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The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 18. Early voting runs from Oct. 26 to Nov. 5. Heres what you need to know.

West Virginians will go to the polls to elect two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, state delegates, state senators, and in many places, new county and city officials. Plus, there are four proposed changes to the West Virginia Constitution. If voters approve them, the amendments will let churches incorporate and give more power to the state Legislature to modify property taxes, set education policy, and conduct impeachment trials without state court interference.

To register to vote in West Virginia, you must:

You can search for your voter registration information on the Secretary of States website by entering your name and date of birth.

The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 18, 2022. You can register online, by mail or in person. You will need a valid ID in order to vote; heres a list of acceptable IDs. Note that first-time voters may be asked to provide additional identification with their current name and address.

You can search for your polling place on the Secretary of States website by entering your name and date of birth.

Deadline to register: Oct. 18, 2022

Early voting starts Oct. 26 and goes through Nov. 5. Heres a list of early voting locations and times.

Election Day: Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Yes, but unlike in recent elections, you have to meet certain requirements before youre allowed to vote absentee in West Virginia. Eligibility requires two basic criteria: (1) confinement or not being present in the county during in-person voting, and (2) a permitted reason/excuse.

Read more on the Secretary of States website.

If approved by voters, this amendment would bar all state courts from interfering with impeachment trials conducted by the West Virginia Legislature.

Background: In 2018, a panel of five circuit judges ruled in a case that halted impeachment proceedings in the West Virginia Legislature against several state Supreme Court justices. Lawmakers who support the amendment have said it is necessary and the legislative branch needs this check on the power of the judicial branch. Opponents argue it would remove some of the existing checks and balances built into the system.

If approved by voters, this amendment would allow the state Legislature to adjust property taxes paid on business inventory; business machinery and equipment; and personal vehicles.

Background: Republicans in the Legislature have wanted for years to eliminate these taxes, which provide hundreds of millions of dollars each year for local services like schools, libraries and emergency services. Theres still no plan to replace the money that local governments get from this tax, although state senators passed a non-binding resolution saying they were committed to [replace] revenue in perpetuity that is above and beyond the personal property taxes to be eliminated.

Almost all local governments have urged people to reject this amendment, which would replace a consistent source of annual funding with one that would be controlled by the state Legislature every year. Gov. Jim Justice has also campaigned against the amendment; he wants to reduce personal income taxes rather than property taxes.

If approved by voters, churches would be allowed to incorporate in West Virginia, which is the only state in the nation that does not allow the practice in its constitution.

Background: This proposed amendment comes after a federal judges ruling in neighboring Virginia that prohibiting a church from incorporating violated its First Amendment rights. The language in the West Virginia Constitution comes from the Virginia Constitution.

If approved by voters, state lawmakers would have the final say over policies and rules created by the West Virginia Board of Education.

Background: The state Board of Education operates independently from the Legislature, with the boards nine voting members appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state Senate. The board sets policies about what students are taught in K-12 schools, teacher requirements, discipline policy and many other areas of school administration. Currently the board does not have to submit school policies and rules to lawmakers for approval. In 2017, the West Virginia Supreme Court ruled that legislative action that impedes school board policy would be unconstitutional. But this constitutional amendment would usurp that ruling.

You can read the full text of all four amendments here.

Read more frequently asked questions here.

Other West Virginia elected offices including governor, attorney general, secretary of state wont beup for election until 2024. The U.S. Senate seat held by Joe Manchin will also be up in 2024; the states other U.S. Senate seat, held by Shelley Moore Capito, wont be up until 2026.

Also note that West Virginia lawmakers completely re-drew the states legislative maps in 2021. Because of that, your U.S. congressional district, state delegate district and state senate district may have changed.

See the original post here:
West Virginia 2022 elections voter guide: What you need to know - Mountain State Spotlight

Spotlight PA is an independent, nonpartisan newsroom powered by The Philadelphia Inquirer in partnership with PennLive/The Patriot-News, TribLIVE/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and WITF Public Media. Sign up for our free newsletters.

YORK Information on criminal cases will be available faster and with fewer redactions under a settlement agreement between the York County Clerk of Courts and five newsrooms including Spotlight PA that had sued alleging First Amendment violations.

