Yale Daily News — Week of Nov. 6

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NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · VOL. CXLIII, NO. 10 · yaledailynews.com

Officials: Election Day much smoother than 2018

YALE DAILY NEWS

This year, lines were long in the morning, but wait times shortened as the day progressed. stream of New Haven residents who she would assist in signing in at the polls.

“It’s a long day,” Manning said.

A city officials and community leaders began to also wake up, many of them were thinking back to the 2018 midterm elections. That year, the News reported hundreds of Yale students being turned away from the polls after hours-long lines — a gen-

BY THOMAS BIRMINGHAM STAFF REPORTER For Ella Manning, Election Day started at 4:30 a.m.

She arrived at the Ives Main Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library, or NHFPL, bright and early, ready to begin her shift as a poll booth worker. Gloves and mask at the ready, she prepared for the soon to be steady

eral air of chaos. Multiple city leaders, like Ward 7 Alder Abigail Roth ’90 and Ward 1 Alder Eli Sabin ’22, told the News that in the run-up to Tuesday’s election, they feared similar disorder.

But while some hiccups were reported throughout the day, by nightfall many of these officials felt far better about the Election Day process than they had in 2018. Lines were

long in the morning, but wait times shortened as the day progressed.

Speaking to the press shortly after he voted at Wilbur Cross High School on Tuesday morning, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker pointed out how efficiently that polling site was run.

But he urged Elm City voters to be prepared for some delay at the polls.

“People need to expect long lines on Election Day,” Elicker said on the long line of voters at Cross. “It’s a sign that people really want to voice their opinions and concerns about what’s going on in the nation and also make a statement about the direction we need to head in in Connecticut.”

The mayor told the News he voted for former Vice President Joe Biden for president and filled out a straight Democratic ballot. He expressed a general excitement about his experience.

“I just love Election Day and the energy that is felt during the day with people standing in the polls,” Elicker said. “I felt like it was important for me to vote in-person. There were some familiar faces and some younger folks.”

Polling site confusion However, as is somewhat custom in the Elm City, the day was not without its mishaps.

The most notable error was that throughout the day, various voters — especially Yale students — had to be redirected across different polling sites. The New Haven Independent first reported that some Yale stu-

dents had shown up at Wexler-Grant School in Ward 22 prepared to cast their ballots, only to be told they needed to go to the NHFPL at 133 Elm Street, roughly one mile away. The News reported yesterday that the Registrar of Voters office incorrectly listed a chart of 2020 polling “districts” on their website. The document provided by the Registrar’s office did not include all of the polling sites for this election, reflecting only those used during municipal elections in odd-numbered years.

The Yale University student group Yale Votes used the information on this list in their effort to inform students on where to vote, and the erroneous polling locations were distributed both among students and through official channels such as the residential college deans. Yale Votes representative Jonathan Schwartz ’21 said his organization is only as accurate as the sources it relies on — such as the Registrar of Voters. He apologized for the miscommunications, which the group corrected on its website the morning of Election Day. “It’s astonishing that the New Haven Registrars of Voters and the Secretary of State’s Office could not coordinate and communicate clear polling locations for the New Haven community,” Schwartz wrote in a statement to the News.

Sabin said that there were also a “handful” of Yale students, who appeared at NHFPL to vote, only to be SEE ELECTIONS PAGE 4

City polling site information contradicted state authorities tion look-up in order to find out where to cast their ballots, rather than using the city’s polling places spreadsheet posted on the city of New Haven’s elections page and originally used to guide students on the Yale Votes website. City officials called the spreadsheet “misleading.”

New Haven’s Democratic Registrar of Voters Shannel Evans and Republican Registrar of Voters Marlene Napolitano did not respond to requests for comment over multiple days in regard to voting concerns. Yale Votes has since updated its information to reflect state polling locations for each residential college. Students in Timothy Dwight and Silliman colleges are among those who likely received

BY THOMAS BIRMINGHAM AND EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTERS Two years ago, a multi-hour line snaking around City Hall had caused a bottleneck in same-day voter registration, leaving hundreds of New Haven voters unable to cast their ballots before the 8 p.m. registration deadline during the 2018 midterm elections.

Even before polls opened throughout the city on Tuesday morning, discrepancies between polling site information circulated by the state and information circulated by the city had already generated confusion and concern.

Voters in New Haven should have referred to the state of Connecticut’s online voter registra-

misleading information from the New Haven city spreadsheet.

“This error underscores how important it is that every voter (regardless of where they are voting) double check their information (including registration status and polling location) with their Secretary of State’s portal before heading to the polls tomorrow,” wrote Yale Votes representative Jonathan Schwartz ’21 in a statement to the News.

After checking the Yale Votes website, Kaley Pillinger ’21 discovered that her listed polling location was Wexler-Grant School at 55 Foote St. — a site she visited last SEE POLLING PAGE 5

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Discrepancies between polling site information circulated by the state and information circulated by the city generated confusion and concern.

Faculty donated almost exclusively to New Haveners demonstrate Democratic-affiliated candidates, groups for 'all votes be counted'

BY MADISON HAHAMY STAFF REPORTER Yale faculty overwhelmingly donate blue.

According to Federal Elections Committee filings data analyzed by the News, 611 current Yale professors and lecturers have donated $200 or more — the minimum donation amount that is publicly disclosed — to individual political groups and campaigns over the past seven years while employed by the University.

Of these donors, less than 3 percent donated to Republican-affiliated candidates and groups.

11,526 donations went to Democratic-affiliated groups, totaling $2,196,222. Groups that donate to both Democratic and Republican candidates received 223 donations, and just 65 donations, totaling $20,861, went to Republican candidates and groups. 558 individuals donated to Democratic-affiliated candidates and groups, 54 individuals donated to groups that make expenditures on behalf of both parties and 18 donated to Republican-affiliated candidates and groups.

Of all donation recipients, the Biden campaign received the largest

COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA

The Department of Astronomy was the only FAS STEM department among the top 10 donating departments.

sum from Yale faculty — $169,390 — while the Clinton campaign received donations from the greatest number of faculty — 132. The DNC closely followed Biden in the amount of money donated, receiving around $130,000. During the recent Democratic primary, a greater number of Yale faculty donated to Sen. Elizabeth Warren than to any other presidential candidate.

Nineteen students and professors interviewed by the News commented on the data and its implications for faculty and undergraduate teaching.

“Yale professors seem overwhelmingly in favor of some central values and policies that fight against inequality, against sexism and against racism, while advocating for social justice, good and universal health care, and other similar ones that better the lives of all inhabitants in the U.S., citizens and non-citizens alike,” wrote Jesus Velasco, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, which has one of the highest departmental SEE DONATIONS PAGE 4

CROSS CAMPUS

INSIDE THE NEWS

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY, 1963.

SEWAGE

New Haven police arrest Yale student Alan Mallach '66 for his role in a housing demonstration organized by the Congress of Racial Equality. He is one of six demonstrators arrested for "breach of peace" and slinging bottles at the police.

Using wastewater sludge as a predictor of rates of coronavirus infection? It's more likely than you think — and rates seen in wastewater are spiking.

Page 3 CITY

GAMZE KAZAKOGLU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Demonstrators gathered on the New Haven Green Wednesday afternoon, calling for election officials to "count every vote."

BY GAMZE KAZAKOGLU AND OWEN TUCKER-SMITH CONTRIBUTING REPORTERS On the day following an inconclusive presidential election, groups of New Haven residents took to demonstrations to tell election officials to “count every vote” and condemn voter sup-

MOVEMENTS

Students at the School of Art and School of Music discuss how social and political movements have informed their work.

Page 6 ARTS

pression and Trump’s calls to stop counting votes in several key states.

Wednesday afternoon saw the gathering of about three dozen demonstrators at the New Haven Green for a rally organized by local groups including the Working SEE DEMONSTRATIONS PAGE 5

VOTING

Read a selection of stories from the News' Elections 2020 special issue, published once every four years. Visit yaledailynews.com/ elections2020 for the rest of the issue.

Page 8 ELECTION

BULLDOG

Page 11 SPORTS

Handsome Dan XVIII, the Olde English Bulldogge who serves as Yale's mascot, is being retired in early 2021.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

OPINION GUEST COLUMNIST KIRAN MASROOR

GUE ST COLUMNIST NORA MOREAU

There is always someone In defense of non-voters singing, somewhere “I T LAST FEBRUARY,

he first time it happens, I’m introduced to a woman who works at the Yale New Haven Hospital. We smile at each other, she begins talking to me and I swear she has the voice of my eighth grade English teacher. It happens another time – this time I’m talking to my friend on Cross Campus and there’s a small smirk on her face as she tells me about her date on Friday. Her voice is broad and unapologetic and it is exactly the same shade as the voice of my old high school friend.

After the first two, I notice it more frequently. I’m introduced to my friend’s boyfriend and he tells anecdotes the same way my old family friend would. My poetry teacher talks with the humility of my old physics teacher. My roommate has the same warm demeanour as someone I’m no longer friends with.

I do not want to live in a world where our most precious memories do not communicate with each other. Where one person’s smile does not linger in our minds the same way someone else’s did a long time ago. Where one person’s laugh does not melt into another’s.

I love imagining how many more parallels I’ll get to make by the time I’m 30, by the time I’m 60. Will the knowledge of all the people I’ve known and loved stay with me until then? I suppose in a hypothetical sense I would like to write out the names of all the people I’ve known and loved and furiously fill in the lines in between, connecting all the people who always knew the right thing to say, all the people who have confused me and enraged me, all the people who I still haven’t finished dreaming about.

I use these parallels to remind myself of people far away from me. Since high school, I’ve realized how difficult it is to emotionally tend to relationships and friendships with people you’re no longer physically with. Life propels us head-first into a new world and it becomes more important to be present in these new moments.

So I’ll find it to be a source of great joy to be talking to a new friend and realize half-way through the conversation that I am reliving an old conversation with my former piano teacher. I’ll remember how our piano lessons would easily devolve into light-hearted small talk, suddenly punctuated by a deep reflection on the way music has changed our lives.

We can also use these parallels to remind ourselves of people we’re infinitely far from, people we’ll never physically be with again. Last February, my friend told me that the way I talked reminded her of someone in her life who had passed away; she felt like she had been given a chance to relive her old friendship through me. Since that moment, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the ways we communicate with people we’re no longer physically with; how these parallels can comfort and guide us through loss.

MY FRIEND TOLD ME THAT THE WAY I TALKED REMINDED HER OF SOMEONE IN HER LIFE WHO HAD PASSED AWAY; SHE FELT LIKE SHE HAD BEEN GIVEN A CHANCE TO RELIVE HER OLD FRIENDSHIP THROUGH ME. SINCE THAT MOMENT, I HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO STOP THINKING ABOUT THE WAYS WE COMMUNICATE WITH PEOPLE WE’RE NO LONGER PHYSICALLY WITH; HOW THESE PARALLELS CAN COMFORT AND GUIDE US THROUGH LOSS. AND SO WHEN WE FEEL UNBELIEVABLY DISCONNECTED FROM THE WORLD AROUND US, LET US TRY TO LOOK HARDER. And so when we feel unbelievably disconnected from the world around us, let us try to look harder.

Because I’d like to think we live in a world with infinite reminders of people we know and love. Maybe you will see a bright orange leaf fall from a tree onto someone’s head and they will laugh when they take it out of their hair. Or someone’s neck will crane to look, really look, at the sunset. A street musician will tap his foot to the beat of a familiar melody. There will always be someone singing, somewhere.

KIRAN MASROOR is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College. Contact her at kiran.masroor@yale.edu .

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f you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” That familiar phrase, wrapped in a matter-of-fact smugness, has slowly faded from mainstream liberal discourse over the past couple decades, with four years of Donald Trump only accelerating the trend. Supplanting it has been a more zealous judgment, reflective of the increasingly dark times we live in: “If you don’t vote, you’re a bad person.” Since this election has such transparently high stakes, the argument goes, non-voting is demonstrative of an apathy that could only be borne of privilege or ignorance. There’s subsequently been a lot of animosity directed toward non-voters in the lead up to Nov. 3.

But for decades now, non-voters have represented a plurality of eligible voters in every major election. Every time Election Day rolls around, instead of checking a box for the blue team or the red team, millions of Americans simply abstain from casting a ballot. Are all these people deserving of our scorn?

The answer should be no. Yet we nevertheless witness our pundits and peers relentlessly shaming those who do not vote, their choice treated like a cardinal sin. Naive moralism at best and blatant virtue signaling at worst, this type of condescension rarely persuades and, in the case of non-voting, usually obfuscates the real reasons behind the phenomenon.

It emphasizes the ethical culpability of individual actors rather than the moral-political failings of the system that gives rise to the actions — or inactions — in question. What is necessary, then, is a reconsideration of our attitudes toward the many Americans who do not vote.

Non-voters are, by and large, poor and working class people, a disproportionate number of them racial minorities.

Not only is voting made significantly more difficult for them due to structural inequities, but their political interests have seen scant representation over the last half-century. Starting in the 1970s, the Democratic Party began to decouple itself from organized labor and gradually transform its concern for underprivileged Americans into mere performance. It embraced a shallow notion of diversity while orienting itself toward an ascendant educated labor force, a gamble that paid off as more money flowed into politics in the following decades.

Today, it is the party of coastal elites, eschewing working class radicalism in favor of neoliberal dogma, all legitimized by a tepid social liberalism.

This isn’t to say we ought to instead revere the Republicans, who are even more unambiguous in their disdain for the downtrodden. It is to point out that American politics has devolved into a contest among the upper class — capital and the super wealthy on the one side and affluent professional labor on the other.

Neither party cares much about the day-to-day struggles of average Americans, about scrimping to make rent or ensuring there’s enough gas money for the week to get to work and take the kids to school. The policy proposals supposedly meant to uplift the economically disadvantaged trend towards laughable inadequacy or insincere lip service.

The decision to not vote isn’t made out of ignorance or privilege. No, non-voters don’t vote because election outcomes simply do not result in substantive changes to their lives.

They certainly have political opinions. Deeply held ones, even. Non-voters can ardently explain why Trump’s tweets

are idiotic, why Biden is uninspiring or why their mayor is a do-nothing loser. But contemporary American democracy as it exists in the public imagination has almost no impact on their socioeconomic position. To them, it’s about casting a vote and then observing nothing change, hallowed participation in an empty ritual. To quote an article from “American Compass,” “[Non-voters] have strong views, and they might get emotionally involved for a bit, but they know their place is to watch. They are spectators of a sport that doesn’t involve them, or care about them.” Theirs is a justified cynicism. Non-voters are understandably disaffected, alienated from a system that willfully ignores their suffering and then shames them for not wanting to participate in it.

Consequently, anyone who is sincere about mobilizing non-voters to get to the polls should focus less on pointed prodding and more on ensuring candidates and policy platforms speak to their material interests.

Get-out-the-vote campaigns, no matter how well-managed, will not solve the root of the problem, never mind the verbal denigration of non-voters on Twitter.

Rather than blaming non-voters for a narrowly lost swing state, we should instead concentrate on policies and organizing that will actually bring them into the fold.

Political agency will not emerge from within the system as it currently exists. The only thing that will spark the voting and broader political involvement of the non-voting masses is a real movement seeking to abolish the present state of things, one that centers the material betterment of marginalized peoples.

NORA MOREAU is a senior in Pierson College. Contact her at ian.moreau@yale.edu .

Let the Constitution die

1

0,704 — the number of votes which catapulted my home state of Michigan’s 16 electoral votes to Donald Trump in 2016. I had this number bouncing around in my head as I dropped my absentee ballot into the blue mailbox last week, the responsibility feeling nearly overwhelming. I know, logically, that my single vote is unlikely to swing any election, but there’s something incredibly anxiety-inducing and intoxicating about believing that to be true.

Pollsters have spent the last few months obsessing over a handful of counties in a handful of states, a small subset of thousands of people — the determinants for an election which has millions of eligible voters and billions of helpless observers.

On Oct. 26, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the United States Supreme Court, securing a 6-3 conservative majority and the third Trump appointment to the Supreme Court. But the court has been failing democracy left and right even without Barrett: The day she was appointed, the court ruled that Wisconsin ballots that are postmarked before Election Day but arrive at voting precincts afterward will not be counted, further incentivizing the Republican assault on the USPS and the privatization of public services.

Indeed, the Right is on the offense. Joe Biden cannot change that.

Yet part of the reason why Joe Biden — and the rest of the Democratic Party — more frequently become enablers rather than any type of #resistance is not due to Biden’s campaign persona as the “nice guy” to Trump’s blatant rudeness and white supremacy. I’d argue it’s not even due to Biden’s moderate politics.

