crabbeby jubce

Earlier this week, when I was talking with my girlfriend about the Michigan primary results, she asked me if we could also vote uncommitted in our state’s primary. Since we live in Georgia, I knew that we didn’t have that option, so I told her that it wasn’t possible and that I personally planned to use my ballot to write in Jane Fonda. Then she asked me if that vote would be counted, which made me realize something: I didn’t know if it would. I looked it up, and and after a bit of searching, I learned that the answer was no. As a Georgia voter, I have to either vote for one of the three names on the ballot or a “validated write-in candidate” or my vote will be discarded. My year-old plan to vote for Jane had always been DOA, and I had never known it until that moment. This got me thinking. If I, someone who writes about politics for a living, didn’t know the exact procedures for a protest vote in my primary in my own state, how many prospective uncommitted voters out there actually know what their options are? I presumed that someone out there had published a guide for how to protest vote in each state, but, at least as far as I can tell, such a guide does not exist. To remedy this problem, I decided to create a guide myself. The following is the first ever state-by-state, territory-by-territory cheat sheet for how you can, and cannot, cast a protest vote against this administration in your upcoming Democratic primary.

Category 1: Can Vote Uncommitted

This is the simplest and most straightforward category. In these states and territories, voters are given a Michigan-style uncommitted option on their ballots. These ballots are fully counted in the results like votes for any of the named candidates. If the total uncommitted vote reaches 15% statewide or in a congressional district, it will be awarded delegates.

Although some of these states have additional protest voting options in addition to uncommitted, selecting the uncommitted line is the most direct and straightforward way to register an anti-Biden vote. If available, it should be chosen over all other options, including write-ins, blank ballots, or votes for named candidates like Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson.

State/territory list:

March 5th: Alabama, Colorado (Called “Noncomitted”), Iowa (Mail-only Caucus), Massachusetts (Called “No Preference”), Minnesota, North Carolina (Called “No Preference”), Tennessee, American Samoa

March 6th: Hawaii

March 12th: Northern Mariana Islands, Washington, Democrats Abroad

March 19th: Kansas

March 23rd: Missouri

April 2nd: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Wisconsin

April 6th: Alaska (Called “Undeclared”)

April 13th: Wyoming (Caucus, Called “Undeclared”)

May 14th: Maryland

May 21st: Kentucky

May 23rd: Idaho (Caucus)

June 4th: Montana (Called “No Preference”), New Jersey, New Mexico

June 8th: Virgin Islands

Category 2: No Uncommitted Option, But Can Vote Write-Ins

Following the set of states and territories that provide straightforward uncommitted option, we reach a small, unique category of primary contests. These states do not provide an uncommitted option, but they do allow for write-in votes, and they take the unique step of tallying every single one of these write-ins in their vote totals. This allows for voters to vote for whoever they want, from Abraham Lincoln to the demiurge, and still see their ballots counted in a broad “write-in” pile of general dissent.

Unlike uncommitted votes, write-in votes will not be able to win delegates as a category—they are only tallied together as a group convenience on election results pages for the sake of convenience. Legally, they all represent votes for entirely different candidates. While it would technically be possible for a write-in candidate to win delegates if they hit the required benchmarks through write-in votes for them, there are currently no efforts to coordinate this. As such, feel free to vote for whoever or whatever you want if you live in these states or territories.

State/territory list:

March 5th: Vermont

May 21st: Oregon

June 4th: Washington, D.C.

Category 3: No Uncommitted Option, Most Write-Ins Not Tallied, But Blank Votes Tallied

Right on the heels of the previous small list with very specific rules is another small list with even more specific rules. Like Category 2, these states do not provide an option to vote uncommitted, but allow for write-ins. Where they differ from the Category 2 states is that they do not count most write-ins in their overall tallies. To save time, only write-in votes for “qualified” write in candidates are considered valid and counted. This means that any write-in vote that says something like “ceasefire,” “uncommitted,” and, yes, “Jane Fonda,” will be discarded.

For most states that do this and don’t provide an uncommitted option, this rules out the possibility of a protest vote beyond voting for the named candidates. These states are the exception, however. Unlike most states, they count blank ballots in their totals. While blank ballots cannot earn delegates, they are counted as a bloc, making them a clear statement of opposition to Biden that avoids providing support for Phillips or Williamson. As such, it is best to send back ballots in these states.

State/territory list:

March 5th: Maine

March 30th: North Dakota (Caucus)

April 2nd: New York

April 28th: Puerto Rico

Category 4: No Uncommitted Option, Most Write-Ins Not Counted, Blank Ballots Not Counted

Category 4 states have easily the most delegates of any section on this list. Unfortunately, they’re also where the options for protest votes become sharply limited. These states have similar rules as Category 3 states. They don’t provide an uncommitted ballot line and don’t tally write-in votes except for those given to qualified write-in candidates. What makes them different from Category 3 states is that they also don’t count blank votes in their tallies.

To register a non-Biden vote in the tallies here, you have to vote for someone pre-approved by the state, whether that be a named candidates on the ballot or a qualified write-in candidate. For most states, this leaves you with Dean Phillips and/or Marianne Williamson if you want your vote to count. Feel free to choose between the two at your own discretion, although you can always vote for another listed candidate or even prick someone from your state’s list of qualified write-in candidates if you really want to avoid voting for either of them.

