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Vox Sentences: Go vote tomorrow. No excuses.

Vox Sentences is your daily digest for what's happening in the world, curated by Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews. Sign up for the Vox Sentences newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox Monday through Friday, or view the Vox Sentences archive for past editions.

Happy* election eve! *Or terrifying! Your choice, really.


You may not have heard, but there’s an election tomorrow

Donald Trump
Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/TNS via Getty Images
  • If you are eligible to vote in the US election, and you haven’t voted yet, you should vote tomorrow. Google will help you! Go make a plan. [Google]
  • If you are worried about intimidation, please bookmark this ACLU page explaining what your rights are at the polls and what to do if they are violated. [ACLU]
  • But you probably shouldn’t worry about intimidation. Most of the rumored white supremacist suppression efforts have turned out to be mostly hot air... [Vox / Dara Lind]
  • ...while Democrats, who sued Republicans in several states and nationally for attempting to intimidate voters through “poll monitoring,” have had those suits shut down in the typical flurry of last-minute election litigation. [BuzzFeed News / Chris Geidner]
  • Election law guru expert Rick Hasen argues that Democrats secured a victory simply by forcing Republicans and the Trump campaign to go on the record about what exactly they meant by “ballot security” efforts, and to promise not to intimidate voters outright. [Slate / Richard L. Hasen]
  • If you are intimidated by anything on Election Day, it is more likely to be the daunting length of the line you’re standing in. On Sunday, early voting lines stretched for hours in several states — and they’re likely to be just as long in some locations on Election Day. [Vox / Libby Nelson]
  • This is not, and will not be, an accident. In areas that were under federal election monitoring before 2013 (when the Supreme Court struck down the relevant provisions in the Voting Rights Act), 868 polling places have been closed — most, unsurprisingly, in areas serving black and brown voters. [NYT Magazine / Emily Bazelon]
  • Of course, when people of color are willing to stand in long lines to vote, and polling hours are extended so that everyone in line can vote, that is also suspicious — and possibly, to Donald Trump, evidence that those voters were being “bused in.” [Vox / Dara Lind]
  • That is the wrong takeaway. This is the right one: When people, despite all the obstacles, do everything they can to exercise their right to vote, that is an inspiration. You should be inspired. Go vote. [Memphis Commercial Appeal / David Waters]

One day more!

Long lines at the polls
Mike Cardew/Akron Beacon Journal/TNS via Getty Images
  • If you are like most Americans, you are probably extremely anxious about who is actually going to win the election! [Vox / Brian Resnick]
  • It is eminently clear that Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump in the popular vote. But thanks to the byzantine intricacies of the Electoral College, Donald Trump could get fewer votes from people and more votes from state electors. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
  • If you have been relying on FiveThirtyEight for your election projections, you are probably more nervous than if you’ve been looking elsewhere. FiveThirtyEight has been substantially more bullish on Trump than other projections, for reasons Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post detailed (and somewhat over-vehemently criticized) here. [Huffington Post / Ryan Grim]
  • But look! Even FiveThirtyEight says Hillary Clinton is probably going to win. And we will never actually know which model is correct about Trump’s relative odds, because (thank heavens) we’re not conducting 1,000 trials of this election to see the probability distribution. [FiveThirtyEight]
  • ...We’re not, right?
  • Anyway. If you are a Democrat, maybe you should spend less time being worried about the presidency and more time being worried about the House and Senate, both of which could easily remain in Republican hands. [Vox / Dylan Matthews]
  • Or you could just geek out on state ballot referenda and high-profile local elections, courtesy of this exhaustive spreadsheet compiled by the incomparable Daniel Nichanian. [Daniel Nichanian]

Never mind

James Comey
Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images
  • Remember when FBI Director James Comey threw Washington into a panic by announcing that there might be new emails relevant to the bureau’s all-but-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton? He announced on Sunday that they’d gone through all of them, and there wasn’t actually anything relevant after all, sorry. [Vox / Andrew Prokop]
  • If you have no idea how computers work, it may seem impossible that agents could look through 650,000 emails in eight days to determine that all of them were either duplicates or irrelevant personal emails. But it is indeed possible. [Wired / Andy Greenberg]
  • The Clinton campaign is pressing its advantage, asking networks to stop airing ads that claim Clinton “is under investigation” (though the investigation has not formally been closed). [Dan Merica via Twitter]
  • To Trump supporters, though, the procedural niceties hardly matter. Clinton’s wrongdoing was always less about the FBI’s findings than a general sense of corruption and treason. [Slate / Jim Newell]
  • That sense of corruption, we’ve learned over the past week, is shared by some at the FBI. It’s going to be interesting to see how the bureau responds to the next president — whoever he or she may be. [Vox / Yochi Dreazen]

Miscellaneous

  • A Japanese designer has designed a map that, unlike Mercator, gets the areas of countries almost exactly right. [Wired / Liz Stinson]
  • Trump will likely lose, but Trumpism is winning in Poland, to terrifying effect. [NYT Mag / James Traub]
  • What it’s like to live off Minions merchandise for a whole weekend. [Vice / Isabelle Hellyer]
  • Embryonic stem cell researchers put out of work by CRISPR are our generation’s disemployed textile workers. [Science / Jon Cohen]
  • I, Dylan, am a big fan of constitutional monarchy, but even for me this argument for monarchy monarchy is quite a lot. [NYT / Nikolai Tolstoy]

Verbatim

  • “This guy is dangerously unhinged. And, for all the things people have said about me over the years, I should be able to spot Dangerously Unhinged.” [Glenn Beck to New Yorker / Nicholas Schmidle]
  • “In Chevy Chase, Comet Ping Pong is known for its pizzas, concerts, and ping pong tables. On the grimiest corners of the rightwing internet, though, the restaurant has earned another reputation this election cycle: as the potential home base of a global Democratic sex ring.” [Washington City Paper / Will Sommer]
  • “Tim Kaine is a really cool guy. I don’t know if it comes off as much — like I got to really chop it up [with him] — but I don’t know if the public fully knows that he cares. He super-cares.” [Pusha T to NY Mag / Rembert Browne]
  • “‘We don’t have a name for him,’ said special forces Maj. Ahmed Hussein, using a black marker to write ‘Heroic martyr, Mosul division’ on the body bag.” [AP / Susannah George]
  • “How famous was I? When I was a somebody, Jackie Chan was a nobody.” [Angela Mao to NYT / Alex Vadukul]

Watch this: From white supremacy to Barack Obama, the history of the Democratic Party

The party completely flipped. [YouTube / Johnny Harris and Andrew Prokop]

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