motherjones--2020-04-02--Inside the Fight to Save November’s Elections

As officials in multiple states have postponed primary elections in the midst of the coronavirus crisis , and with some experts predicting a resurgence of the virus this fall , there have been widespread discussions about preserving the November elections while protecting public health .
The wider adoption of vote-by-mail systems , where every registered voter is automatically mailed a blank ballot , has been pushed as a fair response to a pandemic that has both disrupted and homebound millions of people .
But there are challenges , chief among them , dwindling time .
For a dose of reality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , CEO of Vote at Home , a nonprofit organization focused on promoting vote-by-mail and no-excuse absentee voting systems .
McReynolds , who was the director of elections for the City and County of Denver under the transition to Colorado ’ s mail system , explained how states trying to quickly make the same pivot should consider centralizing efforts , how a crush of postal votes could stress counting , and why President Trump ’ s critique of the practice rings hollow .
While the push for increased vote-by-mail elections has been going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s really having a moment now .
The pandemic and this public health crisis has exposed the real vulnerabilities that exist in the in-person voting structure that many states still rely on .
There are states that still require an excuse to get an absentee ballot , there are states that haven ’ t adjusted their voting laws around mail ballot voting for decades .
States that have moved in the direction where there ’ s a lot more [ vote-by-mail ] availability are more resilient in a time like we are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Colorado ’ s transition to all-mail elections in 2013 .
Can you talk a little about that , and how long it took to work through that process ?
I was director of elections in the city and county of Denver from 2011 until 2018 .
By 2012 , the majority of Coloradans were requesting their ballot by mail , and we had our highest numbers that we ’ d ever had in the presidential election that year .
Right after that we started to talk about comprehensive reform that included same-day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a ballot to every single elector , preserving in-person options at vote centers , creating 24-hour drop boxes for every Coloradan if they didn ’ t want to mail it back , post-election auditing , and also automatic registration .
It was sort of the first time in history that all those things had been packaged , and Colorado catapulted to being a top state for turnout , a top state for security , a top state for access .
All of it was premised on that legislation we passed .
There are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reforms you just described .
How long did all of that take to implement and get right ?
Up to that point , Colorado had no-excuse absentee voting and a lot of voters signing up for that .
And then we were also allowed , starting in 2008 , to conduct some of our elections , like primaries and school board elections , all by mail .
So , in that five-year window we were able to conduct some elections that way .
But our legislation in 2013 passed in May , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new model where we were mailing a ballot to everyone was in November .
So it was actually that kind of short window there where we implemented this new system with vote centers on Election Day .
Ballots went out about four months after we passed that legislation .
And that ’ s a key point , right ?
Colorado had some of this already , a willing legislature , and other pieces more or less in place .
Other states may not be that far along .
How would they get there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extraordinary creativity .
One advantage is that a lot of western states have not only implemented this model , but they ’ ve perfected a lot of things about it .
And that took time—building procedures , processes , systems , technology to support it .
So a lot of that work has been done and figured out .
Hawaii just passed their legislation in 2019 and they ’ re already doing a presidential primary all by mail and then they ’ re gearing up for this year .
So that was within @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t have a ton of vote-by-mail prior to passing their law in 2019 .
They ’ re leveraging what ’ s been developed that they can rely on .
We don ’ t have to reinvent the wheel necessarily .
But what we have to do is adopt those best practices in states that haven ’ t had historically a ton of vote-by-mail .
It ’ s possible , but it ’ s a big shift .
Louisiana ’ s secretary of state ’ s recently told me that they didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for their delayed primary , let alone November , and didn ’ t want Louisiana voters to be a guinea pig for something their office had no expertise in .
What would you say to to Louisiana ?
Louisiana is a good example of a state that could have a statewide system .
They ’ re very top down , so they could really adopt a plan that includes a regionalized or centralized operation for outbound and inbound mail ballots .
Instead of spreading that around all the townships in the wards , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mail out all the ballots statewide .
All the envelopes would be the same , the instructions would be the same .
With prepaid postage , it would come back into a central facility , run by the state or maybe in conjunction with multiple counties .
I think we have to be creative to get scaled up in this amount of time , so that ’ s a kind of emergency situation concept .
Where do you see this being a bigger challenge ahead of November ?
Pennsylvania and Michigan .
Both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Both states don ’ t have a ton of infrastructure at the local level .
They also have outdated laws that don ’ t allow any sort of processing and scanning of absentee ballots prior to election day .
They really don ’ t have very good systems in place for this .
And I think they ’ re both positioned to actually have a more centralized model to alleviate the stress off the counties .
Again , it could be the counties collectively running this type of operation , but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was already worried about the crush of mail ballots this fall , even without a pandemic .
Do you see them getting to a place where they can do it smoothly by November ?
I think that they really should consider kind of a regionalized , or centralized type of operation , mainly because the numbers are going to go up , they aren ’ t prepared to deal with that kind of quantity .
Wisconsin right now is a good example .
They ’ re backlogged , they ’ re not caught @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have been flooding the offices , and that could happen in Michigan and Pennsylvania .
And Michigan saw a little of it in their recent primary , but that could happen if they stick with an application process instead of going to the full vote-by-mail type of program where they would automatically mail ballots to every voter .
Do you feel like there ’ s enough equipment and enough vendors and enough money behind this to get this to where we need to be by November ?
It ’ s gon na take @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me , the biggest problems are the lag and boldness of decisions and then also government bureaucracy .
We ’ ve talked with the biggest providers of these ballot sorters .
They had seven orders placed last week , they had another 10 orders this week .
I have concerns about scaling up at all the local levels , because they don ’ t have enough time to get these large sorters out in all of those locations .
But if states go with what I ’ ve suggested , yes , there @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , how much time do states have to make decisions on this ?
There ’ s a little bit of wiggle room depending on when decisions are made , but we ’ re within a few weeks of it being too late .
We put out the April 15 timeframe , because I have spoken to various vendors about timelines , equipment , ordering—all those things .
I would encourage the rest of the country that hasn ’ t talked to their vendors yet to have that conversation today .
Start putting a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ county , but as a state .
Those conversations and those ordering needs to start now .
Decisions need to happen now .
As this conversation has ramped up over the last month , we ’ ve seen lots of accusations that the Democrats are trying to federalize elections .
The president said that Democrats want to cheat and that Republicans will never be elected again if you did some of these things .
How do you get over that hurdle in states where political cooperation is not the norm ?
First and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ requested an absentee ballot in Florida for their recent primary .
So clearly , he is comfortable with the absentee voting process .
Second , it ’ d be interesting to know how many of the folks in Congress actually vote by absentee ballots in their elections .
My guess is the number is pretty high .
Third , this is not partisan .
This type of reform benefits voters across the political spectrum .
It doesn ’ t benefit one side or the other in a more obvious way .
It benefits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has to be about who votes , not who wins .
When we hear , for instance , the president or others indicate that there ’ s somehow going to be a different outcome if more people vote , I think completely demonstrates why they make certain decisions around policy that hurt the American people .
If we aren ’ t for the American people and for voters voting , then I don ’ t know what we ’ re here for , especially if we ’ re in politics .
I don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything other than unanimous agreement that every American should be able to vote in an accessible , fair , and secure way .
And that ’ s what this reform is about and we need to make sure that especially in a pandemic , and in this crisis , Americans have access to their democracy and their democracy is sound .
What would you say to people who say that election considerations have nothing to do with the coronavirus response ?
That ’ s ridiculous .
The coronavirus response has seeped into every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that we ’ ve had governors canceling and postponing elections , it ’ s obvious that the coronavirus is impacting elections .
Those politicians are clearly not reading or not seeing what ’ s happening on the ground .
We see that just with the cancellations and with poll workers coming down with coronavirus that were exposed to thousands of people in Florida .
We ’ re going to continue to see poll workers test positive in various states that have just had primaries , including Illinois , likely including some of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As we ’ ve already seen in Wisconsin , there ’ s more than 100 jurisdictions that have no poll workers for their April 7 election , they ’ ve all dropped out , and they ’ re not going to show up .
That ’ s going to continue .
In the summer when everyone thinks this might be tamped down , we ’ re going to continue to see less people being willing to go and volunteer or sign up for those jobs because they ’ re exposed to so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one day .
The coronavirus has already infiltrated the election system and had a negative impact .
Anything else you want to add ?
This is an unprecedented situation and it requires extraordinary creativity , just like we ’ re seeing in hospitals and governor ’ s offices and emergency response teams and nurses .