The settlement will bring York County in line with First Amendment and Pennsylvania Constitution requirements when granting access to criminal court records, said Sasha Dudding, a legal fellow for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Thats important for both members of the media who are reporting on criminal cases in York County and also members of the public who are entitled to know whats happening in their community, said Dudding, whose organization provides free legal resources to journalists.

Earlier this year, Spotlight PA joined four other state newsrooms to sue York County Clerk of Courts Daniel J. Byrnes after he shut down free, easy access to criminal court records and instituted practices and policies that slowed the release of documents, according to the federal lawsuit filed in March.

Byrnes office also improperly withheld documents and redacted nonconfidential information, obscuring public access that is critical to reporting on the details of a case, the lawsuit alleged.

Dudding and attorney Paula Knudsen Burke both represented Spotlight PA, the York Daily Record, The York Dispatch, LNP Media Group, and public media organization WITF in the lawsuit. Byrnes, an elected Republican who took office in 2020, was the sole defendant.

Byrnes initially called the lawsuit frivolous and said his office has actually expanded free public access to the public, especially to those facing a financial barrier to information.

The Plaintiffs are essentially disgruntled by not having unfettered and immediate access to all records within the Clerk of Courts Office, an attorney for Byrnes wrote in a March 2022 court filing.

In an email Tuesday, Byrnes said his office will continue to reflect our adherence to professional practices that serve the media and general public as accorded by law.

Attorneys for the news organizations pointed to numerous instances where they say the office delayed access to, improperly restricted, and overcharged for judicial records.

During a three-week period in September 2021, journalists from the five news organizations requested access to 42 judicial records. The office provided six the same day, denied access to another six, and redacted information in 32, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit said the office improperly redacted details in several cases, including the name of an adult victim of an alleged property crime and the address of a shooting.

In court filings, attorneys for Byrnes wrote that the office complied with the requirements of the statewide court system and Pennsylvania law, but acknowledged a few isolated errors.

As part of the settlement, Byrnes agreed to provide the news organizations with a copy of a policy notifying the public how to access judicial records, and a fee schedule that aligns with statewide court policies.

The agreement also addresses the timeline for obtaining records. Byrnes office will make all reasonable attempts to respond to requests on the same business day on which the request is made, and when not practicable, on the next business day, excepting inconsequential deviations and extraordinary circumstances which may delay access.

The office must also adopt a written policy outlining how it will respond to requests for judicial records made in person and by email.

Byrnes also agreed to pay $6,796.52 for costs and expenses incurred by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Both sides agreed that the clerks office will provide redacted versions of documents in order to protect the identities of victims of human trafficking and minor victims of physical or sexual abuse. But the office agreed to not withhold those documents entirely.

Byrnes on Tuesday said his office is pleased that the lawsuit has been resolved with all parties supporting and acknowledging that the Clerk of Courts has a legal and ethical duty to protect the identity of crime victims, particularly minors as specified in the laws of the Commonwealth of PA.

Byrnes office and the newsrooms agreed to have employees who make or fulfill requests for court records participate in training within 30 days.

Hopefully that will sort of bring everybody to the same understanding, Dudding said.

WHILE YOURE HERE… If you learned something from this story, pay it forward and become a member of Spotlight PA so someone else can in the future at spotlightpa.org/donate. Spotlight PA is funded by foundations and readers like you who are committed to accountability journalism that gets results.

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York County agrees to improve public access to criminal court records in response to suit by Spotlight PA, others Spotlight PA - Spotlight PA

In Texas, large social media platforms may soon lose the right to moderate their own content.

It does make exceptions for harassment, for violence, censorship that is permitted under federal law Section 230 which is its own thing," law professor Alan Rozenshtein says.

"But even reading those broadly ... Do we want to have platforms in which Neo-Nazis are always permitted, by law, to say their stuff?

Today, On Point: NetChoice v. Paxton and how a Texas law could impact First Amendment rights and content moderation online.

Alan Rozenshtein, associate professor of law at the University of Minnesota Law School. Senior editor at Lawfare. Co-host of the Rational Security podcast. (@ARozenshtein)

Julie Owono, executive director at Internet Sans Frontires (Internet Without Borders) and the Content Policy and Society Lab at Stanford. Inaugural member of the Facebook Oversight Board. Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. (@JulieOwono)

Give us an overview of HB 20. What does this law in Texas actually do?

