Not-So-Daily This Week

Rill Developer; Staving off the impending demise of liberal democracy in 🇺🇸

Hey folks. I’ve been so focused on scraping battleground state election news, helping some pro-democracy orgs with tech, and monitoring+reporting 2A/MAGA/GOP vote suppression shenanigans that there’s no way I’ll get either the newsletter or #30DayMapChallenge entries in until at least ~Thursday. One tech item today + some resources to do what you can to shore up liberal democracy in the U.S. this week.

Rill Developer

The rest of this edition is election-related, so before you drop from the drop, and since you came here for techy nerdy stuff, check out Rill Developer while you pop some 🍿 to watch the U.S. fireworks this week.

Rill Developer is a “tool that makes it effortless to transform your datasets with SQL and create powerful, opinionated dashboards.” Rill Developer follows a few guiding principles:

• feels good to use – powered by Sveltekit & DuckDB = conversation-fast, not wait-ten-seconds-for-result-set fast

• works with your local datasets – imports and exports Parquet and CSV

• no more data analysis "side-quests" – helps you build intuition about your dataset through automatic profiling

• no "run query" button required – responds to each keystroke by re-profiling the resulting dataset

• radically simple dashboards - thoughtful, opinionated defaults to help you quickly derive insights from your data

It’s pretty dreamy.

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Staving off the impending demise of liberal democracy in 🇺🇸

Photo by stefan moertl on Unsplash

For U.S. readers, head to I Will Vote or Vote Save America to get additional information on voting, and please drop those links to others.

CISA has a good Rumor Control site that you might want to keep bookmarked this month.

Thanks to a bunch of existing not-great policies, and many new ones by daft state legislatures, the 2022 midterm results will most likely be delayed, especially in many battleground states.

There are many 2020 election deniers on ballots across the nation, and many organizations in many states are using gangster-like tactics to suppress the vote. I’m cribbing from the ACLU below, but you should know your rights if you haven’t voted already and intend to do so in person or via drop-off box.

Federal law says that "no person … shall intimidate, threaten, coerce ... any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] person to vote or to vote as he may choose." Many states have their own laws prohibiting voter intimidation.

Examples of intimidation may include:

• aggressively questioning voters about their citizenship, criminal record, or other qualifications to vote, in a manner intended to interfere with the voters’ rights

• falsely presenting oneself as an elections official

• spreading false information about voter requirements, such as an ability to speak English, or the

  need to present certain types of photo identification (in states with no such requirement)

• displaying false or misleading signs about voter fraud and the related criminal penalties

• other harassment, particularly toward non-English speakers and voters of color

You can report intimidation to:

• The Election Protection Hotline: 1-866-OUR-VOTE or 1-888-VE-Y-VOTA (en Español)

• The U.S. Department of Justice Voting Rights Hotline: 800-253-3931; TTY line 877-267-8971

• Local and state officials, including poll workers; your county clerk, elections commissioner, elections supervisor; or your state board of elections

Your voting eligibility may be challenged. If that happens, you can give a sworn statement that you satisfy the qualifications to vote in your state, and then proceed to cast a regular ballot.

FIN

Please be able to hold your head high when, in the future, your kids/grandkids/students/nephews/nieces/etc. ask you where you stood tomorrow regardless of how the midterms turn out.