Moving the November election is not an option .
Moving all of these primaries has demonstrated the lack of resiliency in many state systems .
The only primaries that have continued without being disrupted are those that are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Colorado right now lead the country in turnout , and Colorado ’ s primary was March 3rd and Washington ’ s was March 10 , in the middle of a huge crisis developing in Washington .
This is not just about upcoming primaries .
There are decisions that need to be made about November right now .
And given what we ’ re seeing in terms of the data and how the how the the virus might resurface , even if we are able to mitigate some of it over the summer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
We have to be prepared .
We have to make sure our election system is resilient and voters can vote not only now , but in November .

As officials in multiple states have postponed primary elections in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, and with some experts predicting a resurgence of the virus this fall, there have been widespread discussions about preserving the November elections while protecting public health.
The wider adoption of vote-by-mail systems, where every registered voter is automatically mailed a blank ballot, has been pushed as a fair response to a pandemic that has both disrupted and homebound millions of people.
But there are challenges, chief among them, dwindling time. For a dose of reality, I caught up with Amber McReynolds, CEO of Vote at Home, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting vote-by-mail and no-excuse absentee voting systems. McReynolds, who was the director of elections for the City and County of Denver under the transition to Colorado’s mail system, explained how states trying to quickly make the same pivot should consider centralizing efforts, how a crush of postal votes could stress counting, and why President Trump’s critique of the practice rings hollow.
While the push for increased vote-by-mail elections has been going on for a long time, it’s really having a moment now.
The pandemic and this public health crisis has exposed the real vulnerabilities that exist in the in-person voting structure that many states still rely on. There are states that still require an excuse to get an absentee ballot, there are states that haven’t adjusted their voting laws around mail ballot voting for decades. States that have moved in the direction where there’s a lot more [vote-by-mail] availability are more resilient in a time like we are in right now.
You were part of Colorado’s transition to all-mail elections in 2013. Can you talk a little about that, and how long it took to work through that process?
I was director of elections in the city and county of Denver from 2011 until 2018. By 2012, the majority of Coloradans were requesting their ballot by mail, and we had our highest numbers that we’d ever had in the presidential election that year.
Right after that we started to talk about comprehensive reform that included same-day registration, but it also included mailing a ballot to every single elector, preserving in-person options at vote centers, creating 24-hour drop boxes for every Coloradan if they didn’t want to mail it back, post-election auditing, and also automatic registration. It was sort of the first time in history that all those things had been packaged, and Colorado catapulted to being a top state for turnout, a top state for security, a top state for access. All of it was premised on that legislation we passed.
There are a lot of moving parts to the reforms you just described. How long did all of that take to implement and get right?
Up to that point, Colorado had no-excuse absentee voting and a lot of voters signing up for that. And then we were also allowed, starting in 2008, to conduct some of our elections, like primaries and school board elections, all by mail. So, in that five-year window we were able to conduct some elections that way. But our legislation in 2013 passed in May, and then our first statewide election on that new model where we were mailing a ballot to everyone was in November. So it was actually that kind of short window there where we implemented this new system with vote centers on Election Day. Ballots went out about four months after we passed that legislation.
And that’s a key point, right? Colorado had some of this already, a willing legislature, and other pieces more or less in place. Other states may not be that far along. How would they get there by November?
This time calls for extraordinary creativity. One advantage is that a lot of western states have not only implemented this model, but they’ve perfected a lot of things about it. And that took time—building procedures, processes, systems, technology to support it. So a lot of that work has been done and figured out. Hawaii just passed their legislation in 2019 and they’re already doing a presidential primary all by mail and then they’re gearing up for this year. So that was within the last year and they didn’t have a ton of vote-by-mail prior to passing their law in 2019. They’re leveraging what’s been developed that they can rely on. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel necessarily. But what we have to do is adopt those best practices in states that haven’t had historically a ton of vote-by-mail. It’s possible, but it’s a big shift.
Louisiana’s secretary of state’s recently told me that they didn’t feel comfortable switching to vote by mail for their delayed primary, let alone November, and didn’t want Louisiana voters to be a guinea pig for something their office had no expertise in. What would you say to to Louisiana?
Louisiana is a good example of a state that could have a statewide system. They’re very top down, so they could really adopt a plan that includes a regionalized or centralized operation for outbound and inbound mail ballots. Instead of spreading that around all the townships in the wards, they would actually get a vendor to mail out all the ballots statewide. All the envelopes would be the same, the instructions would be the same. With prepaid postage, it would come back into a central facility, run by the state or maybe in conjunction with multiple counties.
I think we have to be creative to get scaled up in this amount of time, so that’s a kind of emergency situation concept.
Where do you see this being a bigger challenge ahead of November?
Pennsylvania and Michigan. Both of them just passed no-excuse absentee voting. Both states don’t have a ton of infrastructure at the local level. They also have outdated laws that don’t allow any sort of processing and scanning of absentee ballots prior to election day. They really don’t have very good systems in place for this. And I think they’re both positioned to actually have a more centralized model to alleviate the stress off the counties. Again, it could be the counties collectively running this type of operation, but it also would involve statewide coordination.
Pennsylvania was already worried about the crush of mail ballots this fall, even without a pandemic. Do you see them getting to a place where they can do it smoothly by November?
I think that they really should consider kind of a regionalized, or centralized type of operation, mainly because the numbers are going to go up, they aren’t prepared to deal with that kind of quantity.
Wisconsin right now is a good example. They’re backlogged, they’re not caught up with all their absentee requests that have been flooding the offices, and that could happen in Michigan and Pennsylvania. And Michigan saw a little of it in their recent primary, but that could happen if they stick with an application process instead of going to the full vote-by-mail type of program where they would automatically mail ballots to every voter.
Do you feel like there’s enough equipment and enough vendors and enough money behind this to get this to where we need to be by November?
It’s gonna take quick and swift decision making. To me, the biggest problems are the lag and boldness of decisions and then also government bureaucracy. We’ve talked with the biggest providers of these ballot sorters. They had seven orders placed last week, they had another 10 orders this week.
I have concerns about scaling up at all the local levels, because they don’t have enough time to get these large sorters out in all of those locations. But if states go with what I’ve suggested, yes, there’s plenty of time.
Realistically, how much time do states have to make decisions on this?
There’s a little bit of wiggle room depending on when decisions are made, but we’re within a few weeks of it being too late. We put out the April 15 timeframe, because I have spoken to various vendors about timelines, equipment, ordering—all those things. I would encourage the rest of the country that hasn’t talked to their vendors yet to have that conversation today. Start putting a plan together not only as the individual county, but as a state. Those conversations and those ordering needs to start now. Decisions need to happen now.
As this conversation has ramped up over the last month, we’ve seen lots of accusations that the Democrats are trying to federalize elections. The president said that Democrats want to cheat and that Republicans will never be elected again if you did some of these things. How do you get over that hurdle in states where political cooperation is not the norm?
First and foremost, the president and his wife requested an absentee ballot in Florida for their recent primary. So clearly, he is comfortable with the absentee voting process. Second, it’d be interesting to know how many of the folks in Congress actually vote by absentee ballots in their elections. My guess is the number is pretty high.
Third, this is not partisan. This type of reform benefits voters across the political spectrum. It doesn’t benefit one side or the other in a more obvious way. It benefits voters broadly. Election administration and policy has to be about who votes, not who wins. When we hear, for instance, the president or others indicate that there’s somehow going to be a different outcome if more people vote, I think completely demonstrates why they make certain decisions around policy that hurt the American people. If we aren’t for the American people and for voters voting, then I don’t know what we’re here for, especially if we’re in politics. I don’t see why there would be anything other than unanimous agreement that every American should be able to vote in an accessible, fair, and secure way. And that’s what this reform is about and we need to make sure that especially in a pandemic, and in this crisis, Americans have access to their democracy and their democracy is sound.
What would you say to people who say that election considerations have nothing to do with the coronavirus response?
That’s ridiculous. The coronavirus response has seeped into every single aspect of our lives. Given that we’ve had governors canceling and postponing elections, it’s obvious that the coronavirus is impacting elections. Those politicians are clearly not reading or not seeing what’s happening on the ground. We see that just with the cancellations and with poll workers coming down with coronavirus that were exposed to thousands of people in Florida. We’re going to continue to see poll workers test positive in various states that have just had primaries, including Illinois, likely including some of the primaries that were even earlier in March.