State/territory list:

March 5th: California (Both Dean and Marianne on ballot), Texas (D and M), Virginia (D and M), Utah (D and M)

March 12th: Georgia (D and M)

March 19th: Arizona (D and M), Illinois (D and M), Ohio (Dean only)

April 23rd: Pennsylvania (Dean only)

May 14th: Nebraska (Dean only), West Virginia (Dean only)

Category 5: No Uncommitted Option, No Write-in Option, Blank Ballots Not Counted

Category 5 is very similar to Category 4, except with one difference. Instead of just making the write-in option functionally useless, these states don’t provide it at all. There’s no way to get around voting for one of the named candidates of you want to cast a protest vote in these states.

State/territory list:

March 5th: Arkansas (D and M), Oklahoma (D and M)

March 12th: Mississippi (No D or M or anyone else. Biden will just get 100% of the vote here. They’re still holding the contest, though.)

March 23rd: Louisiana (D and M)

June 4th: South Dakota (D and M)

June 8th: Guam (Candidate list currently unavailable)

Category 6: No Primary

Here’s the strangest section of them all. These states just cancelled their primaries and handed all of their delegates to Biden. They won’t let you vote against him even if you want to!

State/territory list: Florida and Delaware

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voting 'uncommitted' aka utilizing the protest vote is now one of the key strategies to let the biden administration know exactly what you think of their policies. it doesn't affect your vote in november, but it does very much affect the US policies being enacted on the ground in gaza right now.

think of it as a "fuck you" to joe biden, in the most democratic way possible.

They view a string of words as a thing to make forecasts about, like the weather.  You cannot talk to them, or tell them to do things – not because they “aren’t smart enough for that,” just because that isn’t how these models are intended to view their inputs.

An analogy:

Imagine a science fiction story in which it turns out that the weather is being manipulated in subtle ways by advanced aliens who are trying awkwardly to communicate with us.  As a result, every weather pattern we see is actually expressing a thought, in some alien “language of weather” – just as expressive and nuanced as a human language, let’s say, but also just as opaque to an outsider unaware of the phonology and syntax (etc.) and even the fact that these properties exist.

Suppose that, at the time this story takes place, humans have not yet “cracked the code” and learned the alien language.  In fact, let’s say the humans don’t even know about the aliens yet, and have no idea that weather might be communicating anything.

However, suppose also that our weather models have gotten pretty sophisticated and accurate, to the point that they can forecast the weather almost exactly up to a horizon of a few paragraphs days.  In the quest for better and better weather prediction, we’ve ended up building computer models that don’t just reproduce the phenomena of real fluid mechanics – they also reproduce the patterns in the alien messages (”syntax,” continuity of topic and style, etc.), as they manifest themselves in actual day-by-day, region-by-region weather.  Perhaps we mistake these for emergent consequences of some unresolved small-scale behavior.

Anyway, suppose we’ve gotten to that point.  From the aliens’ perspective, our weather forecasts might look just the way that impressive language model output looks to us. They might say things like, or analogous to, “wow, that sounds like something one of us would really say!”, or “they stayed on topic for a long time there,” or “perhaps they understand more of [advanced alien physics] than we realize, given that they are able to create accurate and coherent imitations of the [advanced alien physics] primers we’ve been trying to send them.”

Nonetheless, the humans and their simulations wouldn’t actually understand anything the aliens were saying.  At least not in the sense of “understand” that means “can make the intended associations between these words and non-linguistic experience.”  If the aliens were to encode the message “there is treasure at such-and-such location, go there!”, we wouldn’t be able to obey whether we wanted to or not.  We wouldn’t know they were talking about that location, or about treasure, or anything.

If the aliens really wanted us to go to that place, they could try to “drive us around” by (say) stirring up weather that portends future disaster somewhere so everyone evacuates, and then doing the same for the place they evacuated from, until their evacuation path eventually puts them in the right place.  The resulting series of weather phenomena would not say anything resembling “there is treasure at such-and-such location, go there!” – it would almost certainly say something totally different – but only this specific unrelated message would make us follow the injunction.  (This is analogous to prompting zero-shot results from a language model: you don’t tell it “write a summary!”, you write something that is often followed by a summary and let it predict the weather from there, so to speak.)

Importantly, our complete inability to communicate in the alien language is unrelated to our level of (implicit) understanding of the aliens’ world, including stuff like [advanced alien physics] that we do not know except in this implicit way.  Our weather models might well include – in some opaque way, threaded subtly through the details of their various approximate parameterizations for clouds, radiation, turbulence, etc. – a rich knowledge of the alien world, its customs, its ideas, and its perhaps foreign physical constraints and lack thereof.  But, despite having a working knowledge of how all these many things work in relation to one another, we wouldn’t know how to relate a single one of them to its appropriate referent in the physical world.  If they get into dire straights and send some desperate plea, we’ll be able to continue on its theme in a way that reflects a sensitive appreciation of their plight, but we will have no clue that our sensitive appreciation is an appreciation of some extra thing out there (them) of which the weather is just a mirror.  We’d just think we knew a whole lot about the weather. 

Meanwhile, we would have no versatility in producing the alien language: we can say what we’d guess a typical alien message-writer would say, but we can’t saying anything else.