortage on the street,” he said.
Meanwhile, drug overdose deaths are decreasing sharply across the country, according to recent state and federal data. It’s a dramatic improvement in the nation’s efforts to reverse the consequences of fentanyl in the illicit drug supply. Between April 2023 and April 2024, overdose deaths declined by about 10 percent nationally to roughly 101,000, according to preliminary data published recently by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s a development that many drug policy experts would not have imagined,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown at the Brookings Institution, who studies international criminal organizations that make and smuggle fentanyl.
She said drug gangs appear to be trafficking less fentanyl and are also “adulterating” or weakening the potency of the fentanyl being sold. “Everyone has been caught by surprise by the extent of the adulteration of fentanyl,” Felbab-Brown said. “And even more significantly by claims in certain places in the U.S. that there is not enough fentanyl available.”
Why has the supply of fentanyl declined? The question is being fiercely debated by drug policy and addiction experts.
Some analysts believe international pressure on Chinese companies that make fentanyl precursor chemicals may be a factor. Others think a global crackdown on Mexican drug cartels that smuggle fentanyl into the U.S. is finally affecting the black-market supply chain.
While the easing of the fentanyl drug crisis is encouraging, it is probably too soon to pop champagne corks. Dan Salter, head a federal drug trafficking task force in George and the Carolinas says, “I think we need to be real careful about being too optimistic.
(Sources: National Public Radio, New York Times)
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