As we’ve already seen in Wisconsin, there’s more than 100 jurisdictions that have no poll workers for their April 7 election, they’ve all dropped out, and they’re not going to show up. That’s going to continue. In the summer when everyone thinks this might be tamped down, we’re going to continue to see less people being willing to go and volunteer or sign up for those jobs because they’re exposed to so many people in a small space in one day. The coronavirus has already infiltrated the election system and had a negative impact.
Anything else you want to add?
This is an unprecedented situation and it requires extraordinary creativity, just like we’re seeing in hospitals and governor’s offices and emergency response teams and nurses.
Moving the November election is not an option. Moving all of these primaries has demonstrated the lack of resiliency in many state systems. The only primaries that have continued without being disrupted are those that are being conducted by mail ballots. Washington and Colorado right now lead the country in turnout, and Colorado’s primary was March 3rd and Washington’s was March 10, in the middle of a huge crisis developing in Washington.
This is not just about upcoming primaries. There are decisions that need to be made about November right now. And given what we’re seeing in terms of the data and how the how the the virus might resurface, even if we are able to mitigate some of it over the summer, it might resurface in the fall. We have to be prepared. We have to make sure our election system is resilient and voters can vote not only now, but in November.


motherjones--2020-04-02--Learning From Home Is Hard Enough. Try Doing It Where Wifi Is Illegal.

Some of the slowest internet in the country can be found in Pocahontas County , West Virginia .
That ’ s because of the telescope at the Green Bank Observatory , nestled into the rolling Alleghenies right below the state ’ s eastern panhandle .
Wifi , cell phones , radio , and even microwaves are prohibited within 10 square miles of the telescope , which is deep inside of a rectangular 13,000-square foot piece of land known as the National Radio Quiet Zone ( NRQZ ) , a 13,000-square-mile area established in 1958 to protect the Green Bank telescope @ @ @ @ @ @ @ West Virginia , from interference .
If she wanted , Grace Beverage , 15 , could blame the telescope for her recent F in honors science .
She and her twin sister , Melinda , live in the town of Green Bank , inside the Quiet Zone .
Since Pocahontas County High School was closed on March 13 in response to the coronavirus crisis , all of their classes have moved online .
With their old-school hardwired connection , which relies on their telephone landline and which is slower than cable or fiber-optic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Grace learned about convection currents , built an earth science device , and recorded the weather at her house for five days straight .
But she couldn ’ t turn in her completed assignment because there were multiple pages to it , and the connection repeatedly timed out .
She received a zero , and the straight-A student watched her grade tank .
Since you are reading this , you are probably among the approximately 85 percent of American adults with access to high-speed internet , able to download , stream , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much about it .
Now imagine what it ’ s like when you ’ re traveling through a tunnel ; or trying to stream the Super Bowl at the same time as everyone else ; or standing in that random dead zone in your neighborhood .
Or when you are at a picturesque lake house and the internet seems to operate according its own circadian rhythms .
That ’ s what online life is like all the time for the other 15 percent of Americans for whom internet access is not a given @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or the technical infrastructure does not exist .
Fifteen percent of the students in Pocahontas County have no internet access ; 30 percent have no devices that connect to the internet .
For those who do have internet at home , the connections are agonizingly slow .
The coronavirus has revealed the level to which American society relies on the internet in general , but especially in a time of crisis .
Internet bandwidth usage is up , on average , by about 40 percent since the COVID-19 closures .
Within a matter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the country , from elementary schools to graduate programs , shut down their campuses and moved online in an effort to “ flatten the curve ” of the pandemic .
Teachers are encouraged to keep instruction going by using a patchwork of distance-learning technologies , a task further complicated by the widespread closure of the public libraries that schools and local governments typically rely on to bridge the divide between digital haves and have-nots .
It has been an arduous process for teachers and students everywhere .
But in the shadow of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that midcentury monument to scientific progress , it is all but impossible .
“ I ’ m so scared that we ’ re not preparing out students for a technological age here , ” said Samara Mann , who teaches English at Pocahontas County High School .
“ I read wonderful articles about what other teachers are doing online , and I think , that ’ s wonderful for you because you can get your students online.
” Pocahontas County is the most sparsely populated county east of the Mississippi River .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the gentle Greenbrier River cutting through it north to south .
Mann lives next to the Monongahela National Forest , where 8,000 acres of hardwood forest and spruce trees stretch uninterrupted over hills and hollows .
At night , she sees a sky full of stars .
The nearest Walmart is 45 minutes away .
The economy in Pocahontas County relied on a thriving commercial timber industry for most of the 20th century , but the Great West Virginia Flood of 1985 did catastrophic damage from which the timber industry never recovered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ percent of the county lives below the poverty level .
The population is slowly shrinking and getting older .
One in four jobs is generated by the tourists who come through to hike and camp in the forest , ski at Snowshoe Mountain , and , of course , visit the gigantic telescope at the Green Bank Observatory .
The telescope is quite a sight .
Taller than the Statue of Liberty , it ’ s the largest steerable radio telescope on the planet , almost 17 million pounds of criss-crossing white aluminum @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It looks like a Cubist deconstruction of the Eiffel Tower , or a robot scorpion .
When most people think of telescopes , they think of optical telescopes , which are for seeing far away .
This telescope is a radio telescope .
It is for hearing far away .
In 1955 , in the first furlong of the United States ’ space race with the Soviet Union , the National Science Foundation decided to invest in radio astronomy as a scientific discipline .
A committee unanimously chose Green Bank as the site @ @ @ @ @ @ @ specifically because its geography so naturally sheltered the town from radio interference .
In a 1956 history of the Green Bank Observatory , Richard Emberson wrote that among sites under consideration , Green Bank stood out because it had by far the least amount of radio connectivity : One of the earliest advocates for the Green Bank telescope was Vannevar Bush , a philosopher scientist .
This was the same guy who in 1945 wrote a visionary essay for the Atlantic called “ As We May Think , ” which imagined the internet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Consider a future device , ” he wrote , “ in which an individual stores all his books , records , and communications , and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility .
It is an enlarged , intimate supplement to his memory.
” That the telescope he championed would impede the supplement he envisioned is an irony some locals might appreciate , if only they could get the Atlantic ’ s website to load .
Since breaking ground on the Green Bank Observatory in 1957 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this “ valley of telescopes.
” They ’ ve used their high-powered receivers to find molecules in deep space and detect black holes and show that gravity in other galaxies are made up of dark matter .
But making these discoveries requires picking up on teeny tiny wavelengths .
A quasar is a star so bright that it eclipses galaxies , with such a concentration of energy that it could contain a black hole .
But the typical quasar gives off a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a watt per @ @ @ @ @ @ @ radio telescopes require a massive dish , like the 2.3-acre reflecting area on the Green Bank telescope , to hear this cosmic static .
These radio telescopes need to be powerful enough to detect the energy of a snowflake hitting the ground .
And that ’ s why residents in Green Bank are not supposed to have cellphones .
The very qualities that made the mountainous half of Pocahontas County ideal for a super-sensitive radio telescope also make it difficult for the students living there to access modern technology and get online .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to do any internet-related something , you see kids , in multiple rows , shaking their heads , ” Mann said .
“ And then multiple kids speak up at the same time saying , ‘ That is not going to work for me .
My internet is not going to reliably do anything.
’ ” On March 13 , all the normal routines of Pocahontas County High School disintegrated into complete chaos .
The day before , a Thursday , the principal had alerted 31 teachers by email that they should probably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As it turned out , the governor closed schools the following day , meaning the teachers had less than 24 hours to figure out how to improvise a new distance-learning program and send 299 children home with three weeks of lesson plans .
On top of it all , Friday was the day that grades were due for the previous quarter .
Samara Mann likes to over-prepare .
She woke up at 5:30 a.m. that Friday , her mind racing with ideas for lesson plans .
She could assign book reports .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Farm for the seniors .
She grabbed a protein bar , filled her travel cup with Earl Grey tea , and drove 10 minutes to Pocahontas County High School .
When she pulled into the parking lot , it was empty except for the lone driver ’ s ed car .
She had never been at school so early before .
She poured her tea into a mug and made a beeline for the main office so she could commandeer the fast copier before anyone else started using it , because , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the crazy was going to hit.
” The traffic jams at the copy machines got bad that day as the faculty furiously printed and copied and stapled together paper packets for their students to take home .
Sending or receiving assignments over the internet would be difficult given the huge disparities in access and the overburdened sole carrier .
To make matters worse , the wifi went down at school .
No one knew how long school would be closed .