Alan Rozenshtein: "What the law purports to do, and that may be different than what the law actually does, but what the law purports to do is to limit the ability of the biggest social media platforms from, we can call it censoring, we could call it moderating. There's kind of no value neutral description, from removing content posted by users based on, quote-unquote, their viewpoint.

"That's the core of what the law does. In addition, the law imposes some transparency requirements on platforms so that they publicly disclose how they're moderating. It requires platforms to set up processes for users to appeal content removals. Those are a little less controversial. But the core and what's gotten the most attention, and rightfully so, is this restriction on the moderation based on quote-unquote viewpoint."

I want to talk about the practicality of this. This is not the usual purview of a state law to try to regulate just within a state how these worldwide platforms work.

Alan Rozenshtein: "That's right. And it's not clear how you could have a patchwork system of state regulations on these big platforms, which are not just national, but global. If Texas has its requirements, and Florida, which passed a similar law, has its requirements, but then California or Massachusetts has opposite requirements, there's no obvious way for platforms to run different moderation systems for different users without potentially breaking up the platforms into state-based versions, or possibly even having the platforms just withdraw from some jurisdictions.

"If this law fully goes into effect, it's a possibility that the platforms decide that, Well, we just can't operate in Texas. And so they have to block Texas users. This is one reason why some legal observers, myself included, think that behind this law is lurking some real constitutional issues, beyond just potential First Amendment problems. And that has to do with the ability of states to regulate companies that do business across state lines, because of the potential disruptive effects that could have on the national economy."

Who enforces this law? How would it work?

Alan Rozenshtein: "The statute provides that either a user who believes that they or their content has been removed unlawfully, or the attorney general of Texas could bring a lawsuit against the companies. There's no provision for damages. So you can't sue for money, though you can sue for attorney's fees. But the real main remedy is that a user, or the state of Texas, can ask a court to require the companies to reinstate a user or reinstate content."

Is there evidence of an anti-conservative bias on the part of these companies?

Alan Rozenshtein: "With respect to the kind of question of, Is there conservative anti-conservative bias? It's very hard to know. There's no question that plenty of conservatives are censored, if you want to put it that way, on the big tech companies. But plenty of liberals are censored as well, and plenty of conservatives have done awfully well on social media. In fact, a large reason why we've seen, you know, the growth of a lot of kind of conservative media is because of their ability to leverage social media.

"And of course, social media has incentives not to censor the views that millions of Americans find interesting. At the end of the day, these are for-profit companies that run on user engagement, as they say, and advertisement. So it's just not even in their interest to systematically censor one side of the political spectrum or another.

"Now, there have, again, been some high profile incidents. And I do think Twitter and Facebook taking Trump off their platforms in the wake of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, was quite controversial, frankly, among all sorts of folks, not just conservatives. And in addition, I think there is a perception, and I think this is true, that at least culturally, the companies themselves, their employees, they are certainly to the left of the median American, certainly to the left of the median Texan. Again, though, I'm not sure that translates into systematic censorship of conservatives.

"But I do think you can probably say ... that the technology companies are trying to build platforms that appeal to a wide swath of Americans. And therefore, they are probably erring on the side of censoring when you get to the extreme of public opinion. And here I do think that to the extent that conservatives have polarized in the last decade, more so than liberals, political scientists call this asymmetric polarization. Perhaps maybe there's more censorship of conservative views.

"But again, just to emphasize, the empirical premise of a lot of these laws, that there's some anti-conservative censorship on a broad scale, relative to anti liberal censorship, that very much remains to be proven."

Is there a case to be made that better regulation is needed, particularly for these big tech companies?

Alan Rozenshtein: "I certainly think so. I am not someone who reflexively opposes government efforts to regulate, put some guardrails around what these large tech companies can do. Because the state of Texas is right when it says that these companies control the digital public square, that these are some of the most important forums for communication in modern society.

"And I think that it is, at the very least, questionable to leave these monumentally important decisions to large private companies that operate according to the imperatives of the free market. Now, I'm not saying that there should be total regulation. The devil is in the details, as it is with so many issues of tech policy and law. So I certainly think there's some room. I don't think the Texas law does a very good job, though."

Who should be making these rules? Should we leave it to the companies themselves?