Instead, it’s because Democrats refuse to fight dirty. Barrett’s nomination illustrates that the Democratic Party has become so ineffectual as to resist using its own preexisting Constitutional powers while Republicans openly flaunt constitutionality and procedure.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have introduced the remaining Articles of Impeachment that the Democratic House declined to introduce at the end of 2019,

thereby halting all presi d e n t i a l appointments. Even self-proclaimed “progressives” MCKINSEY are balking at the idea of CROZIER court-packing, a pracLeft and tice used most n o ta b ly by Write! the president most closely associated with American progressivism: Franklin D. Roosevelt. These things are perfectly legal. They’re also perfectly possible — and would indicate to the American people that they were smart to trust a Pelosi-led House in 2018.

In Joe Biden, Democrats have embraced their own brand of conservatism. Not, of course, the conservatism of the modern American conservative coalition, which was originally formed by William F. Buckley, Jr. ’50 by uniting the interests of big business, religious conservatives and segregationists. Instead, Democrats have embraced a pseudo-Burkean conservatism that stipulates a return to normal following a Trump ousting, a belief in universal American values and the idea that the best world existed under the Obama administration when regular people didn’t need to think about politics.

Where the Republican Party has claimed American nationalism to ignite racially and economically motivated populism, the Democratic Party has clung to their coattails while attempting to reclaim the American flag, the Constitution and the values we had all along.

But it’s time for Democrats to retire the “American Dream” ethos. The Constitution is dead, and Republicans have killed it. It’s time for Democrats to let it die.

These conversations are already happening — about the electoral college, about voter suppression, about court-packing, about executive power. But right now, they’re happening in a fringe wing of the Democratic Party, which, though vocal, has not been successful at convincing the party’s

elites. Many Democrats want to make this a matter of principle: We shouldn’t have to cheat to win. But the other team is both cheating and winning.

MANY DEMOCRATS WANT TO MAKE THIS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE: WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO CHEAT TO WIN. BUT THE OTHER TEAM IS BOTH CHEATING AND WINNING. Regardless of who wins this election, we already know it’s illegitimate. People have been denied the right to vote. Some of these people were disenfranchised because of their criminal records or their immigration statuses or even because they mailed their ballots to Wisconsin too late. Millions of people are essentially disenfranchised by the Electoral College, by the primary election process, and by barriers to voting like long wait lines, remote polling places, disability inaccessibility, domestic violence experiences and more.

I don’t know what world I’ll be waking up to tomorrow.

And I’m scared. But I do know that I’ll wake up to a world in which Donald Trump will still be in office, even for a few more months. I’ll wake up to a world in which one “side” desperately clings to the rules while the other flagrantly disregards them to disastrous consequences. And I’ll wake up to a world in which the Constitution is already dying right in front of us, and the American Dream was always just that — a dream.

MCKINSEY CROZIER is a junior in Timothy Dwight College. Her column, titled “Left and Write,” runs on alternate Fridays. Contact her at mckinsey.crozier@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 3

“Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.” VICKI BAUM WRITER

ULA, Semilla host Día de Muertos events

ÁNGELA PÉREZ/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Día de Muertos — a Mexican and Central American holiday celebrated on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2 to commemorate deceased loved ones.

BY ÁNGELA PÉREZ AND LARISSA JIMENEZ CONTRIBUTING AND STAFF REPORTERS New Haven Latino immigrant activist groups, including Unidad Latina en Acción, or ULA, and the Semilla Collective, hosted separate events to celebrate Día de Muertos — a Mexican and Central American holiday celebrated on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2 to commemorate deceased loved ones — in the Elm City this week.

On Sunday evening, ULA hosted a small gathering for its members to honor this tradition, while giving a politi-

cal tone to the events by asking visitors to “vote against hate” in the run-up to the Tuesday election. Organizers were given “pan de muertos,” a traditional food eaten on Day of the Dead, and hot chocolate as music played. An “ofrenda,” an altar made in commemoration of the deceased, was posted in the corner of the Casa Otoñal Community Room, where the group met. Casa Otoñal was filled with “caravelas,” large skeleton figurines made in the image of different types of community members. Sunday’s event was

followed by a Monday evening car caravan where participants drove around New Haven to rally voters against the re-election of President Donald Trump.

“We have lived four years with a message of hate towards us,” said John Jairo Lugo, organizer and leader of ULA, as translated by the News from Spanish.

“Because of this, our slogan this year is to honor the dead, fight for the living, but invite people to vote against hate.”

Jairo emphasized the celebration as a contribution to the larger New Haven community on behalf of the immigrant community that ULA represents.

Sofía Tecocoatzi — a member of ULA and a resident of New Haven for over two decades — said she received an invitation and attended Sunday’s event to continue her traditions from Tlaxcala in her native Mexico.

She told the News that she loves the holiday’s food and art.

“It’s nice to celebrate with other communities and Latinos, because every country has different customs,” Tecocoatzi told the News.

Lina Sampedro, another member of ULA, distributed food to visitors for most of the event, while other ULA members served hot chocolate. She noted that all the bread brought to the event was donated by community members.

Sampedro also noted that the cel-

ebrations have changed because of COVID-19.

“A lot changed because of the health and precaution of many people,” she said in Spanish, as translated by the News. “It changed quite a bit.”

Sampedro said that less people came out to the celebrations this year for fear of contracting coronavirus.

Hector Hernández — the lead coordinator for Sunday’s event — used recycled materials, acrylic paint, paper maché and bamboo to work with community members and make the “caravelas” and art for the celebration.

While art lined the walls of the space, a train full of decorated skulls sat at the center of the event. Hernández said this train is a representation of a set of trains known as “The Beast,” which travels from south Mexico to the United States. He emphasized that many immigrants lose their limbs or lives during the days-long trip aboard the trains.

The train was placed at the center of the space and filled with decorated sugar skulls to honor the lives lost during the trip.

“The final work doesn’t just belong to one person, it’s many people,” Hernández told the News in a translated interview.

The Semilla Collective — a local nonprofit whose work targets the city’s immigrant community — hosted a Día de Muertos parade and protest the following

day. The Monday evening event honored local missing and murdered Indigenous women, such as Lizzbeth Alemán-Popoca. Participants took to the streets of Fair Haven with painted banners and crosses to shout her and other disappeared women’s names and demand justice.

Alemán-Popoca, a resident of East Haven, went missing in July and James Gills, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, ruled her death as a result of “homicidal asphyxia.”

Hazel Mencos, an attendee and a friend of Alemán-Popoca’s sister, told the News that this case has personally affected her.

“In the past years we have commemorated those who have died crossing borders, in detention centers or at the hands of the authorities,” Mencos said. “This year we will honor Lizzbeth Alemán-Popoca and all of our missing and murdered sisters. Life is sacred and it is an act of violence by the state not to protect and treat the life of women as sacred.”

Mencos attributed Alemán-Popoca’s death to “patriarchal violence” that she said “does not go away when we cross borders” and “still exists in our communities.”

ULA was founded in 2002.

Contact LARISSA JIMENEZ at larissa.jimenez@yale.edu and ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu .

Sewage suggests New Haven in COVID-19 ‘red zone’

BY RAZEL SUANSING CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Recent wastewater data analyzed by a team from the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering indicates that New Haven’s COVID-19 cases are higher than city data suggests.

The data was published by COVIDTracker CT on Oct. 28. The findings indicate an uptick in coronavirus cases in New Haven, estimating that case numbers are at 20 cases per 100,000 people per day — as opposed to the 13.9 per 100,000 people reported by the city in last week’s press conference. New Haven Public Health Director Maritza Bond said in the conference that New Haven was already nearing the “red zone.” The “red zone” is defined as 15 cases per 100,000 people. However, the new data from Yale researchers suggests that New Haven might be reaching this zone in a few days, if it has not already. The new findings have caused alarm among city officials, who moved New Haven back from Phase 3 of its reopening to Phase 2 last Thursday.

The research project was spearheaded by Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering Jordan Peccia in March,

with assistance from doctoral student Alessandro Zulli GRD ’26 and research technician Annabelle Pan ’20.

“The recent upward trends in cases, wastewater concentrations and hospitalizations all indicate that we are in the midst of an outbreak, potentially even larger than the one we had in March,” Pan said.

In an email to the News, Zulli said that the laboratory roughly estimated viral RNA presence in wastewater based on data collected since March. From these estimates, Zulli said that the lab has now developed a more complex model that tracks wastewater information from several towns in Connecticut and uses viral RNA levels to predict cases, a model that Zulli said tests showed to be “fairly accurate.”

According to Pan, the research team monitors the viral genetic components in New Haven residents’ feces. The lab analyzes wastewater to detect its concentration of COVID-19 RNA. Through this process, Pan said the team could estimate positive COVID-19 cases three to five days before an infected individual would be included in official city case counts.

A detected case of COVID-19 is equivalent to 1,000 to 2,000 copies of viral RNA found in the wastewater. Currently, New Haven is recording more than 50,000 copies per milliliter of sludge.

Pan said that wastewater is a reliable indicator because it is not dependent on factors such as testing availability and hospital capacity. Ultimately, Pan said the data’s primary utility is not predicting the precise number of cases but rather showing trends in cases.

New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker did not respond to a request for comment from the News. However, last Wednesday, he said in an interview with the New Haven Register that City Hall has been following wastewater numbers and other COVID indicators to track the recent uptick. Elicker said that New Haven is planning to have several meetings this week to develop a response in anticipation of the increase in cases.

Bond also did not respond to a request for comment. In an interview with the Register, Bond stated that she “will have to make tough decisions on making recommendations” if the city continues in an upward trend of cases.

COURTESY OF UNSPLASH

New wastewater data from New Haven showed that the city might already be in the COVID-19 red zone.

In a press conference last Thursday, Elicker stated that the uptick in cases was caused by social gatherings among adults, specifically pointing to cases in the First Student Bus Company, Regal Care and Global Daycare.

“It is so important that we as a community make the right decisions so we can lower our cases and make sure that our kids are going back to school, so that we

can provide our restaurants the opportunity to make a dollar and hire more people,” Elicker said in the press conference.

Last Thursday, City Hall delayed the scheduled transition of New Haven Public Schools to the hybrid model due to an uptick in coronavirus cases.

Contact RAZEL SUANSING at razel.suansing@yale.edu .

St. Mary’s priest first person from CT to be beatified

BY SHARLA MOODY CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Last weekend, St. Mary’s Catholic Church celebrated the beatification of Father Michael McGivney — a priest who worked at the parish until his death in 1890.

McGivney’s beatification, which took place on Saturday at the Archdiocese of Hartford, marked the first of an individual from Connecticut. In the process of canonization, beatification is the step before sainthood. In Roman Catholicism, saints are people recognized for

their exceptional holiness and are prayed to in an act of intercession.

Now, McGivney is called Blessed Michael McGivney.

In order to be beatified, an individual must have a miracle attributed to them and an additional miracle must be attributed to them in order for the individual to become a saint. In Catholicism, a miracle needs to be unexplainable by science, and be verified by scientists. Pope Francis approved McGivney’s beatification after a family in Tennessee prayed to him to save their unborn son who was expected to

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

St. Mary’s Church hosted celebrations featuring speeches and prayer in honor of its now-beatified former priest.

die of hydrops fetalis and he was unexpectedly healed.

“After today, this is one of only 16 American cities with a saint or a blessed,” Father Joachim Kenney, associate pastor of St. Mary’s, told the News. “It’s an extremely gracefilled opportunity.”

According to a short documentary on McGivney by the Knights of Columbus, McGivney was conscious of anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic discrimination in New Haven, as well as the challenges of working class individuals in the late 1800s. If the breadwinner of a family died, the documentary claims that McGivney worked to ensure the family was still financially supported. In order to do so, McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus at St. Mary’s in 1882 to address family separation and create stronger bonds in the Catholic Church.

Today, the Knights of Columbus have over 1.9 million members worldwide and provide insurance, scholarships and loans to churches, according to the organization’s website.

“People were just very struck by his [McGivney’s] goodness and charity and the way he reached out to people and his kind of tireless work,” Kenney said. “Having an intercessor here at the parish, and in particular for the Knights of Columbus in general, it’s just huge.”

A c c o rd i n g to K e n n e y,

McGivney organized activities for youth, visited the sick and elderly and regularly ministered to prisoners during his lifetime.

Kenney said that McGivney once celebrated the Mass with and accompanied a man directly prior to his execution.

To celebrate McGivney’s beatification, St. Mary’s –– located on Hillhouse Avenue –– hosted a festival throughout the weekend.

The festival included events such as a performance by the Catholic folk group, The Hillbilly Thomists, a procession, an adoration service, a young adult vigil with praise and worship, talks, prayer and a candlelight Mass in addition to regular services. According to St. Mary’s website, all events followed the state’s COVID19 guidelines, with pre-registration and limited seating. A screen installed on Hillhouse also streamed the festival events live for public viewing.

Yale students also took part in the festival, both as participants and as volunteers.

“The great beauty of the veneration of holy figures in the [Catholic] Church is that in some sense it makes the faith closer to us,” Tommy Schacht ’21, a volunteer at the festival, said. “The Virgin of Guadalupe, more than just the Virgin Mary in the abstract, makes the Virgin Mary closer to people from Mexico. I think it’s very similar. It kind of grounds

the faith a lot closer to us, [to] have someone who walked these church steps, who we can pray to for intercession.”

Jazmine Click, DIV ’21, emphasized that the beatification of someone from her parish was a once-in-a-lifetime event. She said that during his lifetime, McGivney would have been familiar with Yale and the experience of its students.

Mary Margaret Schroeder ’24 echoed Click’s sentiment.

“Everything he did in his short life was really inspiring,” Schroeder said. “Just to know that you just kind of have to start small, and he did really impactful work.”

The festival also drew pilgrims, nuns, priests and other New Haven residents.

“It was just really beautiful to see just a reverence and joy that everybody had,” Abigail Chavez, who traveled from New York for the festival, said. “I think taking the time, stepping away, and getting on a two-hour train ride, was good for my soul, just to recenter myself and what’s important to then go back out into life more recharged.”

McGivney became ill during the flu pandemic of 1890 and passed away from pneumonia at 38. He was declared “Venerable” by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, approved for beatification by Pope Francis in May and beatified on Oct. 31.

Contact SHARLA MOODY at sharla.moody@yale.edu .

PAGE 4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

FROM THE FRONT

“If you can keep your son off the pipe and your daughter off the pole, you're ahead of the game.” CHRIS ROCK AMERICAN COMEDIAN, ACTOR

Election Day in New Haven ELECTIONS FROM PAGE 1 told to go to the Hall of Records at 200 Orange Street. He said to his knowledge, everyone who had the wrong location was able to successfully vote before polls closed.

Aaron Goode ’04, co-founder of local voting rights group New Haven Votes, monitored the situation in Ward 22 closely throughout the day. And while he confirmed that he believed everyone with a mistaken polling place was able to correctly cast a ballot, he expressed disappointment in the city’s lapse in communication.

“It’s very disconcerting that we haven’t been able to figure out a way to make this less confusing to people,” Goode said.

More absentee ballots cause smoother operations As mistaken voters were directed to the correct locations, Roth was keeping an eye on things at the Hall of Records. But by mid-morning, Roth said New Haven City Clerk Michael Smart had told her that roughly 500 absentee ballots had been dropped off at the site.

According to Goode, this number grew closer to a thousand by the time polls closed. While he believes this

reflects higher turnout, Goode noted that this influx of absentee ballots will likely take a long time to process.

“I’m glad people are coming in at the last minute,” Goode said. “But we’re not going to have a final count until at least tomorrow for New Haven. So people need to be patient.”

Goode, Sabin and Roth were all relieved to see that the election was operating more smoothly than the 2018 midterms. Sabin and Roth both noted that the long, early-morning lines may have daunted residents at first, as social-distancing requirements caused voters to stand six feet apart. But by midday, they said, voters were able to move in and out of their polling place in a smooth and largely hassle-free fashion.

Roth said she has made herself available throughout the day to assist voters with various questions, and said the only issue she ran into throughout Election Day was when she had to inform a few voters that they could not complete Election Day registration at the Hall of Records, but instead had to go to the city’s lone Election Day registration location: City Hall.

Goode attributed the smooth nature of Election Day voting experiences to the record number of people that voted via absentee ballot

before Election Day, which he said caused many people that would have otherwise waited in line at the polls to stay home. Public health concerns, he said, have produced well over 15,000 absentee ballot requests in New Haven — an unprecedented number.