As news trickled in , the principal made announcements over the intercom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , director of the Pocahontas County Board of Education , had an emergency situation on her hands .
The Pocahontas County High School girls basketball team had miraculously qualified for the state basketball tournament ; they were on their way to Charleston to compete against schools many times larger .
A spirit bus packed full of fans and fellow students was on its way with them .
Bland wears many hats , including director of school transportation and the county ’ s technology coordinator .
First , she radioed the driver to stop @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which was complicated because the bus was in an area with no cell service .
After getting the caravan to Charleston turned around , she had to call the principals of all five county schools and mobilize a countywide K–12 distance-learning program in under 24 hours .
“ We ’ re building the airplane as it ’ s being flown , ” Bland said .
“ We ’ re teaching the teachers the technology now , and they ’ re teaching the parents.
” After lesson plans were copied , teachers cobbled together @ @ @ @ @ @ @ various platforms available to them—Microsoft Teams , Zoom , Skype , private Facebook groups—to reach students .
Parents were forced to use technologies they ’ d never touched and had to learn multiple systems if their kids attended different schools .
For months , Bland had been nagging teachers and parents to update their computers and learn how to use these applications .
Now she was having a major “ I-told-you-so ” moment , though she sympathizes with the struggles of teachers , parents , and students .
And then there ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The fact that we have unreliable internet makes it very , very difficult , ” Bland said .
“ Our children really need to understand the technology because they ’ re stepping into a technologically equipped world , and we need to teach them that , ” she continued .
“ But it ’ s not just a disservice to the children .
It ’ s a disservice to our self-employed people that have cottage industries here in Pocahontas County , it ’ s a disservice to law enforcement , it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Medical Services ] .
” Schools across West Virginia have been closed now for nearly three weeks .
Closures have been extended to April 20 .
Many students finished the last lessons in their packets on Friday , but they weren ’ t able to turn them in .
School administrators decided not to collect the packets for fear of transmitting the coronavirus through the paper .
Since the shutdown , the slow internet in rural West Virginia has gotten a lot slower .
Everyone is using it at the same time , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that students are spending a lot more time sitting in front of the computers , watching progress bars and spinning wheels , telling them that their data is buffering , or their assignment is loading—and they have to wait .
Mann has students in tears , calling her to say that their 10-page research papers didn ’ t save because it took the internet too long to sync on Microsoft Teams .
With a $ 13 million operating budget , Pocahontas County schools are cash-strapped and don ’ t have the money to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ child—that is Ruth Bland ’ s long-term goal .
There are more immediate needs , in any case .
Because so many students were on free or reduced-cost lunch , the school system qualified for the Community Eligibility Provision ; the county provides free breakfasts and lunches for all students at each of its schools , five days a week .
During the shutdown , Bland has been working overtime with the county ’ s service staff to distribute 5,960 meals to its students , each breakfast and lunch separately packaged with labels @ @ @ @ @ @ @ start working at 6 a.m. to be ready for distribution at 10 a.m .
Bland said that if this didn ’ t happen , many kids would go hungry .
Some students pick up multiple bags for their families at home .
Pocahontas County schools depend on federal funding from the USDA Forest Service as part of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act , which is a bill that provides funds to states and counties with designated national forests that prohibit people from building , thereby shrinking the potential tax base @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helps counties recoup some of those lost taxes to use for things like schools .
But that funding has decreased significantly over the past 20 years .
There are regular fights in Congress to cut this funding , and it ’ s once again under threat .
“ If you were in a populated area and you lost that funding , it would be like cutting off their little toe , ” Bland told me .
“ With us , it ’ s like cutting off our leg.
” For teenagers in Pocahontas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the form of the Google dinosaur that pops up and says , “ Unable to connect to the internet.
” Grace and her twin sister , Melinda , have started waking up at 2 a.m. to turn in their homework .
They ’ re hoping that the internet will be faster in the middle of the night , when no one else is using it .
Grace is tired of watching the progress bar load to 75 percent—before her assignment fails to send and the waiting starts all over .
Melinda is bored @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
She wants to get back to school , where she had planned to try out for the softball team , and looked forward to analyzing music lyrics in English class with Samara Mann every Tuesday .
“ When I try to type on a Word document , I have to refresh so many times , ” said Kelly Pyne , 18 , a senior in Mann ’ s college English class .
“ I tried submitting a scholarship , and it said ‘ still pending ’ for an hour or so.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , including two AP classes .
Sometimes her internet crashes while she ’ s trying to submit assignments .
Sometimes her applications tell her that the file she ’ s trying to send is too large .
Sometimes her browser tells her the page won ’ t load .
Plus , she ’ s still working as a cashier at the Route 39 gas station , where she and her co-workers have started carrying around a bucket of bleach and bleaching everything down .
Under quarantine , Pyne is busier than ever .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ check the many items off her to-do list .
Pyne doesn ’ t see her offline upbringing as a net negative .
She ’ s glad that she learned how to navigate life without the internet .
She sees a lot of tourists pass through the gas station where she works , on their way to Snowshoe Mountain or the Monongahela National Forest or the Green Bank Observatory , helplessly trying to figure out directions because they are so reliant on their cellphones ’ GPS .
The McClintic Public Library sits on a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of daffodils are blooming in the parking lot , their sunny yellow faces drooping against black pavement .
The library closed its doors to the public on March 17 .
But even though the doors are locked , there are always a few cars posted up in the parking lot these days .
That ’ s because people have been coming here to connect to the library ’ s wifi .
In 2019 , there were 3,800 public wifi logins and 8,700 public computer uses at the five branches of the Pocahontas County @ @ @ @ @ @ @ library card holders , which is significant for a county of around 8,400 people .
The public computers at the five branches are normally in constant use , and wifi is available at four of them .
( Only the Green Bank branch , which is inside the NRQZ , has no wifi . )
As soon as the libraries closed , Cree Lahti , director of the Pocahontas County libraries , got to work trying to figure out how to keep providing access to the internet .
They branches opened up their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ parking lot .
Sitting in some of the parked cars are students accessing the wifi and turning in assignments .
At first Lahti and her staff taped six tickets with wifi passwords on the front and side doors of McClintic Public Library .
With so many people taking the tickets , it became clear the system was unsustainable .
So Lahti called the folks at the West Virginia Library Commission , and they remotely opened up access so that logging onto the Pocahontas County Libraries ’ wifi no longer required a password .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ it at any time .
For people living in areas with spotty internet connections , the mass migration online has left them behind .
This is more common in rural areas , though it ’ s not exclusively a rural problem .
According to the Pew Research Center , 50 percent of eighth graders in rural areas do not use internet at home to do their homework .
Seventeen percent of lower-income teens don ’ t have the resources to use the internet at home , which goes up to 25 percent for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ teens surveyed use public internet to do their homework .
That number jumps to 21 percent for teens in low-income families .
In many communities public libraries are the only place with free , reliable access to the internet and computers .
But now , like schools , public libraries are closed to patrons .
They ’ ve been deemed nonessential businesses in West Virginia and around the country , which means that for students who need to do a lot more online right now , accessing the internet is even harder .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ problem ; the coronavirus has simply exacerbated the consequences .
Huge chunks of the population now live in something like a quiet zone .
Bland remains optimistic that Pocahontas County will get through this pandemic intact .
So far there are no cases of COVID-19 in the county , and its chances of keeping the coronavirus out are helped by the fact that everyone lives so far apart .
Many families have their own vegetable gardens and livestock .
Bland has started leaving eggs from her 30 chickens on a table outside her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ neighbors can leave money , because eggs in the grocery store have been hard to come by .
Derek Trull , a middle school science teacher at Green Bank Elementary–Middle School , has been staying up late at night , sewing face masks according to CDC specifications and dropping them off at the Pocahontas County Memorial Hospital .
But with the lack of internet access jeopardizing the long-term viability of their slapdash distance-learning program , the residents of Pocahontas County are confronting the limitations of their own resourcefulness .
After the internet fiasco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have cut back the workload by more than half .
Students are required to send in only two assignments per week instead of five .
Mann has been seeing other people using Zoom to keep their work meetings and classrooms going .
She wants to use Zoom , but she ’ s afraid to try it because it will probably be an irritation for everybody involved , with people ’ s faces freezing and their voices lagging way behind .
She might give it a shot .
She ’ s hoping that this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been , will be a wakeup call for state legislators to invest in the internet .
“ As a teacher this is heartbreaking , disenchanting .
You want to reach all the kids .