Alan Rozenshtein: "If the companies can come up with good rules, I think that's fine. Often the way to get companies to do something is to threaten regulation. If at the end of the day, the regulation, quote-unquote, comes from the companies themselves, rather than the law, kind of who cares?

"But at the very least, I think the relevant party here should be Congress, not the states. Again, because you cannot have a patchwork of state laws. I don't support state laws trying to limit what companies can moderate. I also don't support state laws on the other side trying to force companies to remove electoral misinformation or vaccine information. I just think this is not an issue for states to do."

Lawfare: "The Fifth Circuits Social Media Decision: A Dangerous Example of First Amendment Absolutism" "On Sept. 16, the Fifth Circuit issued its opinion in NetChoice v. Paxton, upholding the controversial Texas law that limits the ability of large social media platforms to moderate content and also imposes disclosure and appeal requirements on them."

Read the original here:
How a Texas law could impact First Amendment rights and content moderation online - WBUR News

In May, Nicholas Weaver suggested in Lawfare that the U.S. Treasury should creatively sanction Tornado Cash. In August, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) followed Weavers advice. The results were pretty disastrous for civil liberties, beginning with OFACs listing of 21 instances of autonomous code published to a blockchain as sanctioned entities with little clarity on the intent or scope of that action. This first-ever OFAC sanctioning of autonomous code controlled by no legal person ran headlong into the established precedent that code is speech and protected by the First Amendment.

Additionally, several contributors to the open source code behind Tornado Cash were suspended from GitHub. These suspensions stoked fears among contributors to privacy-preserving code that if a bad actor uses a tool built with their code, the U.S. government will not only shut down the toolit will also punish contributors who generally have no say in how their open source contributions are used. The implications of [the Treasury Department] adding the Tornado Cash protocol to the sanction list was actually greater for the world beyond crypto than for crypto itself, Omid Malekan, an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School told Grid.

Similar fears around the right to privacy online were echoed by both industry and digital rights groups. Coin Centers Jerry Brito perhaps summed up these concerns best when speaking to The Block: If your right as an American to privacy is only if North Koreans never use that tool, then you dont have a right to privacy.

Now, OFAC has tried to clarify the effect of its sanctions on free speech. But digital human rights advocates are justified in maintaining their concerns over the suit-worthy chilling effects OFACs sanctions are having on free speech rights and the creation of privacy-preserving technologies.

Weavers piece did provide a thorough explanation of how Tornado.cash works, using the popular cryptocurrency Ethereum as an example. At the highest level, as he said: Tornado Cash operates by having a series of pools of Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies controlled by a smart contract, a program deployed on the underlying blockchain that allows someone to withdraw from the shared pool without linking it to their particular deposit.

A less technical analogy of how the virtual currency anonymizer is run could be that Tornado.cash creates a private room full of safety deposit boxes. A person can enter the private room and leave an amount of Ethereum in exchange for a unique receipt. Anyone can then take that unique receipt back into the private room and withdraw from the corresponding safety deposit box. No one would know which box was used by either the depositor or the withdrawer, or even if they are the same person. Once a transaction is completed, the withdrawer can choose to publicly disclose the receipt and prove where the Ethereum came from. But they dont have to, and this breaking of the chain of Ethereums public ledger is how Tornado Cash can improve privacy.

Notably, this all happens through autonomous code integrated into the Ethereum blockchain. No one owns or controls that code, and thus no creator takes a portion of proceeds from its function. Yet that code itself has been sanctioned. In the United States, writing code is protected under the First Amendment as a form of speech. Civil liberties organizations have repeatedly fought, and won, to enshrine the right to code as protected speech. Should OFACs sanctions not be further clarified, this right will take a huge hit because, again, OFAC did not sanction only individuals and entities at Tornado Cash, but Tornado Cashs open source protocolor, in other words, the code itself.

This has already led to a major chilling effect on that code and those who wrote it. The open source code used to run Tornado Cash was taken down from GitHub, the programmer responsible for the code was arrested in the Netherlands, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is now suing on behalf of Matthew Green, a computer science professor at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. Throughout the open source software community, many are protesting this apparent banning of code as speech, with one person even turning it into a song. Of these things, the only one that OFACs clarifications have spoken to is that the right to sing Tornado Cashs code remains uninfringed.