“We had all of these opportunities for no-excuse absentee voting, and that has taken the pressure off of Election Day,” Goode said. “I think that is a very telling argument to make these absentee and early voting opportunities permanent.”

Making voices heard Several residents emphasized to the News that they were excited to add their voice to what they said was one of the most contentious election cycles in recent memory.

At Cross, New Haven resident Anna Hill told the News she decided to vote in person after failing to receive her mail-in ballot for the 2020 primaries. After considering the stakes of this year’s elections, she decided to risk the health concerns and go to the polls herself.

“I just didn’t trust that I would get it this time, so I chose to vote in-person,” Hill said.

At the Elm Street branch of the NHFPL, Gabriel Mesa ’22 said that

even though a vote by mail counts the same as one in-person, voting at the polls felt more impactful to him.

He described it as a “real civic experience.”

At Wexler-Grant in Ward 22, resident Jim Barabe called this election the “most significant of his lifetime.” His wife has Type-1 diabetes and expensive health care costs, and so one of the driving forces bringing him to the polls was an attempt to ease the strains of these costs on his family.

“There’s so many people in this country that are disenfranchised by the massive gaps in wealth and power,” Barabe said. “When you vote in a state or local election, you can’t just think about yourself.”

Nancy Lopez, a Ward 15 resident, said casting her ballot this year flooded her with emotions. Lopez said she believed her ballot to be part of a historic election amid the pandemic. This presidential election, Lopez said, will have “serious” consequences across the country.

“This was a major voting season,” Lopez said. “It was emotional, because you were hearing from voices everywhere — everybody had an opinion. This election was more serious than others before because of all of these opinions and every-

JESSE CHEUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Various voters — especially Yale students — had to be redirected across different polling sites due to inconsistent government information. thing that’s going on in the world.”

According to the Connecticut Secretary of State’s office, there were 205,609 votes cast in New Haven County in the 2016 presidential election.

Vanika Mahesh, Lukas Nel and Isaac Yu contributed to this reporting.

Contact THOMAS BIRMINGHAM at thomas.birmingham@yale.edu

Faculty political donations over the last seven years

KAI NIP/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The Yale School of Management had the second-highest number of unique donors and donations, at 25 donors and $191,428 in donations.

DONATIONS FROM PAGE 1 percentages of donors within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with three out of eight faculty donating.

“I am happy to be part of a community of colleagues who express this degree of universal solidarity,” he told the News.

The dataset analyzed by the News is not necessarily exhaustive given potential name variations — such as a name being “Jim” on the FEC filing for a professor whose first name is James — that may not be accounted for. In addition, FEC disclosure rules have changed over time. To be included in the dataset, donors had to give more than $200 to a single candidate within a specific period of time, but that time frame has changed over the years: one quarter for all donations in 2013 and 2014, one election cycle for donations to candidate committees in 2015 or later and one calendar year for donations to PACs or party committees in 2015 or later.

Top donating departments Of all University departments, academic faculty at the Yale Law School had both the highest number of donors — 51 — and the highest dollar amount of donations: $329,154.

The Yale School of Management had the second-highest number of unique donors and donations, at 25 donors and $191,428 in donations.

As for percentage of donors by department, two departments tied for first place, each with 50 percent: the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program in Yale College and the oncology specialty in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the Yale School of Medicine. Roderick Ferguson, chair of the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, declined to comment. Alessandro D. Santin and Elena Ratner, the oncology chiefs at the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and

Reproductive Sciences at the Yale School of Medicine, did not respond to the News’ request for comment.

The Department of Astronomy, the only FAS STEM department among the top 10 donating departments, had one of the highest total amounts of donations — the 10th highest of all schools and departments — as well as the seventh-highest departmental percentage of donors within the FAS. Sarbani Basu, the chair of the Department of Astronomy, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The donors Professors at professional schools topped the list of donation sizes.

The top individual donors were assistant professor of clinical public health Shelley Geballe, Milton Steinbach Professor of Management Barry Nalebuff, Deputy Dean and William K. Townsend Professor of Law Ian Ayres, Dean of the School of Public Health Sten Vermund and Deputy General Counsel and Yale Law School lecturer Cynthia Carr.

All five donated exclusively to Democratic candidates and groups.

Geballe, who has donated a total of $174,250, told the News that “my husband and I view our donations as an investment in building a more equitable, inclusive nation for our nine grandkids.”

Nalebuff was the second-highest individual donor, whose donations included a $25,000 donation to the DNC this past spring. According to a previous analysis by the News, he donated a similar amount in 2018.

Nalebuff told the News that, as a whole, the Yale School of Management is very politically active and takes its mission of educating leaders for both the business world and society at large very seriously.

“My colleagues and I believe in science and in climate change,” Nalebuff said. “We believe in diversity. We believe in the value of immi-

grants and the contributions of international students. We believe in honesty. We believe in protecting others. We believe in wearing masks.

I hope our teaching reflects these values without being political. And I, for one, would be pleased to support any political party that supports those values.”

Although Nalebuff is a generous donor, he also stressed that the Yale faculty are politically active in many ways that do not involve donations.

For example, Skelly Wright Professor of Law James Forman Jr., who donated to several Democratic-affiliated organizations, held weekly letter-writing campaigns to encourage people to vote, with participants writing over 6,300 letters over the span of four weekends.

Politics in the classroom?

William S. Beinecke Professor of Economics and Management Edward Snyder was one of the few donors to a Republican candidate, according to information available from the FEC filings.

While Snyder told the News that he hoped that Yale, and universities at large, would avoid “echo chambers,” he also complimented his colleagues in the School of Management for the fact that they avoid letting political views interfere with the quality of classroom instruction.

“Many Yale SOM professors raise questions with students about business and society in a neutral way,” Snyder said. “It’s noteworthy that many students appreciate that approach.”

Lecturer in English Mark Oppenheimer ’96 GRD ’03 expressed worry, however, about the ramifications of left-leaning political uniformity at the University, although he does not think such uniformity is the fault of any administrative official. Still, he said, faculty members’ political views can affect the education that Yale students receive.

In Yale College, Aron Ravin ’24 is similarly worried about politics entering the classroom, and he is particularly concerned about how holding political beliefs that differ from faculty members might affect grading. But Ian Berlin ’24 and Shannon Sommers ’22 said that faculty members’ political views have yet to affect their education.

Sommers, who is a political science and history major, frequently encounters professors who engage with contemporary politics in and beyond the classroom as “public intellectuals.” She told the News her professors handle those conversations “exceptionally” well.

But of all 19 people asked to com-

Data analysis and visualizations by Thomas Woodside. Contact him at thomas.woodside@yale.edu.

ment on the data as a whole and its implications for faculty and undergraduate teaching, Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History John Gaddis gave the most succinct answer.

"I wish we had more political diversity on the faculty,” Gaddis said.

“But I also wish the Republicans were less loathsome than they've recently become."

Democratic dominance More generally, students and professors reacted to the findings with varying degrees of surprise.

T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Professor of Religious Studies Carlos Eire told the News that he was surprised that there were Republican-affiliated donations at Yale, an institution he considers to be a “giant liberal echo chamber.” He expected there to be none.

“There is no genuine diversity in higher education when it comes to political leanings, and no genuine inclusion,” Eire said.

David Gelernter, professor of computer science, agreed. In an email to the News, he wrote that to him, the data suggests that Yale faculty as a whole are both “closedminded” and “incurious,” which he claims is a widespread issue across academia.

However, for David Simon, director of undergraduate studies for the Department of Political Science, the question of intellectual diversity is misleading. Simon acknowledges that there is an underlying preference for Democrats over Republicans in faculty, but claims that this could, at least in part, be due to “systematic” tendencies.

“While a couple of generations ago the key differences between the two parties might have been over economic or even foreign policy, they are now as much over values as anything else,” Simon wrote in an email to the News. “Universities have emerged (over the decades) as places that lean towards values like believing diversity itself is intrinsically beneficial, which runs counter to what the current Republican party leadership [believes]. One result of this is surely the bias in whom university faculty chooses to support, but it also certainly affects who chooses to seek work at a university in the first place.”

In an email to the News, Tamar Gendler, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote that Yale does not take into account political leanings when hiring faculty.

Professors back a professor Sid Carlson White ’22, chair of

the Yale Socialist Party, was unconcerned by the number and ratio of Yale faculty donations to Democratic-affiliated groups. Instead, he was worried about the level of faculty support for the Warren campaign.

Carlson White, who called Warren the candidate for the “intellectual elite class,” also told the News that it was unsurprising that Yale professors would throw their support behind Warren. But he considered that support to be “terrifying,” as he saw Warren as resisting the radical theory of change that Bernie Sanders represented. “[Professors who donated to Warren] are practicing a radically different theory of electoral politics than what they’re preaching [in the classroom],” White said. “Anyone who monetarily supports a candidate who resists that theory of change is highly suspect in terms of what their commitments are.”

Nalebuff and Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science Steven Smith also found the amount of Warren support unsurprising. Like Carlson White, they both specifically noted that Warren was the sole professor running, meaning that professors felt a certain comfort with her and her ideas that other candidates did not provide.

Sterling Professor of English Ruth Yeazell, one of Yale’s top donors to Warren’s campaign, added that Warren’s plans, both in their explanations of the problems and policy solutions, also likely stemmed from this professorial past.

Eugene Fidell, senior research scholar in law at Yale Law School, was another top donor to the Warren campaign. In an email to the News, he wrote that he first met Warren when he was an adjunct and she was a professor at Harvard Law School.

“I agree with her that we need major structural change and felt (and feel) that she has the intellect, rigor and personal integrity needed to bring that about — and raise the level of political discourse,” he wrote. “I also admire how she overc[a]me significant obstacles in her own life. The country is fortunate to have her in the political arena.”

Sterling Professor of Political Science James Scott, another top donor to the Warren campaign, added that he considered Warren to be more electable than Sanders despite her similarly progressive ideals.

According to a report from the Office of Institutional Research, Yale had 4,869 faculty members in the 2019-20 academic year.

Contact MADISON HAHAMY at madison.hahamy@yale.edu

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 5

FROM THE FRONT

“Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.” KARL LAGERFELD GERMAN CREATIVE DIRECTOR, FASHION DESIGNER

Confusion over Election Day polling locations POLLING FROM PAGE 1 year to vote in New Haven’s local elections.

The familiar location raised red flags for Pillinger, who has voted in New Haven twice prior. That’s because in New Haven, many constituents are sent to vote in different locations in odd- and even-numbered years, since state representative and senate districts are not exactly aligned with ward boundaries. Since 2020 is an even-numbered year when state positions are contested, Pillinger recognized that the polling location originally listed by Yale Votes and the city of New Haven could be erroneous.

Less than eight hours before polls opened, the Yale Votes website had still been drawing from the city’s published list and not the state’s.

The polling site posted on Pillinger’s state voter look-up — administered by the Office of the Secretary of the State — confirmed her suspicions: According to the information provided by the state, she should have voted at the New Haven Free Public Library’s main branch at 133 Elm St., roughly a one-mile walk from Wexler-Grant.

While attempting to vote at an incorrect site does not result in a penalty for voters, having to relocate could introduce additional delays that could have deterred or prevented voters from casting their ballots before 8 p.m. on Tuesday.

The discrepancies set off a latenight scramble on Monday as state and local election officials and Yale Votes coalition members tried to figure out what election source to trust.​ For upperclassmen and community members who have voted in New Haven in prior elections, these uncertainties are frustratingly familiar: Delays caused hundreds to be turned away from the polls in 2014 and 2016, and New Haven has also in recent years clocked dead last in the state for counting ballots on election night.

“This is yet another example of the widespread misinformation around voting that makes the simple act of casting your vote anything but straightforward,” Yale College Democrats president Molly Shapiro ’21 told the News. “We are frustrated by the inconsistency and hope to see far greater clarity going forward.”

According to the most recently corrected information posted by Yale Votes, a majority of students —

YALE DAILY NEWS

The Secretary of State’s voter search provided the most accurate source of polling site information. those living in Berkeley, Branford, Davenport, Grace Hopper, Jonathan Edwards, Pierson, Saybrook, Trumbull, Silliman, and Timothy Dwight colleges, as well as on Old Campus — were supposed to vote at the main branch of the NHFPL. Residents of Benjamin Franklin, Morse, Pauli Murray and Ezra Stiles colleges were supposed to vote at Wexler-Grant. And students who are living in Rosenfeld Hall, Timothy Dwight’s annex housing, should have reported to the New Haven Hall of Records at 200 Orange St. But the Secretary of State’s voter search provided the most accurate source of polling site information.

The New Haven Register also published a list of polling locations based on the city’s spreadsheet in an article published on Sunday. Ward 7 Alder Abigail Roth attempted to contact the Register to let them know that the information was misleading, but she received no response from the paper. The Register declined to comment on the accuracy of the article.

Multiple alders expressed confusion and exasperation over the contents of the spreadsheet as they

prepared to help constituents on Election Day. Ward 1 Alder Eli Sabin ’22 clarified that some residents of Ward 1 will vote at the main branch of the NHFPL, and others will vote at the Hall of Records. The city’s spreadsheet, however, lists only the public library as a polling place for Ward 1 residents. Sabin urged voters in his ward, particularly Yale students, to refer to the state system for accurate information.

“This is very frustrating,” Sabin said.

According to Ward 22 Alder Jeanette Morrison, Wexler-Grant is normally the only polling place for residents of her ward in odd-numbered years, but in federal and state election years such as 2020, some Ward 22 residents vote at the public library — just as voters from Sabin’s ward will.

She said this change was not reflected in the Registrar of Voters’ information.

“So I’m in Ward 22, and [this election] I vote at Wexler-Grant,” Morrison said. “Someone else, like a student in TD for example, because they have a different state representative, would have

a different polling location just from being on the other side of the street.”

The city circulated a spreadsheet similar to the 2020 polling locations list for the 2019 municipal elections. At first glance, the 2019 list appears to be a copy of the 2020 version. The list of polling locations is the same, and both documents are numbered one through 30. However, the 2019 document is labeled “Wards” and the 2020 document is labeled “Districts.” According to Roth, many voters would likely assume the 2020 document is based on the same ward boundaries as 2019, which could lead to voters ending up in the wrong place come Election Day. “I just think it’s a super confusing chart,” Roth said. “Hopefully people are alerted soon enough so they don’t wait in a long line before finding out [they are in the wrong location].”

Aaron Goode ’04, co-founder of New Haven Votes, said he was surprised that, given the mishaps of the 2018 midterm elections, these problems had not yet been resolved

by the city. His organization also tweeted on the eve of the election, informing residents not to refer to the city spreadsheet at all on Election Day. He urged the city to make signage available at all polling places encouraging voters to check the state look-up system to confirm they are in the right place. He also said that the polling location information sent in postcards from the Registrars of Voters to residents should be correct. But similar to the alders, Goode expressed irritation at having to repeatedly handle these issues year after year.

“It’s about communicating with people,” Goode said. “And unfortunately it seems as though we have a lot of communication lapses in our voting process.”

According to the Connecticut Secretary of State’s office, there were 205,609 votes cast in New Haven County in the 2016 presidential election.

Contact THOMAS BIRMINGHAM at thomas.birmingham@yale.edu and EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu.

New Haven rallies for democracy

GAMZE KAZAKOGLU/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Similar 'Count The Votes' protests have been held in cities across the country since Election Day. Families Party, League of Women Voters of Connecticut and Central Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America. This “count every vote” rally included activists and elected officials, who spoke about the stakes of another term for the Trump administration. Later that evening, activist organ;;izations like Unidad Latina en Acción, Hamden Action Now and Black and Brown United in Action held a similar rally in the Fair Haven neighborhood calling for the Trump campaign to stop its publicized efforts to discard mail-in ballots in several close battleground states.

“I want democracy not to be suppressed in this election,” said Rhonda Caldwell of Hamden

Action Now. “Every single vote will be counted. We need to talk about voter suppression in Connecticut. Voter suppression of [the] Black and brown community is real.”

Caldwell told those in attendance that she believes that the historic turnout in this year’s election was an inspiring sign of popular mobilization. The organizer said that she has seen “Black and brown folks running to the door to have their votes counted” in her home community of Hamden. She told the News that she was surprised by lines that stretched far out the door at the polls in New Haven, adding that the Elm City usually has to prepare for low turnout, not

“over-turnout.”

For Caldwell, the integrity of the election is important because it means that the people of color that she saw come out and vote have the opportunity to influence the politics of their communities.