They all deserve the same opportunities , ” she said .
“ If we had had the internet infrastructure for this , this could ’ ve been an amazing learning opportunity .
For everybody .
”

Some of the slowest internet in the country can be found in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. That’s because of the telescope at the Green Bank Observatory, nestled into the rolling Alleghenies right below the state’s eastern panhandle. Wifi, cell phones, radio, and even microwaves are prohibited within a 10-square-mile radius of the telescope, which is deep inside of a rectangular 13,000-square-mile piece of land known as the National Radio Quiet Zone (NRQZ), which was established in 1958 to protect the Green Bank telescope and another one in Sugar Grove, West Virginia, from interference.
If she wanted, Grace Beverage, 15, could blame the telescope for her recent F in honors science. She and her twin sister, Melinda, live in the town of Green Bank, inside the Quiet Zone. Since Pocahontas County High School was closed on March 13 in response to the coronavirus crisis, all of their classes have moved online. With their old-school hardwired connection, which relies on their telephone landline and which is slower than cable or fiber-optic internet, they struggle to keep up. Grace learned about convection currents, built an earth science device, and recorded the weather at her house for five days straight. But she couldn’t turn in her completed assignment because there were multiple pages to it, and the connection repeatedly timed out. She received a zero, and the straight-A student watched her grade tank.
Hear from teachers, a student, and a librarian in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, where widespread internet slowdowns have made distance learning almost impossible, in this edition of the Mother Jones Podcast:
Listen to the latest episode of the Mother Jones Podcast: Subscribe using Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app.
Since you are reading this, you are probably among the approximately 85 percent of American adults with access to high-speed internet, able to download, stream, tweet, and access emails without thinking much about it. Now imagine what it’s like when you’re traveling through a tunnel; or trying to stream the Super Bowl at the same time as everyone else; or standing in that random dead zone in your neighborhood. Or when you are at a picturesque lake house and the internet seems to operate according its own circadian rhythms. That’s what online life is like all the time for the other 15 percent of Americans for whom internet access is not a given, either because it costs too much or the technical infrastructure does not exist. Fifteen percent of the students in Pocahontas County have no internet access; 30 percent have no devices that connect to the internet. For those who do have internet at home, the connections are agonizingly slow.
The coronavirus has revealed the level to which American society relies on the internet in general, but especially in a time of crisis. Internet bandwidth usage is up, on average, by about 40 percent since the COVID-19 closures. Within a matter of weeks, nearly every educational institution in the country, from elementary schools to graduate programs, shut down their campuses and moved online in an effort to “flatten the curve” of the pandemic. Teachers are encouraged to keep instruction going by using a patchwork of distance-learning technologies, a task further complicated by the widespread closure of the public libraries that schools and local governments typically rely on to bridge the divide between digital haves and have-nots. It has been an arduous process for teachers and students everywhere. But in the shadow of the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, that midcentury monument to scientific progress, it is all but impossible.
“I’m so scared that we’re not preparing our students for a technological age here,” said Samara Mann, who teaches English at Pocahontas County High School. “I read wonderful articles about what other teachers are doing online, and I think, that’s wonderful for you because you can get your students online.”
Pocahontas County is the most sparsely populated county east of the Mississippi River. It’s rural and mountainous, with the gentle Greenbrier River cutting through it north to south. Mann lives next to the Monongahela National Forest, where 8,000 acres of hardwood forest and spruce trees stretch uninterrupted over hills and hollows. At night, she sees a sky full of stars. The nearest Walmart is 45 minutes away.
The economy in Pocahontas County relied on a thriving commercial timber industry for most of the 20th century, but the Great West Virginia Flood of 1985 did catastrophic damage from which the timber industry never recovered. Now, a little over 17 percent of the county lives below the poverty level. The population is slowly shrinking and getting older. One in four jobs is generated by the tourists who come through to hike and camp in the forest, ski at Snowshoe Mountain, and, of course, visit the gigantic telescope at the Green Bank Observatory.
The telescope is quite a sight. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, it’s the largest steerable radio telescope on the planet, almost 17 million pounds of criss-crossing white aluminum beams looming over the rural landscape. It looks like a Cubist deconstruction of the Eiffel Tower, or a robot scorpion. When most people think of telescopes, they think of optical telescopes, which are for seeing far away. This telescope is a radio telescope. It is for hearing far away.
In 1955, in the first furlong of the United States’ space race with the Soviet Union, the National Science Foundation decided to invest in radio astronomy as a scientific discipline. A committee unanimously chose Green Bank as the site for a new National Radio Astronomy Observatory specifically because its geography so naturally sheltered the town from radio interference. In a 1956 history of the Green Bank Observatory, Richard Emberson wrote that among sites under consideration, Green Bank stood out because it had by far the least amount of radio connectivity:
“The radio-interference measurements showed that the Green Bank site was in a class by itself….The steering committee unanimously recommended the selection of the Green Bank site for the proposed observatory.”
One of the earliest advocates for the Green Bank telescope was Vannevar Bush, a philosopher scientist. This was the same guy who in 1945 wrote a visionary essay for the Atlantic called “As We May Think,” which imagined the internet 44 years before it existed. “Consider a future device,” he wrote, “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged, intimate supplement to his memory.” That the telescope he championed would impede the supplement he envisioned is an irony some locals might appreciate, if only they could get the Atlantic’s website to load.
Since breaking ground on the Green Bank Observatory in 1957, scientists have made mind-blowing discoveries in this “valley of telescopes.” They’ve used their high-powered receivers to find molecules in deep space and detect black holes and show that gravity in other galaxies are made up of dark matter. But making these discoveries requires picking up on teeny tiny wavelengths. A quasar is a star so bright that it eclipses galaxies, with such a concentration of energy that it could contain a black hole. But the typical quasar gives off a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a watt per square meter. That’s why radio telescopes require a massive dish, like the 2.3-acre reflecting area on the Green Bank telescope, to hear this cosmic static. These radio telescopes need to be powerful enough to detect the energy of a snowflake hitting the ground. And that’s why residents in Green Bank are not supposed to have cellphones.
These radio telescopes need to be powerful enough to detect the energy of a snowflake hitting the ground. And that’s why residents in Green Bank are not supposed to have cellphones.
The very qualities that made the mountainous half of Pocahontas County ideal for a super-sensitive radio telescope also make it difficult for the students living there to access modern technology and get online. “When I announce that we have to do any internet-related something, you see kids, in multiple rows, shaking their heads,” Mann said. “And then multiple kids speak up at the same time saying, ‘That is not going to work for me. My internet is not going to reliably do anything.’”
On March 13, all the normal routines of Pocahontas County High School disintegrated into complete chaos.
The day before, a Thursday, the principal had alerted 31 teachers by email that they should probably prepare for early closures the following week. As it turned out, the governor closed schools the following day, meaning the teachers had less than 24 hours to figure out how to improvise a new distance-learning program and send 299 children home with three weeks of lesson plans. On top of it all, Friday was the day that grades were due for the previous quarter.
Samara Mann likes to over-prepare. She woke up at 5:30 a.m. that Friday, her mind racing with ideas for lesson plans. She could assign book reports. True Grit for the first-years, Animal Farm for the seniors. She grabbed a protein bar, filled her travel cup with Earl Grey tea, and drove 10 minutes to Pocahontas County High School. When she pulled into the parking lot, it was empty except for the lone driver’s ed car. She had never been at school so early before. She poured her tea into a mug and made a beeline for the main office so she could commandeer the fast copier before anyone else started using it, because, as she said, “I just knew the crazy was going to hit.”
The traffic jams at the copy machines got bad that day as the faculty furiously printed and copied and stapled together paper packets for their students to take home. Sending or receiving assignments over the internet would be difficult given the huge disparities in access and the overburdened sole carrier. To make matters worse, the wifi went down at school. No one knew how long school would be closed. As news trickled in, the principal made announcements over the intercom.
The night before, Ruth Bland, director of the Pocahontas County Board of Education, had an emergency situation on her hands. The Pocahontas County High School girls basketball team had miraculously qualified for the state basketball tournament; they were on their way to Charleston to compete against schools many times larger. A spirit bus packed full of fans and fellow students was on its way with them.
Bland wears many hats, including director of school transportation and the county’s technology coordinator. First, she radioed the driver to stop and return the kids to school, which was complicated because the bus was in an area with no cell service. After getting the caravan to Charleston turned around, she had to call the principals of all five county schools and mobilize a countywide K–12 distance-learning program in under 24 hours. “We’re building the airplane as it’s being flown,” Bland said. “We’re teaching the teachers the technology now, and they’re teaching the parents.”