To be clear: State-sanctioned criminal enterprises, as well as those that support them, are deplorable and should be stoppedbut not in a way that compromises human rights and the First Amendment. In sanctioning the open source protocol Tornado.cash, OFAC has arguably overstepped its authority in addition to chilling speech. OFAC has the authority to sanction persons or property. But Tornado.cash is neither. It is code. This is a rough equivalent to sanctioning the email protocol in the early days of the internet, with the justification that email is often used to facilitate phishing attacks.

OFAC has not yet clarified what Tornado.cash has specifically done wrong, or what other projects need to do differently to avoid being the target of sanctions. Every open source and decentralized project runs the risk of becoming tainted by bad actors. This often happens when a developer gives up control of their code. This chilling effect could reverberate throughout the internetthat if a developer creates privacy-preserving code, the U.S. government could come after them. Without further clarification from OFAC, fewer privacy-forward projects might be built in the United States in the future, which would likely be a huge detriment to the human right to privacy online.

OFACs sanctions can also easily be interpreted as a warning shot at projects attempting to build anonymous digital assets. With ever-increasing concerns about harmful and exploitative surveillance of every aspect of Americans digital lives and few laws to protect Americans privacy online, the need for privacy-preserving technology only grows more urgent. Software projects should not be labeled as criminal for trying to replicate the same degree of anonymity and privacy in the digital space that cash-based systems of commerce have offered for thousands of years. Cash is a public goodand some amount of cash will always be used in crime. Yet there are no noteworthy calls for a ban on cash.

There are many legitimate reasons to seek anonymity in financial transactions. Privacy tools are important to, for example, activists in authoritarian states where revealing financial information could result in jail time or execution. Anonymity, particularly financial, may soon become essential for pregnant people seeking abortions in the United States, as well as for supporters in states that criminalize donations to abortion funds or Planned Parenthood. Simply not wanting personal financial history surveilled by governments, corporations, stalkers, or other bad actors is a legitimate reason to seek privacy-preserving technologies online.

OFAC is on firm ground when it sanctions people or property, including cryptocurrency, involved in criminal enterprises like the North Korean Lazarus Group. But OFAC went too far in sanctioning code, and there has been tremendous fallout in terms of speech and privacy. OFAC still needs to clarify what, exactly, it was trying to do and in doing so walk back this apparent sanctioning of code. Writing code is a basic human right, and so is privacy.

Read more from the original source:
Tornado Cash Sanctions Are Unduly 'Creative' With the First Amendment - Lawfare

Censorship, and advocating for it, is anti-American. Banning and controlling information is the work of an authoritarian government, not a democratic one. It is also a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Even still, individuals and entities make attempts to ban certain works of literature for a myriad of reasons. According to the American Library Association (ALA), the top three reasons written works are challenged are because there is sexually explicit content, content that is unsuited for any age group and/or content with offensive language.

Pen America, an organization that advocates for free speech, reported that from July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2022, schools banned 2,532 books. These bans occurred in 32 states and affected 4 million students.

2022 is set up to be a record year of book challenges; from Jan. 1 Aug. 1 alone, there have been 681 challenges on 1,651 unique titles. 41% of these books have LGBTQ themes and protagonists, 40% include protagonist or secondary characters of color, 22% contain various sexual content and 21% address race or racism.

Everywhere Babies is a picture book for children aged 1-3 containing illustrations of babies crawling, sleeping and being cradled by family members was placed on the Florida Citizens Alliance Porn in Schools Report because there is an illustration of a same-sex couple, which is absolutely asinine. If you are viewing a book about babies as having pornographic material, reevaluate yourself and your perspective. Same-sex couples taking care of a child is not pornography; this is a book intended for babies enrichment and learning.

Over half of the books challenged are intended for young adults or children. It is not children that are challenging books for their content, but adults who are fearful that their children may be exposed to certain themes or content, such as gender identity, mental illness, sexuality and racism. But this bubble they are fabricating is only to comfort themselves. Racial injustice will not end because a child doesnt read about it; queer people will still exist; mental illness will still be prevalent. Reading about these topics and seeing your identity and experiences in an empowered character is affirming and validating.

Books represent the most core experiences of a society and reflect the worlds most common occurrences. They are time capsules of their periods. You cannot coddle your children into ignorance and shield them from the realities of life.

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Attacking the First Amendment: The growing censorship movement - Chargerbulletin