Another speaker, Gretchen Raffa, director of public policy and advocacy for Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, told the crowd gathered that she had come out to the Green to make sure that all New Haveners’ voices were heard. To her, the election results represent, in part, a referendum on women’s reproductive health care in the country.

Raffa said she has been disappointed by the Trump adminis-

tration’s rollback on the “fundamental right to health care.” She said voting — and having that vote be counted — would show that the American people support access to “safe legal abortion” by voting out the current administration and changing the demographics of the country’s elected representatives.

“All our voices must be heard and they absolutely will be,” said Raffa.

As the rally at the Green came to an end, newly reelected State Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, asked those in attendance to “resist” the current political climate by changing their actions beyond the rally. While criticizing Trump from afar helps show the voice of the community, New Haveners should also focus on discussing their political views with those we “don’t want to have that conversation with because it’s uncomfortable.”

Later that evening, a different group of organizations — ULA, Hamden Action Now and Black and Brown United in Action — held a rally at the intersection of Grand Avenue and Ferry Street.

Some two dozen community members gathered to show their opposition to efforts in court by the Trump campaign’s to discredit mail-in ballots in several close battleground states.

Organizers also condemned the administration for inciting hatred and voter suppression in this month’s election.

“We will not rest until every vote is counted,” ULA communications representative Megan Fountain said to the crowd. “We know that the president has said that some of the mail-in votes could be fraudulent as an excuse to not count all the votes. But everyone is vigilant.”

Fountain also took the chance to rally community members to involve themselves in local political efforts regardless of the eventual outcome of the election.

She asked those in attendance to

be “ready to fight for immigration reform, ready to fight for workers’ dignity, ready to fight for health care.”

Black and Brown United in Action member Catherine Brown said she believed the rally was important because of the various forms of voter suppression or discouragement that appeared on Election Day this year.

Brown told the News that various aspects of New Haven’s electoral system, including that voters must visit the back of City Hall and pay parking fees to pick up election materials, illustrate that the system is inaccessible, especially for elderly and disabled voters. She noted that Connecticut voter suppression has also impacted voters of color.

“Voter suppression has always been a concern in Connecticut,” Brown said. “The process is not inclusive for the disabled, the elderly and for Black and brown people. It’s 2020, and there’s no reason why we should have such an archaic system. We’re here to say that we’re here, we’re here to stay and our votes matter.”

Yet activists like Caldwell said that despite the unaccommodating nature of the current voting process, they were proud of the resilience of voters of color.

In Connecticut, Caldwell said, voters of color have always played a large role in driving voter turnout.

“We had such a high turnout all over the country,” Caldwell told the News. “Black and brown people turned out, and thank God we did, because if not, we would’ve lost. The American people have spoken. We have said we have had enough of [Trump’s] rhetoric of hatred.”

91 percent of votes have been reported for the state of Connecticut.

Contact GAMZE KAZAKOGLU at gamze.kazakoglu@yale.edu and OWEN TUCKER-SMITH at owen.tucker-smith@yale.edu .

PAGE 6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

ARTS A political bent: School of Art students and faculty engage with social activism

BY ANNIE RADILLO STAFF REPORTER In light of the presidential election, MFA students at the Yale School of Art are incorporating the current political ethos into their work. Faculty members at the School of Art have altered the material they teach and are working to engender social change through their work.

The election has opened new opportunities for School of Art students and faculty, who have long been involved in activism, to engage in social issues.

From paintings of a gentrifying Brooklyn to photographs about colonization, students at the School of Art are making art that reflects the current political and social climate.

“There seems to be increased engagement right now, for obvious reasons,” said School of Art faculty member and activist Pamela Hovland. “We have all woken up to the realization that democracy is not a spectator sport — we have to move from the passive to the active.”

With the election, faculty at the School of Art are engaging with social-activist and political movements now more than ever, according to Hovland, who added that she thinks Zoom and social media have contributed to a greater level of engagement for artists than before.

Hovland’s own organization, called Class Action Collective, is working to mobilize people in light of the upcoming election. Leading up to the election, Anoka Faruqee — another faculty member and activist — created a fundraising initiative called “Walk the Walk” to support grassroots community organizations. These organizations are strengthening electoral power in Black and Latinx communities in eight swing states — Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Ohio and Texas.

“Structural forces have decimated our public institutions of education, healthcare, and democracy itself, so now is our chance to utilize all of the democratic pathways that are still available to us,” Faruqee wrote in an article on Medium.

Hovland added that many professors at the School of Art have interrupted their usual syllabi to “make space” for students to discuss what is going on — both individually and collaboratively. She said it is import-

YALE DAILY NEWS

ant for students to reflect on what matters to them and how they can use their work to contribute to the existing artistic dialogue.

Nabil Harb ART ’21 primarily takes pictures of his hometown of Lakeland, Florida. His photographs look at themes of consumption, colonization and the environment. His work interrogates what it means for him, a queer man and first-generation American of Palestinian descent, to add to the region’s artistic narrative.

Even though his work has always maintained a political bent, Harb said that in the context of a growing activism movement, he has begun to talk and think about his art more politically.

“I’ve sort of begun to hone in the gestures in the work that are political,” Harb said. For example, he had never looked at a particular photograph — showing a fence post covered in grasshoppers — with a climate-change perspective. But now, he said that in retrospect his work highlights “environmentalism and the precariousness of our landscape.”

Danielle De Jesus ART ’21 takes pictures of the place where she grew up — Brooklyn, New York. She docu-

ments the gentrification that occurred in recent years and often wears a sweatshirt with the words “Gentrification is war.” Her paintings contrast the aesthetics of gentrification alongside the harsh reality of its consequences. Even though this is not a new project, it has taken on new meaning and importance in the context of the election.

“It is often left to the artists and designers to ascribe meaning in times of historic shifts and many of us feel that responsibility — a duty, really — to comment on and perhaps even clarify the world we inhabit,” Hovland said.

In light of the uncertainties and anxieties posed by the election, School of Art Dean Marta Kuzma emailed the School of Art community yesterday. She announced that assistant deans will hold discussion hours over the course of the week for students to “drop-in and share any questions, concerns, fears.” These will begin on Wednesday, Nov. 4 after the election.

Contact ANNIE RADILLO at annie.radillo@yale.edu .

School of Music composers’ works merge the personal and the political

BY MARISOL CARTY STAFF REPORTER Political issues can often feel large-scale and impersonal, but composers at the Yale School of Music shared how they use music to unite their personal experiences and political issues.

The past few months leading up to the election have seen several significant political developments, including the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession and incidents of police brutality raising awareness of racial injustice. Composers have been using music as a way to understand and confront these issues personally.

“The tensions of this time have only strengthened my belief in the need to communicate through music, with great urgency, about matters that should concern all people,” said Aaron Jay Kernis MUS ’83, a professor of composition at the Music School. “At times like these we need music even more than ever — to console, touch, provoke, bring together and inspire.”

Kernis recently wrote works addressing concerns about climate change and the environment. He is currently collaborating with Peter Cole, a professor of Judaic Studies and comparative literature, on a work titled, “Edensongs,” which relates to the state of the earth.

Joel Thompson MUS ’26 is known for his 2014 piece, “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which was inspired by the last words of seven Black men killed by police. He said his compositions are a way for him to “process his emotions,” which tend towards grief and anger in the wake of police brutality.

Over the summer, Thompson composed a piece responding to the news about Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was killed by police in March.

Thompson said that the piece, titled “breathe/burn: an elegy,” presented an accurate reflection of his “emotional landscape.”

“It’s a goal of mine that my pieces can function as snapshots of who I am,” Thompson said.

“I want the music that I create to at least inspire some dialogue that will be a part of the change that I hope to see.”

But Thompson said that even though it can be cathartic to hear an emotionally relatable musical piece, music also serves as a way to distract from the “chaos of the present moment.”

Soomin Kim MUS ’21 noted that even when she writes music about social and political events, her music “comes from a personal place.”

Kim wrote about the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, a disaster in South Korea that killed over 300 people — most of them children — and caused social and political turmoil in South Korea. She also recently wrote a piece called “Vires Diary,” inspired by children’s journals during the pandemic.

Nate May MUS ’23 said that in order to write pieces about social issues, he needs to first understand the relationship between his work and the issue at hand.

May, who grew up in the Appalachian region, has written sev-

eral pieces about political and social issues, such as Appalachian migration, a chemical spill and opioid addiction in the area. These pieces include a chamber opera called “Dust in the Bottomland,” written in response to mountaintop removal mining and opioid addiction.

Yet Eli Greenhoe MUS ’25 noted that even though music can be political and spark political action, being a composer and being politically active are two different things.

A composer Greenhoe admires told him that it is a wonderful thing to write political music, as long as it is understood as a fundamentally personal act, not a substitute for direct political action and policy change.

May noted that music can be used politically to varying ends — a composer does not have the power to control the way in which music inspires people.

“I think artists can sometimes kid themselves about the amount of control they have over what their art is inspiring,” May said. “When the conditions are right, art can share with storytelling the role of generating new channels of empathy and new sources of connection, and I do think those things are worth doing when it feels genuine.”

Contact MARISOL CARTY at marisol.carty@yale.edu .

ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

YALE DAILY NEWS ·FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 7

ARTS YSO’s Halloween Show goes virtual

BY MARISOL CARTY STAFF REPORTER Every Halloween, students rush to purchase tickets for the Yale Symphony Orchestra’s much-anticipated Halloween Show. But this year, there was no frantic buying, reselling of tickets or fights over Woolsey Hall seats. On Saturday at midnight, over 1,000 viewers around the world attended the premiere virtually.

This year’s show, titled “The Virtual Bachelorette”, adapted the premise of the popular reality TV show for the Yale community. The plot featured a competition in which Yale’s 14 residential colleges vied for bachelorette “Danielle,” played by Epongue Ekille ’21.

The show featured classical love songs including Romeo and Juliet themes, but also pop songs by artists like Lizzo and Cardi B. Many scenes reflected the reality of romance during the pandemic, with drones carrying roses and a socially distant marriage proposal.

“We wanted people to feel connected to Yale,” co-producer Supriya Weiss ’24 said. “Feeling like we’re part of the Yale family, we’re making the same jokes — I wanted people to feel like they were coming home.”

Highlights of the show included cameos from Hillary Clinton ’73, Angela Bassett ’80, Peter Salovey and Chris Harrison, who is the host of “The Bachelorette.”

Film director and co-writer Lucy Wilkins ’22, who is also an editor at the News, said in order to secure the cameos, she decided to “aim high and see what happens.” Surprisingly, Chris Harrison agreed to partake in the show after she directly messaged him on instagram. Wilkins reached out to Angela Bassett’s PR team and Hillary Clinton’s assistant, both of whom were receptive to her request.

Tickets for the YSO Halloween show are typically sold out within three to four minutes after their release. The number of interested students usually exceeds Woolsey Hall’s

limited seating capacity. But this year, there was no upper limit on the number of attendees as the show was publicly live streamed on YouTube and will remain accessible on the platform.

“Internally within the YSO there’s this great lineage of Halloween shows, producers of Halloween shows and people who pour so much love and energy into the show,” co-producer Aria Harris ’24 said. “We really wanted to be part of that lineage and continue it.”

Weiss said the production team wanted the show to be accessible to all students because it is one of the few traditions Yale students will be able to experience despite pandemic-induced changes this year. She said this was particularly important for first years, who have not experienced a typical Yale semester, and added that she did not want them to miss out on another first year “hallmark.”

The show has received a warm response so far — Yale students used social media to say that the show made them feel connected to campus, and Weiss said alumni sent messages expressing their excitement about

being able to watch the Halloween show this year.

But behind the seamless final product lie months of hard work and creativity, from the YSO, the production team and cast members.

Over the summer, Wilkins and Francis Fedora ’24 co-wrote the original script for the show, but it had to be replaced by a new script in an attempt to comply with Yale’s COVID-19 safety regulations.

Wilkins said she was initially worried about the project due to the pressure that comes with creating the Halloween show. She did not want the movie to be filmed entirely over Zoom. To introduce in-person scenes while adhering to safety regulations, cast members relied on their own creativity and help from roommates while filming.

“We’ve just tried to make the show fun,” Wilkins said. “Yes, it was filmed in a pandemic, and you can tell in the show that there’s an ongoing pandemic, but we’ve tried to make it funny and humorous and positive.”

Wilkins noted that the changes

brought by the pandemic to the process allowed her to work more closely with music director Jacob Miller ’22.

Normally, the music director chooses musical works to accompany the script over the summer. This year, Miller began the process earlier in order to allow musicians to record their parts separately so he could compile them together.

“My job looked very different this year,” Miller said. “[Wilkins] and I were both kind of editing audio and visuals at the same time and giving input on each other’s ideas.”

Miller added that the production team functioned like a “single body” throughout the process. He said the team wanted to present the Halloween show at “any cost.”

“That feeling within the production team just kind of continued, and up until last night at 6 a.m. we were trying to make it the best show that we could,” Miller said.

YSO was founded in 1965.

Contact MARISOL CARTY at marisol.carty@yale.edu .

COURTESY OF SUPRIYA WEISS

Dance teams find new ways to maintain social connections during the pandemic

COURTESY OF TANVI YENDE

BY SANCHITA KEDIA CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Dance has long served as a creative outlet and social space for students on campus. But the pandemic has forced dance teams to find new methods of engaging the dance community.

This semester, several dance groups have altered their practice schedule. Due to the closure of dance studios and the limited number of students on campus, dance groups have to accommodate virtual or socially distanced forms of practice.

Most groups are conducting sessions over Zoom, but some have introduced in-person components. Groups have also cut practice times and launched new initiatives to encourage social connections between team members.

“I think that it’s less about increasing [social interaction], but more about maintaining it because it’s inevitable that it’s going to decrease or that it’s going to be somewhat difficult to increase member interaction,” said Sebastian Chang ’23, co-captain of Movement.

Although the virtual transition has allowed dance teams to continue practices, it has been difficult for teams to engage members socially. Members no longer have the opportunity to catch up with each other during breaks or before and after practice. Additionally, groups such as Rhythmic Blue, Yale Taps and Yale Jashan Bhangra have reduced practice times.

“Of course everybody is there to dance and excited to dance, but when I come to [Yale Dancers] class, I’m equally excited for the opportunity to see my friends,” said Faith Tomlin ’22, co-president of Yale Dancers. “Over Zoom we are taking class in our own little virtual boxes, so you don’t really get to interact with any other company members.”

Tomin added that it is impossible to interact with members, exchange feedback, hype people up or ask questions while learning choreography. For this reason, Rhythmic Blue, Yale Dancers and Yale Taps chose to introduce an optional in-person practice session every week at the Beinecke plaza.

There, the teams must dance on

concrete. To combat that problem, Taps has begun using portable wooden tap floors to allow outdoor practices.

“Group participation has increased this year for our weekly group classes just because it’s a way of socializing with each other in a safe way while also being able to pursue our passions together,” said Gabrielle Niederhoffer ’23, a co-president of Taps.

To allow current team members to maintain connections with one another and for new members to build connections, dance groups have created innovative programs and bonding activities.

Jashan Bhangra chose to continue with tap night traditions over Zoom.

Team members taught initiates bhangra moves. Captains Ameena Kapadia ’23 and Neeha Kothapalli ’22 created YJB families to help current members get to know the 17 new taps.

They also assign tasks to members, including changing Facebook profile photos to a bhangra pose or playing virtual Pictionary games.

Rhythmic Blue has a similar system of families, “RBuddies,” where

grouped members can get together to take a dance class or talk over a meal.

The dance group also plans to introduce open workshops, where a team member teaches a dance that anyone can participate in. The group hopes to expand social connections with the rest of the Yale community through dance.

“We had our first workshop where [a student] taught a piece that she has been working on,” said Ke’ala Akau ’22, co-president of Rhythmic Blue. “It was really fun to see people all across the country joining in on this dance.”

Even though Yale Dancers usually conducts tap night with both old and new members, they opted for an in-person scavenger hunt for their six new first years this year. The group has also had alumni members come and teach over Zoom.

Movement hosted a jeopardy competition, where members were divided into teams with the opportunity to win prizes. They included questions about their seven new members in the game. In general, the group has game and movie nights on a weekly basis. Members use an app called Steezy — a dance app that allows people to attend dance classes together — to replicate the in-person dance experience.

Taps has had outdoor bonding activities, including a Pilates class and picnic for new members. They hope to invite professional tap dancers to teach techniques to group members virtually each month.