“We’re building the airplane as it’s being flown.”
After lesson plans were copied, teachers cobbled together an ad hoc communications network out of various platforms available to them—Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype, private Facebook groups—to reach students. Parents were forced to use technologies they’d never touched and had to learn multiple systems if their kids attended different schools. For months, Bland had been nagging teachers and parents to update their computers and learn how to use these applications. Now she was having a major “I-told-you-so” moment, though she sympathizes with the struggles of teachers, parents, and students. And then there’s the problem no one has control over—“The fact that we have unreliable internet makes it very, very difficult,” Bland said.
“Our children really need to understand the technology because they’re stepping into a technologically equipped world, and we need to teach them that,” she continued. “But it’s not just a disservice to the children. It’s a disservice to our self-employed people that have cottage industries here in Pocahontas County, it’s a disservice to law enforcement, it’s a disservice to our [Emergency Medical Services].”
Schools across West Virginia have been closed now for nearly three weeks. Closures have been extended to April 30. Many students finished the last lessons in their packets on Friday, but they weren’t able to turn them in. School administrators decided not to collect the packets for fear of transmitting the coronavirus through the paper. Since the shutdown, the slow internet in rural West Virginia has gotten a lot slower. Everyone is using it at the same time, straining the limited bandwidth, which means that students are spending a lot more time sitting in front of the computers, watching progress bars and spinning wheels, telling them that their data is buffering, or their assignment is loading—and they have to wait. Mann has students in tears, calling her to say that their 10-page research papers didn’t save because it took the internet too long to sync on Microsoft Teams.
With a $13 million operating budget, Pocahontas County schools are cash-strapped and don’t have the money to implement the one-to-one initiative—one technological device per child—that is Ruth Bland’s long-term goal. There are more immediate needs, in any case. Because so many students were on free or reduced-cost lunch, the school system qualified for the Community Eligibility Provision; the county provides free breakfasts and lunches for all students at each of its schools, five days a week.
During the shutdown, Bland has been working overtime with the county’s service staff to distribute 5,960 meals to its students, each breakfast and lunch separately packaged with labels and heating instructions. They have to start working at 6 a.m. to be ready for distribution at 10 a.m. Bland said that if this didn’t happen, many kids would go hungry. Some students pick up multiple bags for their families at home.
Pocahontas County schools depend on federal funding from the USDA Forest Service as part of the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act, which is a bill that provides funds to states and counties with designated national forests that prohibit people from building, thereby shrinking the potential tax base. The idea is that this funding helps counties recoup some of those lost taxes to use for things like schools. But the funding has decreased significantly over the past 20 years. There are regular fights in Congress to cut this funding, and it’s once again under threat.
“If you were in a populated area and you lost that funding, it would be like cutting off their little toe,” Bland told me. “With us, it’s like cutting off our leg.”
For teenagers in Pocahontas County, this waiting has taken on the form of the Google dinosaur that pops up and says, “Unable to connect to the internet.”
Grace and her twin sister, Melinda, have started waking up at 2 a.m. to turn in their homework. They’re hoping that the internet will be faster in the middle of the night, when no one else is using it. Grace is tired of watching the progress bar load to 75 percent—before her assignment fails to send and the waiting starts all over. Melinda is bored with hanging around the house all day. She wants to get back to school, where she had planned to try out for the softball team, and looked forward to analyzing music lyrics in English class with Samara Mann every Tuesday.
“When I try to type on a Word document, I have to refresh so many times,” said Kelly Pyne, 18, a senior in Mann’s college English class. “I tried submitting a scholarship, and it said ‘still pending’ for an hour or so.”
Pyne has a full schedule of schoolwork, including two AP classes. Sometimes her internet crashes while she’s trying to submit assignments. Sometimes her applications tell her that the file she’s trying to send is too large. Sometimes her browser tells her the page won’t load. Plus, she’s still working as a cashier at the Route 39 gas station, where she and her co-workers have started carrying around a bucket of bleach and bleaching everything down. Under quarantine, Pyne is busier than ever. The slow internet makes it harder to check the many items off her to-do list.
Pyne doesn’t see her offline upbringing as a net negative. She’s glad that she learned how to navigate life without the internet. She sees a lot of tourists pass through the gas station where she works, on their way to Snowshoe Mountain or the Monongahela National Forest or the Green Bank Observatory, helplessly trying to figure out directions because they are so reliant on their cellphones’ GPS.
The McClintic Public Library sits on a little bit of a hill. Clusters of daffodils are blooming in the parking lot, their sunny yellow faces drooping against black pavement. The library closed its doors to the public on March 17. But even though the doors are locked, there are always a few cars posted up in the parking lot these days. That’s because people have been coming here to connect to the library’s wifi.
In 2019, there were 3,800 public wifi logins and 8,700 public computer uses at the five branches of the Pocahontas County libraries. The library system has 5,460 library card holders, which is significant for a county of around 8,400 people. The public computers at the five branches are normally in constant use, and wifi is available at four of them. (Only the Green Bank branch, which is inside the NRQZ, has no wifi.)
“If you were in a populated area and you lost that funding, it would be like cutting off their little toe. With us, it’s like cutting off our leg.”
As soon as the libraries closed, Cree Lahti, director of the Pocahontas County libraries, got to work trying to figure out how to keep providing access to the internet. The branches opened up their wifi and made it accessible from the parking lot. Sitting in some of the parked cars are students accessing wifi and turning in assignments.
At first Lahti and her staff taped six tickets with wifi passwords on the front and side doors of McClintic Public Library. With so many people taking the tickets, it became clear the system was unsustainable. So Lahti called the folks at the West Virginia Library Commission, and they remotely opened up access so that logging on to the Pocahontas County Libraries’ wifi no longer required a password. Now, anyone can come and access it at any time.
For people living in areas with spotty internet connections, the mass migration online has left them behind. This is more common in rural areas, though it’s not exclusively a rural problem. According to the Pew Research Center, 50 percent of eighth graders in rural areas do not use internet at home to do their homework on a daily basis. Twenty-four percent of lower-income teens don’t have the resources to use the internet at home, which goes up to 25 percent for Black teens. About 12 percent of teens surveyed use public internet to do their homework. That number jumps to 21 percent for teens in low-income families.
In many communities public libraries are the only place with free, reliable access to the internet and computers. But now, like schools, public libraries are closed to patrons. They’ve been deemed nonessential businesses in West Virginia and around the country, which means that for students who need to do a lot more online right now, accessing the internet is even harder. The digital divide is not a new problem; the coronavirus has simply exacerbated the consequences. Huge chunks of the population now live in something like a quiet zone.
Bland remains optimistic that Pocahontas County will get through this pandemic intact. So far there are no cases of COVID-19 in the county, and its chances of keeping the coronavirus out are helped by the fact that everyone lives so far apart. Many families have their own vegetable gardens and livestock.
Bland has started leaving eggs from her 30 chickens on a table outside her house with a little bag in which neighbors can leave money, because eggs in the grocery store have been hard to come by. Derek Trull, a middle school science teacher at Green Bank Elementary–Middle School, has been staying up late at night, sewing face masks according to CDC specifications and dropping them off at the Pocahontas County Memorial Hospital.
But with the lack of internet access jeopardizing the long-term viability of their slapdash distance-learning program, the residents of Pocahontas County are confronting the limitations of their own resourcefulness. After the internet fiasco of the first two weeks, teachers have cut back the workload by more than half. Students are required to send in only two assignments per week instead of five.
Mann has been seeing other people using Zoom to keep their work meetings and classrooms going. She wants to use Zoom, but she’s afraid to try it because it will probably be an irritation for everybody involved, with people’s faces freezing and their voices lagging way behind. She might give it a shot. She’s hoping that this crisis, as bad as it has been, will be a wakeup call for state legislators to invest in the internet.
“As a teacher this is heartbreaking, disenchanting. You want to reach all the kids. They all deserve the same opportunities,” she said. “If we had had the internet infrastructure for this, this could’ve been an amazing learning opportunity. For everybody.”
Update: The FCC has relaxed regulations, and now the four out of five schools in Pocahontas County with wifi have opened up their wifi as hotspots. Parents and students can now drive to one of these schools and submit their assignments from the parking lot.


motherjones--2020-04-02--Trump Asks Deutsche Bank and Palm Beach County to Give His Businesses a Break

Donald Trump ’ s company has asked its biggest lender , German financial giant Deutsche Bank , for a break on repaying some of its loans .