Even with the pandemic, all dance groups are using practices to film a final performance video at the end of the semester. Teams like Movement hope these new bonding activities will continue to take place when they resume in-person practices. “[The pandemic] has forced us to be more creative, in terms of coming up with these initiatives and I feel like the legacy of this coming into the future will be that these events will continue to exist but in the actual form,” Chang said. “All these great ideas will be better and in person.”

Rhythmic Blue will have its next open dance workshop on Nov. 15.

Contact SANCHITA KEDIA at sanchita.kedia@yale.edu .

PAGE 8

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

ELECTIONS 2020 Despite new policy, students face delays in election mail received at residential colleges

BY JULIA BIALEK AND EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTERS Students voting by mail in Tuesday’s election were permitted to have their ballots sent to their residential college addresses this year — bypassing a hurdle that had complicated the mail-in voting process in 2018. But the change didn’t come without its own challenges.

This year, students could find information about how to vote on the Yale Votes website, set up by the University to ease the process. Yale Votes urged students who were voting by mail to request their absentee ballot four to six weeks prior to election day so that students had enough time to receive their ballots, fill them out and return them to their local election authority. This year, any student who did not have a P.O. box — which costs around $90 per year — was permitted to send election mail to their residential college address.

The change aimed to ensure that students would get election mail, which includes ballots, in a timely manner — but students still faced delays. On Oct. 28, less than a week before the election, a group of ballots arrived in the Pierson college mail room for students in different states, some of whom had requested their ballot weeks earlier.

“Students should receive e-mails from their college offices to pick up absentee ballots addressed to them,” confirmed Dean of Yale College Marvin Chun in a Oct. 28 email to

the News. But in Pierson’s case, the college aide responsible for sending those emails failed to do so until last Wednesday.

Yale’s general Campus Mail policy typically states that all incoming mail that is addressed to colleges or dorms — rather than P.O. boxes or the Student Receiving Center — will be returned to the sender.

Two years ago, less than two weeks before the 2018 election, Campus Mail Services had been sending back the ballots of students who did not have P.O. boxes, leaving voters in limbo in the days leading up to the midterms.

The discovery — made by Karen McGovern, assistant to the head of college of Timothy Dwight — led to an urgent scramble to recover the ballots in transit and create a “special service” exception for students requesting mail-in ballots to their residential colleges.

In order to avoid the ballot concerns of 2018, students were permitted to send election mail to their residential college offices this year.

While many students have gotten their mail-in ballots without issue, others faced delays in getting the election mail they had sent to their colleges.

According to Senior Associate Dean of Yale College and Associate Vice President of Student Life Burgwell Howard, his office urged students living on campus to use the physical address of their residential colleges as their address to receive election mail in order to “avoid any

issues with mail being bounced back, at Post Office Boxes, that we have experienced in past elections.” He also mentioned that his office agreed to cover the cost of postage for students who did not have stamps to return their ballots, and that many colleges made printers available to students who may have needed them to request ballots.

“The process for how students may have been notified about when their absentee ballots arrived at their college, may have varied from college to college, as each college is staffed a bit differently,” Howard wrote in an email to the News. “However, in general, the goal was to have someone notify the student their voter related information had arrived, and then arrange for the student to pick up their materials and provide postage to facilitate its return.”

One Pierson College student, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from their college administration, raised concerns when around 12 ballots arrived on Oct. 28 in the college mail room for students registered in different states. The student alleged that at least one other student’s ballot tracker had marked that their ballot should have been delivered weeks earlier.

Pierson College Head of College Stephen Davis told the News that the college has received around 25 absentee ballots this semester. While Davis was under the impression that those students had been asked to come by and pick up their ballot once before, the aide responsible for distribution in actuality had failed to inform them until Oct. 28.

“While our office staff has been communicating with students about their ballots, the aide whom we thought was sending these notices apparently misunderstood the instructions and hadn’t informed some of the students when their ballots originally came in,” wrote Davis in an email to the News. “This glitch was the reason for the delay in students being informed about their ballots.”

According to Davis, the college offered to arrange overnight delivery or reimbursement for such for those students affected.

46.8 percent of eligible Yale students voted in the 2018 election.

Contact JULIA BIALEK at julia.bialek@yale.edu and EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

rF ZOE BERG/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

News conducts survey on undergraduate attitude toward voting process .Y

BY JULIA BIALEK STAFF REPORTER Most respondents to a recent survey by the News about undergraduate students’ attitudes on the voting process found voting easy, but many students still struggled to vote.

1,081 undergraduate students responded to the survey between Wednesday and Friday of last week, resulting in a response rate of 18 percent among all undergraduates. 1,006 respondents — over 93 percent of total respondents — are registered to vote in the United States, and nearly 87 percent of those individuals had already voted at the time of filling out the survey prior to Election Day. While 135 respondents had not voted at the time of the survey, 93 percent of them plan to vote on or before Nov. 3.

However, despite the fact that most respondents who had already voted or plan to vote have found the voting process to be “somewhat easy” or “extremely easy,” 17.1 percent of respondents found voting to be difficult and feel dissatisfied with their state’s voting process this year.

“I think that Yale is doing a lot to make it easier to vote, but this country doesn’t want us to vote fundamentally, so the odds are stacked against us,” Vy Tran ’21 said.

Tran currently lives in New Haven, but she is registered to vote in her home state of Texas. Tran described the process of getting her absentee ballot as a “tumultuous experience,” citing what she called Yale’s late announcement that election mail can be sent to residential college offices, confusion over how much postage was required for her ballot and worries about meeting her state’s voting deadlines. Although she mailed in her ballot, Tran fears that her

JESSIE CHEUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

vote may not be counted because she is unsure if she used the proper amount of postage.

Although Tran wanted to vote in the 2018 election, she was unable to vote after her absentee ballot — which she says she requested four separate times from her Board of Elections in Texas — never arrived.

However, Tran mentioned how helpful it was to get assistance from the Yale Votes Texas voter captain this year. According to the survey, Yale Votes was the most widely used campus resource to assist respondents with voting, with 223 respondents mentioning them in

the survey. 285 registered voters — 28 percent of all survey respondents — used at least one type of campus resource.

Daniel Edison ’23 and Nicholas Cerny ’24 experienced similar difficulties when voting in Texas.

Both Edison and Cerny began the process of requesting their absentee ballots in the summer, expressing skepticism at Texas’s voting infrastructure.

Edison’s initial absentee ballot application was never received by his local Board of Elections, as he discovered by making “a proactive effort to be early and follow up.”

He immediately mailed in a second ballot application and eventually received his ballot, albeit nearly two months after his initial application.

“If I didn’t intentionally begin this process with skepticism in Texas’s capacity to support my vote (and I get to [say] that from the most privileged point possible, there are millions of Texans with higher barriers than I) I may not have had so much time to spare and my vote may not have been counted,” Edison wrote in an email to the News.

Cerny also had a difficult time getting his ballot. After sending in his absentee ballot request at the beginning of September, he checked in with his local Board of Elections when he had not received any acknowledgement of his ballot request, nor his ballot, by early October. When his Board of Elections told him that he would have to send in a letter formally requesting a second ballot, he feared that the chances of his vote arriving by the closing of the polls on Election Day — Texas’s deadline for accepting absentee ballots — were slim.

While his initial ballot eventually came in time, he commented that it seemed like the difficult process was “an active attempt to suppress [his] vote.” He explained that while he will not speak for all voters, this seems to be a commonly held viewpoint among Yalies from Texas.

49 percent of survey respondents registered to vote in Texas who have already voted said it was “somewhat difficult” or “extremely difficult” to vote, compared to 17 percent overall.

However, most survey respondents did not find voting to be difficult. John Brockmeier ’22 is one of those respondents. Brockmeier is currently living in Colorado but is registered in his home state of Nebraska. While he does not believe the voting system in Nebraska is perfect, he voiced his

opinion that his county has done a good job of making the absentee ballot application process easier.

Brockmeier voted by mail, which he thought was “easy,” given the relatively small number of ballots cast and processed in his home county.

“I think the reasons for voting for state and federal offices are the clearest, and most important, they’ve been in my lifetime,” Brockmeier wrote in an email to the News. “But I also love voting for the local offices such as school board and city council that directly affect my younger siblings and family.”

Almost 70 percent of survey respondents were “somewhat satisfied” or “extremely satisfied” with their state’s voting process this year.

According to the survey, an overwhelming majority of respondents — over 75 percent — said that they voted by mail or plan to vote by mail. David Metrick ’24 is not one of them. A resident of New Haven, he plans to vote in person on Election Day, adding that it felt irresponsible of him to add stress to the “already overstressed mail-in ballot situation nationwide” when he is able to cast an in-person ballot.

He believes that voting will be a relatively easy process for him.

This is the first general election in which he is eligible to vote.

“I’m voting because it’s the most consequential thing a United States citizen can do,” Metrick wrote in an email to the News. “I strongly believe in the democratic process and, specifically for this year, feel that a radical change of who is in power is required.”

Of the 871 undergraduate students who filled out the survey indicating that they had already voted, just under 10 percent are registered to vote in Connecticut.

Contact JULIA BIALEK at julia.bialek@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 9

A forty percent gap: what would it take for all eligible Yalies to vote?

BY EMILY TIAN STAFF REPORTER Four years ago, 56.7 percent of eligible voting undergraduate and graduate students at Yale cast their ballots in the 2016 presidential election.

That number was 24 percent higher than in 2012 — 32.7 percent — and also 8.4 percent above the national voter average among college campuses. But it is also not nearly high enough, according to a broad base of student organizers mobilizing the campus to vote in the 2020 general elections.

“Our mentality is that 100 [percent] eligible students should be registered and voting,” Yale College Democrats’ president Molly Shapiro ’21 told the News. “It would be a failure on our part if students aren’t mobilized — there’s so much at stake.”

This year, Yale Votes, a non-partisan coalition of student organizations including Every Vote Counts, the Yale College Dems and the Yale College Council, have been organizing a sweeping campus-wide campaign to encourage every eligible student to vote alongside University administrators through targeted messaging at individual students, faculty members and organizations.

To focus the group’s efforts, they have been examining data pulled from the University’s participation in the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement in 2016 and 2018 to identify trends in past student turnout at

the polls. The NSLVE, run by Tufts University, measures student voter participation rates by accounting for the voting records of over 10 million students in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. In September, President Salovey signed the All In Challenge, committing the University to convene a campus-wide committee and implement a concrete action plan to increase student voting rates and encourage students to value civic participation. As part of the challenge, past reports gathered from the NSLVE were also made public.

Yale’s 2016 voting turnout falls squarely mid-range compared to peer Ivy League institutions that have also publicized their data. In 2016, 59.0 percent of Brown University’s student body, 57.8 percent of Harvard’s student body and 46 percent of Cornell University’s student body voted in the general election.

NSLVE’s disaggregated 2016 report reveals that STEM majors tend to vote at lower rates than those studying humanities and social sciences. It’s difficult, however, to draw any specific conclusions from the major and demographic group breakdowns, because the data set neglects to remove international students and other students who are not eligible to vote.

Henry Smith ’22, the voter engagement coordinator for Yale Votes, told the News that the coalition tried to address the apparent voting gap by curating their message to STEM faculty members. Smith explained that student coordinators shared more quantitatively-driven evidence rather

than moral and civic arguments to encourage STEM faculty members to become “voter-friendly.”

“Voting shouldn’t be delegated to one group— it should be everyone on campus,” Smith said.

At Yale, voting turnout fell in 2018, a midterm year, to 46.8 percent, representing less than half of eligible student voters — a deficit replicated widely across the nation when the Oval Office is not up for contest.

“Personally, I think that poor voter turnout contradicts Yale’s mission as an institution,” said Henry Smith ’22, the voter engagement coordinator for Yale Votes. “Student learning should not only be in the classroom but also on the ground, and engaging democracy through voting is one of the main ways to do that.”

Organizers this year are more determined than ever to streamline the voting process and make voting information more accessible despite the hurdles the pandemic has presented.

Matthew Youkilis ’24 is the voting engagement coordinator for Every Vote Counts, a civic engagement and voting advocacy organization representing around 50 college campuses that was launched at Yale in the wake of the last presidential election.

According to Youkilis, EVC has been working in conjunction with Yale Votes to organize students to text their friends and family members, reaching out directly to student social organizations, and setting up stations on cross campus so that students can print absentee ballots. Emails from state “captains” — students volunteering to support and answer questions from peers — have attempted to reach virtually every corner of the student body. Representatives of the coalition are also staffing a hotline on Election Day to provide voting support and respond to questions.

Yale Votes coordinators have also encouraged student organizations to publicly commit to full voter participation by taking a “Pledge to 100.” As of Monday evening, 16 organizations ranging from Yale International Relations Association to Yale Water Polo and Kappa Alpha Theta have signed on.

Coordinators also asked faculty members to become “Voter Friendly Professors” — nearly 50 of whom have, according to Smith — by publicizing voting registration information, integrating voting content into course material and accommodating class absences and assignment extensions on Election Day. While Joshua Kalla, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, emphasized the urgency of voting on Tuesday, he also suggested that students exercising their right to vote now were also likely to build constructive habits throughout their adult lives.

To vote in Connecticut in the 2020 presidential election, you must have registered by Oct. 27 or register in person on Election Day.

YALE NEWS

Contact EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu .

Voter registration in New Haven has increased since 2000

lkhgfdspoX BY ÁNGELA PÉREZ CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Data compiled by the News indicates a gradual increase in New Haven voter registration rates since the turn of the century.

The Elm City has had a consistent Democratic plurality among registered voters since the 2000s. During the 2018 midterm elections, slightly more than 40 percent of the city’s residents were registered as Democrats, while about 2.66 percent registered as Republicans.

In 2000, about 54 percent of the city registered to vote in the general election. This increased to about 64.35 percent by 2016, before dropping during the 2018 midterm elections to 58.83 percent. The decrease in 2018 is a common trend — midterm election registration tends to be lower than presidential election registration.

While voter registration rates have been mostly increasing since 2000, Republican registration rates had been at a steady decline until the 2016 election, when they shot up. Democratic registration has also been increasing since 2000.

Democrat Sergio Rodriguez, a former alder and registrar of voters hopeful, said he believes that voter registration increases as more candidates run in elections. He also noted that this year’s presidential race has encouraged many people to vote.

“The presidential race is a very significant and important race,” Rodriguez told the News. “There’s a lot of folks who are trying to get out and vote, which is a good thing.”

Yale student groups such as Yale Votes and Every Vote Counts have been working in recent years to increase voter turnout among New Haven residents and students. As thousands of students flock to Yale’s campus every semester, resources for students to vote in New Haven have grown over the years.

Raymond Lucarelli ’23, a member of Yale Votes, told the News that the group reached out to Yalies all over the United States this year to engage voters across the country.

“We canvassed neighborhoods at the beginning of the semester, physically registering people to vote, accumulating polling information … for each of the 30 wards and sent graphics to alders [and]

HEDY TUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

DTC co-chairs to hand out to constituents,” Grace Whittington ’22, a member of the Yale College Democrats, told the News.

Yale student participation in elections has grown greatly in recent years. Yale’s voter participation rate went from being 3.1 percent lower than the average across

U.S. academic institutions in 2014 to being 7.7 percent above the average in 2018.

The number of Yale students registered to vote increased by 4.2 percent in that same time frame.

Contact ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu .

PAGE 10

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

SPORTS

“You are never really playing an opponent. You are playing yourself, your own highest standards, and when you reach your limits, that is real joy.” ARTHUR ASHE AMERICAN TENNIS PLAYER

Linebacker Micah Awodiran ’22

DANIEL ZHAO/SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

More than 25 colleges sought out Awodiran to play football for them, but the Bulldogs defender chose Yale over Duke, Illinois, Vanderbilt and more.

FOOTBALL FROM PAGE 14 “I’m definitely geared more towards social justice as you start to peel back politics and all those different things, you know that the grassroots is where it’s really happening,” Awodiran said. “So it really is just being a part of organizing efforts as much as I can be. When we had the defunding of YPD initiative my sophomore year, having those protests right on Broadway . . . with two young people who had been, you know, shot by YPD and we were really just trying to bring awareness to their situation.”

Awodiran said that having spaces for people to belong and voice their experiences with the broader community is important to him, and the most recent way he has been able to engage in this is with Yale Bulldogs for Change, or YBC, a panel of student-athletes convened to improve the experiences of student-athletes of color.

Yale football assistant head coach Derrick Lett, who is a member of the department’s new Social Justice and Inclusion Task Force, said he has seen Awodiran’s drive and intelligence on and off the field. He called Awodiran a “natural-born thinker,” someone who always has ideas about everything from practice schedules and how to spend

team downtime to social issues.