The Trump Organization has also asked Palm Beach County for similar leeway on rent payments the president owes on one of his Florida golf courses .
The New York Times reports that Trump Org executives made the requests recently , citing the global financial crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic .
The pandemic has been devastating for much of the American economy , particularly the travel industry .
As much as three quarters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years has come from his travel-related businesses .
Nearly all of Trump ’ s properties are shuttered ; some are barely operating , with limited offerings .
In all , the Trump Organization has laid off or furloughed more than 1,000 employees .
The shutdowns may be costing the president as much as $ 680,000 a day in revenue .
When Trump became president , he refused to divest from his business empire .
At the time , ethics experts worried about the potential for a major conflict-of-interest should the sitting U.S. president @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lenders or business partners for any change to their existing deals—the exact scenario now playing out .
Deutsche Bank has always been at the top of the list of potential conflicts between the president and one of his business partners .
Long after other Wall Street banks decided to stop lending to Trump over his past business failures , Trump developed a relationship with the German bank ’ s private wealth management division , which currently holds four Trump loans .
In addition to lending him $ 160 million in 2015 to finance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it made two loans , totaling $ 125 million , to bankroll his company ’ s purchase and redevelopment of the Doral golf course in Miami .
The bank also loaned Trump $ 69 million to refinance debt related to his Chicago tower .
While the Trump Organization has always maintained that its level of debt is not particularly high compared with the value of its properties , it nevertheless must continue to pay its loans back , which is difficult to do when no money is coming in .
According to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Organization approached Deutsche Bank about possibly postponing payments on at least some of the loans .
Eric Trump , the president ’ s middle son , told the Times that this is no different from what any other business is doing : That may be true , but the loans that Trump has with Deutsche Bank are personally guaranteed—meaning that if the president is unable to repay them , Deutsche Bank would be able to come after the personal assets of the president of the United States to settle the debt .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a face-off between the most powerful politician on Earth and a German bank that has struggled financially in recent years and run into trouble with U.S. law enforcement and bank regulators—all in the shadow of a global crisis .
This is pretty much the worst-case scenario posited by ethics experts when Trump took office and refused to sell off his assets .
.
The Times also reported that Trump executives approached Palm Beach County officials for a break on rent that the president owes the county .
Trump doesn ’ t actually own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Course in West Palm Beach , one of his favorite courses to visit on his frequent presidential golf outings ; he just rents it from the county .
It ’ s unclear if Deutsche Bank or Palm Beach County will give the president any leeway , and discussions remain preliminary , the Times reports .

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Donald Trump’s company has asked its biggest lender, German financial giant Deutsche Bank, for a break on repaying some of its loans. The Trump Organization has also asked Palm Beach County for similar leeway on rent payments the president owes on one of his Florida golf courses. The New York Times reports that Trump Org executives made the requests recently, citing the global financial crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic has been devastating for much of the American economy, particularly the travel industry. As much as three quarters of Trump’s revenue in recent years has come from his travel-related businesses. Nearly all of Trump’s properties are shuttered; some are barely operating, with limited offerings. In all, the Trump Organization has laid off or furloughed more than 1,000 employees. The shutdowns may be costing the president as much as $680,000 a day in revenue.
When Trump became president, he refused to divest from his business empire. At the time, ethics experts worried about the potential for a major conflict-of-interest should the sitting U.S. president ever need to ask one of his lenders or business partners for any change to their existing deals—the exact scenario now playing out.
Deutsche Bank has always been at the top of the list of potential conflicts between the president and one of his business partners. Long after other Wall Street banks decided to stop lending to Trump over his past business failures, Trump developed a relationship with the German bank’s private wealth management division, which currently holds four Trump loans. In addition to lending him $160 million in 2015 to finance the opening of his luxury DC hotel, it made two loans, totaling $125 million, to bankroll his company’s purchase and redevelopment of the Doral golf course in Miami. The bank also loaned Trump $69 million to refinance debt related to his Chicago tower. While the Trump Organization has always maintained that its level of debt is not particularly high compared with the value of its properties, it nevertheless must continue to pay its loans back, which is difficult to do when no money is coming in.
According to the Times, executives at the Trump Organization approached Deutsche Bank about possibly postponing payments on at least some of the loans. Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, told the Times that this is no different from what any other business is doing:
“These days everybody is working together,” said Eric Trump, the president’s son, who manages the family business. “Tenants are working with landlords, landlords are working with banks. The whole world is working together as we fight through this pandemic.”
That may be true, but the loans that Trump has with Deutsche Bank are personally guaranteed—meaning that if the president is unable to repay them, Deutsche Bank would be able to come after the personal assets of the president of the United States to settle the debt. We’re looking at the possibility of a face-off between the most powerful politician on Earth and a German bank that has struggled financially in recent years and run into trouble with U.S. law enforcement and bank regulators—all in the shadow of a global crisis. This is pretty much the worst-case scenario posited by ethics experts when Trump took office and refused to sell off his assets. .
The Times also reported that Trump executives approached Palm Beach County officials for a break on rent that the president owes the county. Trump doesn’t actually own the land underneath his Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, one of his favorite courses to visit on his frequent presidential golf outings; he just rents it from the county.
It’s unclear if Deutsche Bank or Palm Beach County will give the president any leeway, and discussions remain preliminary, the Times reports.


motherjones--2020-04-02--Despite Coronavirus Lockdown, Wisconsin Republicans Insist on an Election that Will Disenfranchise T

Despite Coronavirus Lockdown, Wisconsin Republicans Insist on an Election that Will Disenfranchise Thousands

While ten states with primary contests originally scheduled this month have delayed them or switched to all-mail voting , Wisconsin , the lone exception , is moving ahead with its election on Tuesday , April 7 , despite a rising death toll from coronavirus in the state and a stay-at-home order issued by Democratic Gov .
Tony Evers .
The date can only be changed by the Republican-controlled state legislature , which has both refused to postpone it while rebuffing calls by Evers to mail a ballot to every registered voter .
With just days before voting is set to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ citizens could be unable to participate on Tuesday , with a critical state Supreme Court election being decided alongside a Democratic presidential primary between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders .
On Wednesday Sanders called for the election to be delayed , saying “ people should not be forced to put their lives on the line to vote.
” Last Friday , Evers called for the election to take place as scheduled , but urged that a ballot be rushed to every registered voter with a pre-paid return envelope , but Republican Assembly Speaker @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impossible and incredibly flawed ” and said without evidence that it was an “ invitation for voter fraud.
” Republicans may be counting on low Democratic turnout to help them win a statewide contest on Tuesday ’ s ballot , between incumbent state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly , who has been endorsed by Donald Trump , and progressive challenger Jill Karofsky .
While Republicans currently have a 5 to 2 majority on the court , a win on Tuesday could set Democrats up to flip the balance of power in 2023 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Court election last year , after which Eric Holder , Obama ’ s former attorney general , criticized Democrats for not devoting more resources to the race . )
A Kelly victory could have a big impact in a pending voting rights case : in December , a Wisconsin judge ordered that 232,000 voters would be purged if they failed to respond to official elections mailings at their registered address .
While that move has been blocked by a state court of appeals , the Supreme Court could reinstate it ; while Kelly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ proceedings because he once advised the conservative group that brought the lawsuit , he ’ s said he could rejoin the case if he wins re-election .
That raises the possibility he could take part in a ruling that would ensure tens of thousands of voters—disproportionately from Democratic areas—are deactivated from the voting rolls months before a critical presidential election and in the midst of a nationwide pandemic .
With the election scheduled to take place as normal , turnout among key Democratic constituencies could fall precipitously , particularly among college students , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and in Milwaukee , the epicenter of the state ’ s outbreak and home to 70 percent of the state ’ s black population .
The city boasts just 16 percent of Wisconsin ’ s population , but has made up half of the state ’ s roughly 1,600 coronavirus diagnoses and 16 of its 32 deaths—the vast majority from black or Latino residents .
Preliminary returns of ballots suggest that voting is taking place among a dramatically reshaped electorate .
To date , absentee ballots are being returned at a much @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outside of Milwaukee than from heavily Democratic Milwaukee County or in Madison ’ s Dane County .
Relative to 2016 , turnout has fallen the most in poor , heavily black neighborhoods in Milwaukee , according to Neil Albrecht , executive director of the city ’ s election commission .
“ Real democracy is when every eligible voter has an opportunity to cast a ballot—and we couldn ’ t be further from that right now in the city of Milwaukee , ” he says .
If voters do not vote absentee , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ show up on Tuesday in large numbers , and those that try to will face dramatically reduced opportunities to vote .
The state is short nearly 7,000 poll workers , prompting 111 communities to admit they have no one willing or able to operate their elections .
Milwaukee has cut the number of polling places from its usual 180 to just five .
While Evers has taken the unprecedented step of asking the National Guard to staff polling places , that won ’ t make up the labor shortage , nor convince voters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ People are going to be making a very difficult decision on Election Day and have to choose between placing themselves at some level of risk or they ’ re going to choose not to vote , ” Albrecht says .
“ As an election administrator I ’ d never want to hold an election under these conditions.
” While a record number of around a million Wisconsin voters have requested absentee ballots for the April 7 election , that ’ s well short of the 2.1 million people that participated in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s absentee ballot laws are notably restrictive—a voter must get a witness to observe them signing their ballot , a particularly burdensome requirement at a time of social distancing .
Election officials in Milwaukee have already received 450 absentee ballots that can not be counted because they lack a witness signature .
Voters must also include a copy of their ID with their absentee ballot , even though many people will be afraid to travel to or spend time in lines at the DMV to obtain a government ID if they lack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ alone , there have been over 1,200 absentee ballots submitted without the required ID .
Ballots must be received by Election Day to count , and many voters may not receive a requested absentee ballots in time given the unprecedented volume of requests being handled by already short-staffed election officials .
Meagan Wolfe , the top administrator for the Wisconsin Elections Commission , anticipated that as many as 27,000 ballots could arrive after Election Day and not be counted .
Albrecht and other election officials across Wisconsin have strongly argued for the election @ @ @ @ @ @ @ every other state faced with conducting an election under the pall of the coronavirus .
“ It ’ s not right from a public health perspective and it ’ s not right from a voter access perspective , ” Albrecht said .
“ There ’ s nothing fair about this election.
” Wisconsin has emerged as a key battleground in Republican efforts to make it harder to vote .
In 2016 , the state ’ s GOP-backed voter ID law prevented up to 23,000 people from voting in Dane and Milwaukee counties , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with black voters three times as likely as whites to say they were deterred from voting .
The spread of coronavirus will now make getting to the polls that much harder .
It ’ s a scary situation for voters and a potentially nightmarish one for Democrats .
Low Democratic turnout has helped Republicans maintain a controlling majority on Wisconsin ’ s state Supreme Court , just as it stands poised to decide a case that could further suppress Democratic participation in one of the country ’ s most important presidential battlegrounds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a federal judge declined to postpone the election in response to a lawsuit by Democrats and voting rights groups seeking a delay , but relaxed some absentee rules , allowing voters to skip witness signatures and return ballots as late as April 13 .

While ten states with primary contests originally scheduled this month have delayed them or switched to all-mail voting, Wisconsin, the lone exception, is moving ahead with its election on Tuesday, April 7, despite a rising death toll from coronavirus in the state and a stay-at-home order issued by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.
“I’d never want to hold an election under these conditions.”
The date can only be changed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, which has both refused to postpone it while rebuffing calls by Evers to mail a ballot to every registered voter. With just days before voting is set to take place, hundreds of thousands of citizens could be unable to participate on Tuesday, with a critical state Supreme Court election being decided alongside a Democratic presidential primary between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. On Wednesday Sanders called for the election to be delayed, saying “people should not be forced to put their lives on the line to vote.”
Last Friday, Evers called for the election to take place as scheduled, but urged that a ballot be rushed to every registered voter with a pre-paid return envelope, but Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos called that proposal “logistically impossible and incredibly flawed” and said without evidence that it was an “invitation for voter fraud.” Republicans may be counting on low Democratic turnout to help them win a statewide contest on Tuesday’s ballot, between incumbent state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly, who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, and progressive challenger Jill Karofsky. While Republicans currently have a 5 to 2 majority on the court, a win on Tuesday could set Democrats up to flip the balance of power in 2023. (Progressives narrowly lost a close Supreme Court election last year, after which Eric Holder, Obama’s former attorney general, criticized Democrats for not devoting more resources to the race.)
A Kelly victory could have a big impact in a pending voting rights case: in December, a Wisconsin judge ordered that 232,000 voters would be purged if they failed to respond to official elections mailings at their registered address. While that move has been blocked by a state court of appeals, the Supreme Court could reinstate it; while Kelly has so far recused himself from the proceedings because he once advised the conservative group that brought the lawsuit, he’s said he could rejoin the case if he wins re-election. That raises the possibility he could take part in a ruling that would ensure tens of thousands of voters—disproportionately from Democratic areas—are deactivated from the voting rolls months before a critical presidential election and in the midst of a nationwide pandemic.
With the election scheduled to take place as normal, turnout among key Democratic constituencies could fall precipitously, particularly among college students, whose schools have moved to online-only classes, and in Milwaukee, the epicenter of the state’s outbreak and home to 70 percent of the state’s black population. Milwaukee County boasts just 16 percent of Wisconsin’s population, but has made up half of the state’s roughly 1,600 coronavirus diagnoses and 16 of its 32 deaths—the vast majority from black or Latino residents.
“It’s not right from a public health perspective.”
Preliminary returns of ballots suggest that voting is taking place among a dramatically reshaped electorate. To date, absentee ballots are being returned at a much higher rate from the staunchly Republican counties outside of Milwaukee than from heavily Democratic Milwaukee County or in Madison’s Dane County. Relative to 2016, turnout has fallen the most in poor, heavily black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, according to Neil Albrecht, executive director of the city’s election commission. “Real democracy is when every eligible voter has an opportunity to cast a ballot—and we couldn’t be further from that right now in the city of Milwaukee,” he says.
If voters do not vote absentee, it’s highly unlikely they’ll show up on Tuesday in large numbers, and those that try to will face dramatically reduced opportunities to vote. The state is short nearly 7,000 poll workers, prompting 111 communities to admit they have no one willing or able to operate their elections. Milwaukee has cut the number of polling places from its usual 180 to just five. While Evers has taken the unprecedented step of asking the National Guard to staff polling places, that won’t make up the labor shortage, nor convince voters it’s safe to show up. “People are going to be making a very difficult decision on Election Day and have to choose between placing themselves at some level of risk or they’re going to choose not to vote,” Albrecht says. “As an election administrator I’d never want to hold an election under these conditions.”
While a record number of around a million Wisconsin voters have requested absentee ballots for the April 7 election, that’s well short of the 2.1 million people that participated in the 2016 presidential primary. The state’s absentee ballot laws are notably restrictive—a voter must get a witness to observe them signing their ballot, a particularly burdensome requirement at a time of social distancing. Election officials in Milwaukee have already received 450 absentee ballots that cannot be counted because they lack a witness signature. Voters must also include a copy of their ID with their absentee ballot, even though many people will be afraid to travel to or spend time in lines at the DMV to obtain a government ID if they lack one. In the city of Madison alone, there have been over 1,200 absentee ballots submitted without the required ID. Ballots must be received by Election Day to count, and many voters may not receive a requested absentee ballots in time given the unprecedented volume of requests being handled by already short-staffed election officials. Meagan Wolfe, the top administrator for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, anticipated that as many as 27,000 ballots could arrive after Election Day and not be counted.
Albrecht and other election officials across Wisconsin have strongly argued for the election to be postponed, just like nearly every other state faced with conducting an election under the pall of the coronavirus. “It’s not right from a public health perspective and it’s not right from a voter access perspective,” Albrecht said. “There’s nothing fair about this election.”
Wisconsin has emerged as a key battleground in Republican efforts to make it harder to vote. In 2016, the state’s GOP-backed voter ID law prevented up to 23,000 people from voting in Dane and Milwaukee counties, according to a University of Wisconsin study, with black voters three times as likely as whites to say they were deterred from voting.
The spread of coronavirus will now make getting to the polls that much harder. It’s a scary situation for voters and a potentially nightmarish one for Democrats. Low Democratic turnout has helped Republicans maintain a controlling majority on Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court, just as it stands poised to decide a case that could further suppress Democratic participation in one of the country’s most important presidential battlegrounds.
UPDATE: Late on Thursday, a federal judge declined to postpone the election in response to a lawsuit by Democrats and voting rights groups seeking a delay, but relaxed some absentee rules, allowing voters to skip witness signatures and return ballots as late as April 13.