Lett and other members of the Social Justice and Inclusion Task Force — Senior Associate Athletic Director for Fan Engagement Nathalie Carter and Assistant Athletic Director for Administration Marissa Pearson — met with students on YBC to discuss action items for the group in August.

“We asked, ‘What is our top priority?’” Lett said. “‘What are our top priorities right now, what do we want to tackle as a group for [the] Yale University athletic department?’ We’re throwing ideas, pushing things [around], things like that.

Micah said, ‘What if we can come up with a challenge for the whole athletic department where we compete by sports, by teams?’ … You know how competitive we are, and also it’s a very big election, so we wanted to get as many people to vote as possible, and this is a great way to do it.

We were all very pleased and very impressed with the idea, and we took it and ran with it.”

The Bulldog Ballot Challenge was a success for the department, ensuring that all 739 eligible student-athletes and coaches were registered to vote. Both Lett and Awodiran touched upon the competitiveness of teams and how that helped fuel each program’s desire to complete the challenge.

Lett said that Awodiran’s drive to

Bond Sports powers sports facility oversight BOND FROM PAGE 14 Throughout that time, I organized a lot of different sporting activities, whether it was games or tournaments or practices, and every time I did it, I was incredibly frustrated by how difficult it was to find and reserve places to play.”

Rothschild shared Minoff’s sentiments about the complicated process of making sports reservations and said Minoff would constantly relay his difficulty finding a place to play basketball. As the father of twin girls, Rothschild struggled to register them for soccer programming. He and his wife also struggled to find places to play tennis.

While it is now easy to schedule restaurant reservations or doctor’s appointments online, Minoff said that sports reservations have fallen behind. Many businesses or institutions that operate sports facilities primarily communicate via email, text message and spreadsheets, which makes it challenging to publicly display facilities’ availability.

“There’re so many people sitting on a lot of spaces, and we’ve realized that part of what makes it so hard is that they’re operating no software or operating software that doesn’t help them as much as it could,” Rothschild said. “If we can help them, it’ll both have the dual purpose of generating more revenue and also providing greater access to their facilities to the surrounding community, therefore enabling more people to participate.”

Minoff said Bond Sports manages four revenue streams in facilities. The first is customer membership. The second is activity management — leagues, tournaments, events, classes, instructions and camps. The third is facility rentals, which allow third parties to host tournaments, events and activities.

Finally, the fourth is commerce, with facilities selling everything from water and Gatorade to equipment and apparel.

Users can also use the software to run the administrative side of the businesses. Bond Sports includes modules for calendar

and scheduling management, employee communication, customer relationship management and digital payments.

Despite COVID-19 significantly decreasing demand for facility rentals, Minoff and Rothschild remain confident in their platform.

Minoff believes that the pandemic has made many rethink their business practices. He said that there has been a push to move everything to digital platforms from both an administrative and customer standpoint.

Because sports facilities need to control their capacity, online reservations are necessary.

“Bond Sports assists us in ensuring that we give our staff and users the best and safest experience possible for recreation at our tennis and hockey facilities when applicable through our phased athletics return,” Yale’s Director of Third Party Rentals and Events Greg Zullo wrote in an email to the News. “Their system helps us to manage online sign-ups and supervise the total number of people in each venue while also providing a contactless point of sale when completing registration.”

Minoff believes that postCOVID, the demand for sports is going to be higher than ever.

Especially as everyone moves to work remotely and work from home, he said sports will be a major outlet for how people convene and where they find their community.

“There’s over 200,000 sports facilities just in the United States alone,” he said. “Obviously, our vision is to be the software that powers all of them — ultimately, to power all recreational sport. [Our goal is] to make it easy for people to find places to play, find activities and leagues, and things to join and find people to play with.

That’s our long-term vision. You have to start with step one, and step one is we’re building great software for people who own and operate sports facilities.”

Yale Sports and Recreation began using Bond Sports in September.

Contact ZACH MORRIS at zach.morris@yale.edu .

get this challenge off the ground and running came as no surprise and fit Awodiran’s character. Yale football captain and linebacker John Dean ’22 played alongside Awodiran for the past three seasons and echoed Lett’s sentiment, calling his teammate the “the absolute heartbeat of our whole entire football program.”

“I wasn’t shocked at all,” Dean said. “He’s starting to realize how special he is and how impressive of a person and leader he can be.

So, you know, for him to step up and realize that he can make a real difference and get 739 people in the athletics community to register to vote, that just speaks to the leadership abilities he has and how special he can be.

So for me, I’m not shocked, but extremely impressed, and I love what he’s doing.”

When asked about Awodiran’s recent success promoting social justice in the Elm City, Christensen had just one thing to say: “I’m proud, but not surprised.”

Awodiran’s role as an advocate for positive change in his communities began long before his time at Yale and looks to continue long after he graduates. He said he recently discussed the judicial elections in Chicago with his mother, taking into account individual candidates and their policies. They reflected on how much impact every decision and candidate could have.

“I was just thinking about how much goes into local, state [and] national elections and how with every single term [and] every single administration, there’s so much that comes behind it, whether it be legislation or just relations within different communities,” Awodiran said. “That’s just something that I really hold dear — to really make sure that everyone’s having their voice heard and affecting their immediate community as much as they possibly can.”

Contact BEN SCHER at ben.scher@yale.edu.

Athletes find comfort in Yale protocol PHASES FROM PAGE 14 arriving at Payne Whitney Gymnasium to lift, athletes need approval before entering each time. Their temperatures are taken and they sign in before receiving a stamp of approval on their arm. Afterwards, they wait for approval that they can enter the varsity weight room, which has a maximum of one athlete per bar.

Brayboy said that the coaches tell everyone to keep their masks on unless otherwise instructed, something that tennis player Theo Dean ’24 echoed in an interview. Occasionally, during conditioning outdoors, athletes are allowed to remove masks if they are doing exercises that make them breathe very heavily.

Nonetheless, they are prohibited from taking their masks off in Payne Whitney.

Dean feels very safe returning to practices. The men’s tennis team only has five players on campus and two coaches, meaning practices consist of seven

distanced members. He mentioned feeling safe due to the small group of people present during practices, Yale’s routine bi-weekly testing and the nature of the sport itself.

“I was mostly concerned with being stuck not being able to do things for some time,” Dean said. “Every sport is being held to the same standard, so I think that’s fair. … I think it’s better as a whole that every team is at the same phase.”

Dean mentioned that while he understood not being allowed to practice sport-specific activities, he feels that for sports like tennis, the distance between opposing players on each side of the court is large enough to be just as safe as the way they are practicing now.

As of Nov. 2, Yale has had nine positive on-campus undergraduate cases of COVID-19 in the last seven days.

Contact ÁNGELA PÉREZ at angela.perez@yale.edu.

JESSIE CHEUNG/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Athletic teams use Payne Whitney Gymnasium’s varsity weight room for strength and conditioning practices during Phase I.

Yuste signs with Atlético Tordesillas MEN’S SOCCER FROM PAGE 14 cal side of the game and was often pushed off the ball.

“I kind of consider myself more of like a crafty creative player,” Yuste said. “My first two years especially, it was tough, it was a very physical game.”

As Stannard noted, the strength and conditioning program was beneficial for Yuste’s development as a player. While his technical ability and eye for goal were always top-notch, Yuste only learned to harness his low center of gravity in the second half of his Yale career. Rather than pushing his way past defenders, he weaved around them, far too agile for his opponents.

However, Yuste’s greatest asset as a captain was his mindset. His coaches and teammates alike benefited from his determination, and he helped usher in a new era at Yale.

“Most importantly, he grew in his burning desire to leave a legacy and to understand the importance of having every single person on the team with an “all in” mentality and to embody the idea that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts,” Stannard said.

Yuste led from the front. As a striker, he was clinical in front of goal. Influenced by his idol, legendary Real Madrid striker Raúl González Blanco, Yuste loved

joining the attack. Fifty percent of his shots on target last season resulted in goals. He was the leading scorer for the Bulldogs, punishing the opposition on numerous occasions.

The current captain, attacking midfielder Mark Winhoffer ’21, learned a lot from Yuste.

The Spaniard was not only a role model for his teammates, but also a friend. Yuste received high praise from them — they respect him both on and off the field, Winhoffer said.

“Miguel was the first player I met at Yale,” Winhoffer said.

“He took me around campus on my visit and we connected right away. He is a super talented player and he gets along with everyone.

We would go to the fields on our own and try to make each other [better] every day on the pitch. He is one person that truly personifies YMS, a talented player and person and a man with integrity.”

In Yuste’s final season as a Bulldog, he witnessed the culmination of years of hard work as the Blue and White took the Ivy League crown. With this championship, the squad had fulfilled its potential, and their captain, as he said himself, “finish[ed] on a high note.”

Yuste has fond memories of his years at Yale. He joined the program during a transition period.

The Bulldogs posted a 1–14–2 record in 2015, the year before he arrived. As a result, winning the

Ivy League with an overall record of 13–3–2 was particularly notable for him.

“I think it was a super rewarding experience and I’m super grateful about my four years [at Yale]...It was a great group effort, to be honest,” Juste said. “And I think the legacy and the image we left on campus is, to me, much more important than individual goals or trophies, or other recognitions. To me as the captain, that is something I’m always going to be super proud of.”

Yuste still hopes to play professionally one day. The University of Portland has a rich history of sending players to the MLS in the past — Yuste hopes to be one of the next.

However, Yuste currently plans to continue his studies back in the U.S. before potentially moving on to play with the pros. Unfortunately, he is unsure when he will be able to return to collegiate soccer due to COVID-19 concerns.

Regardless of when that may be, Stannard is confident in Yuste’s ability to impress at Portland.

“In addition to his incredible soccer talent, he will bring maturity, leadership, and a personality that can bring a team together.

Portland is very lucky to have him.”

The University of Portland’s sports teams are nicknamed the Pilots.

Contact REHAN MELWANI at rehan.melwani@yale.edu.

LUKAS FLIPPO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Yuste leaves behind a winning legacy and a strong culture at Yale Men’s Soccer after graduation.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

NEWS

PAGE 11

“Poles finished communism, and Great Britain profited significantly from this.” LECH WALESA POLISH STATESMAN, DISSIDENT, AND FORMER SHIPYARD ELECTRICIAN

Walter, Handsome Dan XVIII, set to retire in early spring

ZULLY ARIAS/PRODUCTION & DESIGN EDITOR

BY JAMES RICHARDSON CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Handsome Dan XVIII, affectionately known as “Walter,” is set to retire after four years of serving as Yale’s official mascot.

Walter, who was born on Sep. 23, 2016 and announced as Handsome Dan XVIII on Nov. 17, 2016, was the first Olde English Bulldogge to serve as Handsome Dan. All previous Dans were purebred English Bulldogs. His retirement follows the early October departure of Kevin Discepolo ’09, Walter’s caretaker who left Yale Athletics for a new position at BSE Global, though it remains unclear whether the two events are related.

“Handsome Dan 18 will remain Yale University’s mascot until early spring,” Associate Athletic Director for Strategic Communications Mike Gambardella wrote in an email to the News. “A formal transition and celebration to Handsome Dan 19 will take place at that same time.”

When asked about the reasoning for Walter’s retirement or an update on the search process for Handsome Dan XIX, Gambardella did not share any further information.

Discepolo, the former assistant athletic director of facilities, operations and events at Yale Athletics, helped lead the search for Walter in 2016 after Handsome Dan XVII, known as “Sherman,” passed away

of a heart attack that summer. After an intensive search, Discepolo welcomed Walter to New Haven from a breeder in Maine. For the past four years, he has taken care of the dog, bringing him to work at Ray Tompkins House and parading him around campus and Yale athletic facilities.

But in October, Discepolo left his position at Yale to serve as a capital expenditure project manager, or a CAPEX project manager, at BSE Global, the Brooklyn company that operates and manages the Barclays Center, the Brooklyn Nets and other affiliated teams.

“I found a great opportunity outside of Yale,” Discepolo said. “[But] as an alum, definitely difficult to leave.”

Discepolo said he is not permitted to publicly discuss plans for Handsome Dan at this time, but told the News, “rest assured, [Walter’s] doing fine.”

Although he did not get the opportunity to support any Yale titles this fall, Handsome Dan XVIII will leave Yale after seeing two Ivy League championships in football, a March Madness berth in men’s basketball, Ancient Eight titles in several different Yale varsity programs and national championships in men’s lacrosse as well as in men’s heavyweight crew.

Two days after his formal announcement in November 2016, Yale football snapped a nine-year

losing streak in The Game with a 21-14 victory at Harvard. With Walter as Handsome Dan, Yale is 3-1 in The Game.

As an Olde English Bulldogge, a new breed created in the 1970s, Walter is healthier and more athletic than the English Bulldog, which is a breed of bulldog characterized by poor health due to generations of inbreeding. In a January interview with ESPN, Discepolo said that “everyone who comes in contact with him says he’s the most athletic bulldog we’ve had.” “[English Bulldogs’] longevity is definitely affected by the degree of conformational change and inbreeding, which is reflected by lifespan estimates … with a median of 8.4 years,” Niels Pedersen, professor emeritus of medicine and epidemiology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, wrote in a 2016 research paper for “Canine Medicine and Genetics.”

Walter was bred by Jessica and Pete Seiders of Wicked Good Bulldogges in Bristol, Maine. The News was unable to reach them for comment as to if Yale had placed an inquiry for Handsome Dan XIX. As Walter passes the torch to the dog who will serve as the nineteenth iteration of the beloved mascot, the role of Handsome Dan remains an essential part of Yale life. Handsome Dan XIX has big paws to fill.

Handsome Dan’s impact is felt not only in his appearances at sporting events and daily walks around campus, but also in the form of a quarter-ton bronze statue at the Yale Bowl. When it opened in 2012, the New Haven Shake Shack location even had a menu item named after the Yale mascot — the “Handsome Dog,” a Vienna allbeef dog topped with Shack cheese sauce and crispy ShackMeister Ale marinated onions.

Handsome Dan I was introduced in 1889 and was the first live animal mascot in college sports.

Contact JAMES RICHARDSON at james.richardson@yale.edu .

PAGE 12

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY New organ selection system at YNHH yields five-fold increase in heart transplants

BY MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO STAFF REPORTER For patients with end-stage heart failure, heart transplants are often the only procedure that can save them from a fatal outcome. But finding an organ that is a perfect match is not always easy — in the United States, 20 people die each day waiting for a transplant.

In an effort to secure more donor hearts while conserving positive patient outcomes, cardiologists at the Yale New Haven Hospital adopted a new approach to heart transplants in 2018 and are now seeing the results of the switch. This change broadly consisted of modifications to leadership and infrastructure — including hiring a transplant procurement surgeon and coordinator — as well as a more inclusive way to select organs. As a result, only one year after these changes were effected, the hospital saw a five-fold increase in heart transplant volume relative to the previous four-year period.

In September, the group of YNHH cardiologists leading this new approach published a paper in JAMA detailing differences in transplant statistics before and after the new approach. Prior to the changes, 49 patients received heart transplants from September 2014 and August 2018 at YNHH. Following the modifications, 58 transplants were performed from September 2018 and August 2019 alone.

According to Arnar Geirsson, chief of cardiac surgery at YNHH, while YNHH’s yearly transplant volume used to be under 15 transplants before the new selection process was established — over 40 patients have already received transplants in 2020.

“I think there’s probably no other therapy in all of medicine that is so dramatic, because you have someone basically dying and then they walk out of the hospital,” said Tariq Ahmad, the medical director of the Advanced Heart Failure program at YNHH and assistant professor at the School of Medicine, told the News. “We had a lot of good outcomes on people’s lives.”

Ahmad recalled a young man at YNHH who was “in all likelihood the most crit-

ically ill person in the state.” His clinical condition was so severe that he needed dialysis and had to be hooked up to two artificial hearts and a breathing machine.

Despite being on the brink of death, a heart transplant allowed this patient to get well and even go back to his job as a school teacher.

Considering the size of the YNHH system, the number of open-heart surgeries that the center performs and the volume of patients with advanced heart failure, Geirsson said that the leadership of the heart transplant program came to the conclusion that the service had the potential to do more of these procedures.

“Certainly it is important to grow volume, grow the number of cases, but you have got to make sure that the outcomes are good,” Geirsson told the News. “We were able, as is shown in the paper, to increase the volume without affecting the outcomes basically.”

The change began with preparatory phases, in which the medical leadership of the heart failure program worked to procure more resources and strategically recruit other surgeons to join these efforts. According to Geirsson, these plans began to materialize in 2018.

Coincidentally, this initiative overlapped with a change in the United Network of Organ Sharing allocation system, which expanded the criteria for donor hearts to include organs that were previously conceived as “higher-risk,” such as those that belonged to older donors.

According to Makoto Mori, a cardiothoracic surgery resident at YNHH, there was a time when the medical community viewed risk factors — including certain prior medical conditions in recipients — as characteristics that should be avoided when considering a transplant. But Mori explained that, over time, experts found evidence that those factors were actually not as harmful as many thought.

“A lot of times there’s a host of other things that will go into determining an outcome that have nothing to do with that organ,” Ahmad said. “By human nature, you kind of overestimate your ability to change an outcome by overestimating one variable that goes into that outcome.”

Ahmad mentioned the concept of

“competing risks,” which explains why waiting for a perfect organ can sometimes be harmful for patients in need of a heart.

According to Ahmad, waiting too long for a “perfect” organ could allow for the condition of the critically ill patient to progressively worsen.

If that rare “perfect” organ ever arrives, Ahmad said that the recipient might be past the point where they could benefit from receiving a transplant. He also explained that some may even die waiting for an impeccable organ when a less than perfect one could have given them another chance at life.

“That’s really the reason why people get transplants, to improve the prospect of survival,” Mori said. “During the period that the patient is waiting, they are consistently at increased risk of dying from heart failure, so [shorter waiting times] definitely translate into lives saved.”

Mori emphasized that YNHH’s new approach lowered the waiting time for a heart transplant from 242 days in the

pre-change era to 41 days — a decrease of 83 percent.

Ahmad, Mori and Geirsson all emphasized that, for patients with end-stage heart failure, a heart transplant can be truly transformative. According to Geirsson, this new approach has fundamentally changed how heart transplants are performed at YNHH. “[Heart transplants at YNHH] happen very frequently, everybody knows what they’re doing and we have a good team,” Geirsson said.

Mori added that although the approach is significantly bolder, with a higher volume of patients undergoing surgery and doctors taking on higher-risk cases, the fact that outcomes were not jeopardized is a testament to its success.

According to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, one deceased organ donor can save eight lives.

Contact MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO at maria.pacheco@yale.edu .

SUSANNA LIU/SENIOR ILLUSTRATOR

Yale CS professor wins award for ‘Pancake’ cybersecurity system

BY ADAM LEVINE CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Anurag Khandelwal, assistant professor of computer science, won a Distinguished Paper Award at the 29th USENIX Security Symposium for his paper on a new cybersecurity system this fall.

The annual USENIX Security Symposium, which Computer Science Department Chair Zhong Shao called “one of the most prestigious computer science conferences,” brings together researchers and practitioners from within the security field. Each year, hundreds of researchers submit their papers to USENIX in hopes of winning an award and sharing their work with a large audience. Khandelwal’s paper — which he worked on with associates from Cornell University, Cornell Tech and University of California, Berkeley — reported on the security system they developed called Pancake.

“The department is really thrilled that Anurag has won this distinguished paper award during his first year at Yale,” Shao wrote in an email to the News. “There are many faculty members and students at Yale who are really interested in the data security and privacy problem. Anurag is a top researcher and a real system builder in this field. We all look forward to seeing many more exciting results from him in the coming years.”

Khandelwal’s paper was one of 11 papers to earn a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2020 conference. In total, there were 977 submissions, and 157 were accepted.

Pancake prevents “malicious” cloud administrators from accessing potentially sensitive information from certain server records. Although data being stored in the cloud may be encrypted, sensitive information can still be dis-

covered by simply analyzing the data’s access patterns. To explain this concept, Khandelwal used the example of medical diagnoses. Even if hospital records are encrypted, he says one can deduce their contents if one knows the commonality of different diseases.

“The tricky bit is just by looking at

This security problem was previously solved by oblivious random access memory, which generates false data, or accesses, whenever an adversary tries to access the actual records in an attempt to confuse them. However, these extra data lead to greater bandwidth overhead, which adds unnecessary computing time.

ANASTHASIA SHILOV/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

how frequently a particular record is being accessed and having some prior knowledge … for instance if I knew the fact that diabetes is three times as common as cancer … I can actually perform a pretty good guess of what the data item actually contains and what disease the patient might have,” Khandelwal said.

Khandelwal took a different, highlevel approach to the problem: a technique called frequency smoothing.

When the extra accesses are added, it is done in a way that the distribution of data appears flat and uniform across all records — hence the name Pancake.

“When [the adversary] was observing the accesses, it would have thought that

... this record is receiving three times as many accesses as the other one, so this record probably corresponds to diabetes,” Khandelwal explained. “But now, if the distribution is flat, then every item receives the same number of accesses, so it can’t tell which one is which anymore.”

Computer science professor Lin Zhong said that Khandelwal, who joined the department just last January, has already brought to the department expertise regarding the cloud — a term for data centers available to users on the Internet. Zhong specifically mentioned Khandelwal’s knowledge of data servers, cloud computing and serverless functions.

“Anurag has been a pioneer in looking to do some of these functions,” Zhong said.

Khandelwal will continue to work on Pancake to make the system even more secure. More specifically, he said that while Pancake is able to hide individual items from being accessed, correlations between multiple accesses — like whether one item is consistently being used after another — are still visible to attackers, so Khandelwal is exploring how to hide that information. He is also looking at how to make the system scalable, so that it will still function properly when more servers are added.

Currently, Khandelwal is teaching a graduate computer science course on trends in cloud-based systems, advising students and working on research projects with collaborators like Shao, Zhong and associate professor of computer science Abhishek Bhattacharjee.

One current project involves resource disaggregation, which separates resources across a network in order to increase resource efficiency.

The 2020 USENIX Security Symposium was held virtually from Aug. 12 to 14.

Contact ADAM LEVINE at a.levine@yale.edu .

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE 13

BULLETIN BOARD ILLUSTRATIONS

VICTORIA LU is a first year in Siliman College.

Contact her at victoria.lu@yale.edu.

ANNIE YAN is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College.

Contact her at annie.yan@yale.edu .

MALIA KUO is a first year in Morse College.

Contact her at malia.kuo@yale.edu .

GIOVANNA TRUONG is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College.

Contact her at giovanna.truong@yale.edu .

GIOVANNA TRUONG is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College.

Contact her at giovanna.truong@yale.edu .

SOPHIA ZHAO is a sophomore in Pauli Murray College.

Contact her at sophia.j.zhao@yale.edu .

CROSSWORD Today’s puzzle:

Answers for Wednesday’s crossword puzzle:

MLS Orlando City 2 Columbus Crew 1

MLS

Minnesota United 2

Chicago Fire 2

SPORTS HANDSOME DAN XVIII WALTER TO RETIRE IN EARLY SPRING 2021 Born on Sep. 23, 2016 and introduced as the University mascot in November 2016, Yale’s 18th Handsome Dan will retire this spring. For more, see page 11.

MLS LA Galaxy 1 Seattle Sounders 1

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL A TALE OF TWO CT HIGH SCHOOLS From New Haven hope to state-wide heartbreak, how the CIAC’s decision to cancel the fall football season for every high school in Connecticut has sparked opposing reactions at New Haven’s Wilbur Cross and Trumbull’s St. Joseph. For more, see goydn.com./ YDNsports.

FOOTBALL

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

Micah Awodiran ’22, the Yale football linebacker who came up with the idea for the Bulldog Ballot Challenge, has been active in social justice since high school.

Just before school began this fall, Yale football linebacker Micah Awodiran ’22 came up with the idea for the Bulldog Ballot Challenge, a department-wide initiative that led every eligible coach and student-athlete to register to vote by late September.

Awodiran’s passion for organizing traces back long before his work with the Yale Bulldogs for Change, the student group that helped implement the challenge. The political science major was passionate about social justice back at Marist High School in Chicago, where he grew up. Tensions flared between different communities in his school when topics around racial justice arose, Awodiran’s guidance counselor and coach Erik Christensen told the News. A widely spread racist text sparked significant agitation during his senior year.

“What ended up happening is out of that incident and out of that

MLS Portland 0 Rapids 1

FOR MORE SPORTS CONTENT, VISIT OUR WEB SITE goydn.com/YDNsports Twitter: @YDNSports

Yale football’s heartbeat: Awodiran

BY BEN SCHER CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

MLS Nashville 0 FC Dallas 1

movement with Awodiran and a small group of his senior friends came a club we call the EVOLVE club,” said Christensen, who is also a moderator for the club. “That stands for empathy, volunteering, observation, leadership, vitalization and education, and it’s all about trying to bring all the different groups — from a racial perspective, from an LGBTQ+ perspective, from a socio-economic perspective — to bring them together and to get people interested in those issues, a platform to be able to discuss it [and] to run events around it.”

In Christensen’s view, Awodiran’s ability to take a negative situation and generate a positive outcome is a testament to his character. The name of the club and the goals of the club were all orchestrated by Awodiran and his peers.

Christensen said that the club is a big part of Awodiran’s legacy at the school and still has a tremendous impact at Marist today.

One of the main goals of the club was to get Black History Month

Yale alum’s firm managing sports reservations

recognized by Marist High School.

According to Christensen, the club hosted a fashion show last February in which over 400 people from diverse backgrounds came together to honor Black History Month.

“I think when I look back now and I hear from kids who are there now or maybe graduated a few years behind me, and hearing about how the EVOLVE club or just even having those issues brought out into the air, helps their experience, I think that that’s one of the things that I’m most proud of, even with what I accomplished on the field,” Awodiran said. “It’s all about just trying to make places better than when I found them. And you know, things that I wish I had when I was younger, making sure that the kids that are coming after me have that and don’t have to come up with these crazy solutions by themselves, but have the proper resources to be able to feel safe and feel like they can succeed and excel.”

When he was in high school, more than 25 colleges sought out Awodiran to play football for them, but the Bulldogs defender chose Yale over Duke, Illinois, Vanderbilt and more. He said one of the main reasons he chose to don the Blue and White was that he felt Yale would enable him to examine why the world is shaped the way it is and to ask the hard questions about the history and context behind his community.

After he started at Yale, getting things done at the grassroots level remained a clear focus for Awodiran. In April 2019, a Hamden police officer as well as a Yale Police Department officer shot at Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon, and Awodiran was a part of the group that protested the shootings shortly thereafter.

SEE FOOTBALL PAGE 10

“As student-athletes, we represent many unique backgrounds and identities that define us beyond our actions in the field of play. Voting is a vital action that preserves who we are as Americans.”

MICAH AWODIRAN ’22 YALE FOOTBALL LINEBACKER

Yale athletes feel safe during Phase 1 redux BY ÁNGELA PÉREZ CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Following a COVID-19 outbreak on the Yale men’s hockey team, student-athletes returning to practices say they feel safe as Phase I continues.

PHASES As part of Phase I, teams are required to social distance, have a maximum of 10 students at practices and are allowed one hour per day of weight training and conditioning for a total of five days per week.

Student-athletes have begun to meet again at Yale athletic facilities in the last two weeks for practices.

“The health and safety of our student-athletes, staff and community are always at the forefront of all we do,” Yale Athletics told the News in a written

statement. “We are currently in Phase I which is limited to only strength training & conditioning activities and all social distancing measures are maintained at all times.”

Quanah Brayboy ’24, a midfielder on the men’s soccer team, emphasized the safety precautions taken during practices. He noted that his team, which has about 20 on-campus members, is divided into two groups during practices at Reese Stadium, each group dividing its members to be about “12 feet apart.”

“I wasn’t too nervous [about restarting practices]. … [Yale has] been super cautious,” Brayboy told the News. “I was more excited to get back to practice. … I think Yale’s done a good job with the phased approach.”

He told the News that when SEE PHASES PAGE 10

LUKAS FLIPPO/PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Student-athletes continue to train through Phase I and feel safe doing so despite the coronavirus cluster revealed on Oct. 13.

Yuste takes talent to Portland

BY REHAN MELWANI STAFF REPORTER Miguel Yuste ’20 played 28 minutes in his first season as a Bulldog due to a torn ACL. Last fall, he started every game as the captain of the Yale men’s soccer team, leading them to the Ivy League crown. Now, as he awaits his return to Division I soccer at the University of Portland, he is training with a third division Spanish team, Atlético Tordesillas.

MEN’S SOCCER Yuste began his soccer career at the age of four with dreams of playing professionally one day. He would visit the stadium of his boyhood club — Real Valladolid — every week

with his father. At the age of twelve, he joined their academy and played on the U19 team until he began his collegiate career with the Bulldogs. On Oct. 15, Atlético Tordesillas announced that they had signed Yuste, where he is currently staying in shape before he eventually returns to the U.S. to play for the University of Portland. There, he will pursue a master’s degree in biomedical engineering.

Yuste made a name for himself at Yale, leading the Bulldogs to their best season in the program’s history. Yale men’s soccer head coach Kylie Stannard spoke of Yuste’s undeniable commitment to the team, and how his way of thinking proved invaluable for the squad.

“He learned from difficult times in his previous years and

understood what worked and what didn’t,” Stannard said. “He brought a whole new level to our program for his passion for the game and for training that became the new standard. He helped elevate our culture even further as a soccer culture, but even more importantly, as a winning soccer culture.”

When he arrived in New Haven, Yuste did not see as much of the field as he had during his high school career. He suffered a torn ACL 20 minutes into the first game of the season, sidelining him for almost a whole year.

In addition, Yuste is smaller than many of his opponents. The striker struggled with the physiSEE MEN’S SOCCER PAGE 10

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

Bond Sports, co-founded by Matt Minoff ’04, helps power sports facility management. Yale Sports and Recreation began using the software in September.

BY ZACH MORRIS CONTRIBUTING REPORTER Yale Sports and Recreation has adopted a new software platform this year to manage facility reservations: Bond Sports.

BOND Launched in March of this year, Bond Sports helps groups manage sports facilities. The company, co-founded by former Yale men’s basketball captain Matt Minoff ’04 and Marc Rothschild, consolidates facility revenue streams and administrative workings into one platform.

Its main client-partner groups

are schools, colleges and universities, departments of recreation and large multi-sport complexes.

Minoff, who remains CEO, and Rothschild, who is now president, discussed the company in Zoom calls with the News. The pair lead Bond Sports along with Chief Product Officer Shahar Chaskelevitch.

“The genesis of the company frankly goes back about eight years ago,” Minoff said. “I played basketball at Yale, and played professionally in Israel for a few years, and I came back and was living in New York City for basically the last 15 years.

STAT OF THE WEEK

SEE BOND PAGE 10

1889

COURTESY OF YALE ATHLETICS

Yuste ’20, last year’s men’s soccer captain, is currently training with Spanish professional team Atlético Tordesillas.

THE YEAR HANDSOME DAN I WAS INTRODUCED, BECOMING THE FIRST LIVE ANIMAL MASCOT IN COLLEGE SPORTS.

WEEKEND FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020

Ameeliorating:

Breaking Down Barriers in Prison Communication // BY MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO

“This year … I lost my job, started chemo … and you guys have helped me still be able to show my husband that I stand right here with him waiting for him no matter what.”

If you read through Ameelio’s app reviews on Google Play, grateful comments such as this one populate the page. From people who couldn’t previously afford to communicate with their incarcerated loved ones to others who went into debt because of the money they spent on letters, the impact this tech startup has had in the lives of families affected by incarceration is not only tangible but also vast.

Ameelio was co-founded in 2019 by Gabriel Saruhashi ’21 and Uzoma Orchingwa LAW ’22. Through their website and app, the prison communications nonprofit has already helped over 50,000 people get in touch across all prison facilities in the United States. The startup comes at a time when, according to their website, one in two Americans are directly impacted by incarceration, 63 percent of those incarcerated are over 100 miles away from their families and a 15-minute phone call to someone in prison can cost up to 25 dollars. Through their letters, postcards and, in the very near future, videoconferencing services, Ameelio sets out to reshape the prison communication landscape and dismantle the physical and financial barriers that separate incarcerated people from their loved ones.

Before starting law school at Yale, Orchingwa was pursuing a Master of Philosophy degree in criminology at the University of Cambridge, where he studied mass incarceration and United States penal policy.

Because some of his childhood friends were incarcerated, he had long been interested in the issue. His passion to search for solutions that could target the problems that challenged the U.S. prison system propelled him to delve into this area.

But when Orchingwa was nearing the end of his studies, he realized that, in light of the “balkanized” nature of the American criminal justice system, many of the solutions he was promoting would require a long time to come to fruition. He started to pursue other ways through which more immediate impact could be made while long-term issues, such as long sentences and prosecutor power, were addressed. In doing so, he discovered the untapped niche of prison communication.

“I stumbled onto the issue of prison communication just reading reports primarily from the Prison Policy Initiative and other organizations,” Orchingwa said. “I started uncovering that this was a really large industry, valued at 1.2 billion dollars a year. Some of the leading companies were billion dollar companies, and were making their money primarily by exploiting low-income people, even though data shows that the more one stays in contact with their family members, the better that they do post-release.”

Upon realizing that this was a major problem — to which there could be tangible solutions through adequate investment — Orchingwa decided that he wanted to organize efforts to come up with a platform that could disrupt this industry.

Orchingwa explained that there is a lot

of room for technological disruption in the prison communication landscape, given how much the area has been neglected in terms of innovation. According to him, the hope is that Ameelio can serve as an example of the kind of social justice work that others can do.

“I think a lot of people right now are looking for ways that they can contribute to criminal justice reform and a lot of the focus is on policy,” Orchingwa said. “But we want to highlight the fact that there are a lot of areas where innovation and technology can really help, and prison communication is one of them.”

Although the team started making plans and organizing their work in 2019, Orchingwa explained that it wasn’t until early 2020 that they really started building the service and its technology.

Orchingwa and Saruhashi first connected over coffee in New Haven during his search for a technical co-founder. Saruhashi’s time working for Facebook, experience with nonprofits and passion for social innovation made him a “perfect” match, Orchingwa said.

Saruhashi described that he and Orchingwa have different, but complementary, areas of expertise. While he deals closely with the technical and product side of Ameelio, Orchingwa works more with partnerships and fundraising.

According to Saruhashi, the name chosen for the startup is grounded in the idea of amelioration. “’Ameelio stems from the word ameliorate, to make things better,” Saruhashi said.

“It reflects our focus on the disruption of the ongoing communication duopoly in American prisons, and on ameliorating the financial burden of prison communications costs on incarcerated people and their families.”

Emma Gray ’21 first became involved with the startup shortly before its official launch back in March. As head of partnerships and outreach, Gray’s job involves enrolling users in Ameelio’s services, raising awareness about their work and also creating partnerships with other organizations that can connect currently and formerly incarcerated individuals to helpful resources.

Before joining Ameelio, Gray worked with the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project and attended the graduations of incarcerated students enrolled in a separate mentoring program called Family ReEntry. In these ceremonies, not only did she often hear them say that connection with their loved ones kept them hopeful during their time in prison, but she also had the opportunity to meet the students’ families in person.

However, after reading a Yale Daily News article on the birth of Ameelio, she was awakened to how this communication that they so cherished was, in fact, prohibitively expensive. Realizing that something that mattered so deeply to those affected by incarceration was often inaccessible, she was galvanized into working to streamline pathways for them to stay in touch with their loved ones.

“We thought we understood how hard it was, but we’ve only learned more about all of the barriers that exist,” Gray said.

According to Gray, one of the most prevalent barriers to prison communication is cost. On average, sending a single message through prison communication services like JPay or Corrlinks costs 50 cents.

“Many people think that doesn’t sound that high, but one in three families is going into debt just trying to stay in communication with their loved ones, which is a really upsetting statistic,” Gray said.

Gray recalled that one of their users reported often having to decide between paying for stamps and paying for heart medication before Ameelio’s services. She explained that, upon hearing stories like that, the team was shocked that people had to make this sort of decision when, outside of incarceration, text messages incur no costs.

To make matters worse, there was no incentive for industries to cut back on costs or make these communication services more accessible, Gray said, because the prison communications duopoly — mostly held by Securus Technology and Global Tel Link Corporation, according to Saruhashi — had spent a long time unchallenged. Gray explained that the captive market within the prison communication industry made it so people could only speak to their loved ones through companies that charged exorbitant prices, creating a “predatory space.”

This was the territory that Ameelio first stepped into when they launched their platform. But because of their crowdfunding efforts and the donations they’ve received, users don’t have to spend a cent to communicate with their incarcerated loved ones through their services. A 3 dollar donation — less than the price of a coffee at Starbucks, as Saruhashi described it — is enough to fund a month of free letters for an entire family.

Ameelio provides multiple mediums for communication, which include letters, postcards, pictures and, soon, a brand new service called “Connect,” which will become the first free prison videoconferencing platform in the United States. This wide range of modalities makes Ameelio more inclusive than most prison communications platforms. Different from most services, Ameelio also uses their own tracking system to inform users where their correspondence is, providing frequent notifications from the moment letters are sent to when they arrive.

But friends and family of incarcerated people are not the only ones using Ameelio’s services. Mourning Our Losses — a volunteer group that organizes crowd-sourced memorials for people who died living or working in U.S. jails, prisons and detention centers during the pandemic — uses Ameelio’s platform to find out about anonymous deaths that happened inside of these facilities and allow incarcerated people to write memorials for their friends who passed away behind bars.

Eliza Kravitz ’24, the project coordinator for Mourning Our Losses, said that Ameelio’s organizational features allow them to keep tabs on their letters in a more centralized way while optimizing the efficiency of their communications.

“This proves especially useful when we are expecting a reply from an inside contact,”

Kravitz said. “We can check Ameelio’s page for Mourning Our Losses to see if our volunteer’s letter has arrived yet.”

According to Frances Keohane ’25, a volunteer for Mourning Our Losses, this communication used to cost the organization the price of stamps and envelopes, which added financial expenses.

“Ameelio has lifted incredible weights off of shoulders, not just for families of loved ones, but also for Mourning Our Losses and other small criminal justice organizations that rely on inside communication,” Keohane said in an email to the News. “It is all the more exciting for us at Mourning Our Losses that this partnership is not just one within the criminal justice system, but also reaches to our Yale roots.”

Ameelio’s contributors include the Robin Hood Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation and the tech nonprofit Fast Forward.

The startup has also enlisted the support of famous donors, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Academy Award winner Tarell McCraney and Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey — who recently gave Ameelio half a million dollars.

Mark Pekala, a sophomore at Harvard and a member of Ameelio’s engineering team, explained that this gratuitous service dramatically facilitates communication with people who are in prison. Through Ameelio’s platform, all users have to do to send messages to their incarcerated loved ones is download their app and make a few clicks.

“You don’t need to worry about buying a stamp or writing the address correctly,” Pekala explained. “We do all that for you.”

Since Ameelio’s formal launch coincided with the onset of the pandemic, the effects of the coronavirus exacerbated the onus of their services. In light of the turbulent period that the world was going through, the Ameelio team felt motivated to do whatever they could to make it easier for families separated by incarceration to connect Gray, Pekala and Orchingwa all cited the new economic difficulties that were brought by the pandemic. Where some might have previously been able to afford phone calls, rising unemployment rates and undefined interruptions to jobs made it so several families no longer had the means to pay for that.

“One of the first things that happened once the pandemic seriously hit was that they canceled in-person visits, and 42 percent of families pre-COVID reported visiting their loved ones in prison and communicating that way,” Pekala said. “That’s a sizable chunk of people that, all of a sudden, couldn’t communicate anymore.”

Pekala explained that Ameelio is currently on GitHub — a platform where developers from all over the world can access codes for projects that the team is working on and either suggest changes or add new lines of code for them to review. This allows for users or others who are familiar with Ameelio’s platform and have technical or programming knowledge to contribute to making the app even better.

See AMEELIO on B2

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND FALL From AMEELIO on B1

Joyce Wu ’23, a member of the Ameelio engineering team, joined the startup to pursue her passion for combining computer science and design to build platforms that could empower traditionally marginalized communities. Although she works mostly on the technical side of Ameelio, she also takes part in graphic design initiatives.

Wu explained that, although Ameelio has provided users with the opportunity to write letters since their launch, she has been working with part of the team to design premade postcards, which users have described as “cool, funny [and] inspirational.” Some of them, Wu explained, even have interactive games on the back that incarcerated people can fill out to pass the time.

“So many facilities are under lockdown: People are stuck inside their cells for 23 hours a day. It’s really isolating for them right now,” Wu said.

“We do a lot of user interviews and a lot of people talk about how they want games, so we have many postcards that people can send to their loved ones that also have games like Sudoku and stuff like that.”

According to Wu, the process of sending a letter through Ameelio begins through their website or app, which the engineering team coded themselves.

The program allows users to type in their letters and then exports the text and sends it over to a tertiary service using an application programming interface. This service then prints and sends the letters directly.

Maria Antonia Sendas ’23 joined Ameelio as a fellow over the summer and continued to work with the team throughout the fall semester. According to her, the startup’s steadfast commitment to truly understanding the challenges that plague the prison communications industry is part of what moves them to connect even more incarcerated people to their loved ones.

“As an organization, Ameelio really wants to understand, on a profound level, what incarcerated people are going through so that we can cater to those needs,” Sendas explained.

“Ameelio has become much more than just a service, it has become a support network in and of itself, one that is very humanistic and fully dedicated to making a difference.”

When she first started to work at Ameelio, Sendas said she was impressed by the organization’s forward-facing outlook. Although they had launched their correspondence services in March, by the time she joined the team in June, they were already writing applications for grants that could fund future videoconferencing services.

Jenny Lee ’22, who did marketing for Ameelio over the summer, said that she really valued the welcoming, passionate and collaborative nature of the group.

She recalled a specific moment in weekly meetings where co-founders Saruhashi and Orchingwa would give people shoutouts for the work they had done, praising team members for their dedication and reminding everyone of

how much their work mattered.

“There was always a really great vibe within the team,” Lee said.

According to Pekala, Saruhashi and Sendas, Ameelio is always working to refine their platforms according to the feedback they receive from users.

In the Ameelio app’s Google Play page, testimonials that describe the nonprofit’s customer service as “the best I have ever received” illustrate the team’s attentiveness to user feedback to iteratively improve their services.

Ameelio’s commitment to facilitating correspondence between incarcerated people and their loved ones is already disrupting the prison communications landscape. Through their services, more than 20,000 people across all 50 states have already sent over 100,000 letters to their family or friends who are in prison. But while their success has been encouraging, Ameelio’s work is far from over. Since studies have

shown that keeping in touch with loved ones helps improve reentry outcomes, their ultimate goal is to help reduce incarceration rates in the United States through the power of communication.

As Saruhashi and Orchingwa described, they will continue to seek innovative ways to make incarcerated people feel as close as possible to their loved ones. The team as a whole is committed to help keeping these connections alive for people like Gene, who wrote this thankful review for Ameelio: “This is a good thing to offer people with loved ones locked away. Im 75 and have palsy in my hands … so writing is very hard for me but even harder for my son to decipher. My thanks to the good folks who provide this free service.”

Contact MARIA FERNANDA PACHECO at maria.pacheco@yale.edu .

My Parents, Defenders of Democracy—Apparently // BY CHANWOOK PARK “thank u for protecting our freedom,” the homemade card said. All sides of the card were so spattered with colorful star-spangled motifs that the Hallmark-aspirer could have repurposed it as a submission for the next flag design competition. While it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a care package for a soldier stationed abroad, it definitely seemed foreign in the hands of my foreign, Korean-immigrant father. Apparently, mailmen are cool now.

Whenever my elementary teachers would ask, “Who’s your hero?” my answer was always the same: Martin Luther King Jr. Obvious and undebatable — unless you’re a bigot. The thought of answering the prompt with my parents never crossed my mind. Not because I didn’t think they were worthy of my grade-school accolades, but because “They’re really cool and they feed me” felt like a very difficult thesis to argue for three pages. Why work so hard when an MLK Jr. essay was already written for me on Wikipedia? Love and affection are a lot more difficult to write about than the March on Washington.

So imagine my surprise when my dad showed off his homemade Hallmark, satirically declaring it a badge of heroism. The sender of the card was an elementary-aged kid on my dad’s regular mail route. My dad delivers his report cards twice a year and his Lego magazine four times a year. And it wasn’t just talk; the kid proved his allegiance to the postal service with a crisp, 20-dollar bill within the fold of the card. My dad — against the wishes of my 11-yearold sister, who requested to invest it in her piggy bank — returned the monetary portion of the thank-you gesture, but the star-spangled card still hangs on our fridge today. Not long after, my mother received her very own token of heroism from an elderly woman on her postal route.

Our entire family — especially my parents — finds the situation to be hilarious.

This sudden promotion of my parents’ occupation seemed comical. My parents, whose duties mainly involve delivering Amazon packages, stuffing mailboxes with junk mail and bringing

the dogs on their routes biscuits, were now considered heroes to society. Out of all of the consequences of the global pandemic, who knew that my parents’ rise in popularity would be one of them?

On the scale of heroism, it’s probably safe to assume that their new status falls somewhere between librarians and Martin Luther King Jr. — roughly equivalent to firefighters and teachers.

It isn’t that any member of our family is trivializing the tremendous responsibility shared by all employees — carriers, clerks and distribution workers — of the United States Postal Service. In the month leading up to the fateful day of our democracy, my parents and their colleagues across the nation have been working overtime to ensure that the salvo of voting-related mail does not congest the already-impaired machine that is the USPS. These days, it’s rare that my parents arrive home before 7 p.m. To combat the longer work hours and earlier sunset, headlamps have become an essential part of their tool kit. And since the organization’s current chief executive holds personal interests that could be furthered by the sabotage of the organization he is sworn to protect, the individual tenacity of every postal employee has never been so crucial to maintaining the essential operations of the USPS. But the hilarity of my parents’ elevation to their current status as modern Paul Bunyans arises from the completely unprecedented nature of the promotion. Before their current occupation as postal carriers, my parents toiled away at a diverse array of jobs that would have never made it onto society’s metric of heroism. My dad began our life in America as a kitchen hand in a small deli. He later owned a convenience store, then became a poultry farm laborer, an automobile assembly line worker and a nail technician.

Meanwhile, my mom sold hairpins from a small cart at the mall and later worked as a nail technician alongside my dad. None of these jobs ever even approached being defined as “heroic” by society. They were only the means to our survival so that my sister and I could pursue more heroic endeavors in

WKND RECOMMENDS Abolishing the electoral college.

the future.

We had viewed my parents’ latest occupation as postal carriers in a similar light: unskilled labor that kept food on the table. The only significant difference in this position was that the employer was the government, meaning job security. It fascinates me to see my parents’ work being recognized by people who aren’t directly supported by their paycheck — my sister and myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been proud of my parents — even if they’ve never been the subject of my “hero” essays, they are my heroes. But it sparks a different sense of internal pride to see your personal heroes being finally recognized in a similar light by everyone else.

So even though my dad has probably dented your Amazon delivery and my mom couldn’t completely protect your bills from the rain, know that the postal workers across the nation — in direct contrast to the postmaster general — are making sacrifices for the sanctity of our democratic process. Trust my dad, trust my mom and trust the United States Postal Service’s role in the election process.

Also, PSA FROM MY DAD: Pick up your mail every day — my parents despise the houses that make them play loose-leafed Tetris.

// DORA GUO

Contact CHANWOOK PARK at chanwook.park@yale.edu .

ONLINE THIS WEEK: END OF AN ERA: Dilge Buksur ’24 reminisces on childhood seaside memories.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND SORKIN

The West Wing Revisited:

Aaron Sorkin’s Aristocratic Apologia // BY TIMOTHY HAN

Ahead of the 2020 election, the cast of “The West Wing” were back at it again, releasing a special episode on Oct. 15 to encourage people to vote. “The West Wing” was something rare in television: a show that had an impact. I have worked on political campaigns, I have worked on the Hill, and I have yet to meet a staffer who has not watched show creator Aaron Sorkin’s Camelot-esque rendering of Washington.

Stuck in quarantine and despairing about the state of our politics, I binge-watched “The West Wing” again (only the first four seasons, which are the ones Sorkin wrote).

The elements that made Sorkin’s show brilliant remain so: soaring soliloquies, innovative cinematography (the famous Sorkin “walkand-talk”) and witty, fast-paced dialogue. But on the whole, the show has aged horribly.

To begin, there is the blatant sexism repeatedly inserted as a cheap punchline. The president frequently mocks the first lady’s initiatives and puts down one of her lead projects, the Women’s Caucus, as her “sewing thing.” Secretarial work is a woman’s job, as male characters frequently joke. The president dryly remarks that he hired a female lawyer because she was a “blonde, Republican sex kitten.” One character, British Ambassador Lord John Marbury, who takes the role of a Shakespearean clown, leans entirely upon his misogyny and sexual harassment — including frequently attemping to grope female subordinates — for his comic relief.

However, the larger problem underpinning “The West Wing” is its romanticization of aristocratic, meritocratic governance: the same aristocratic technocracy that led us to the problems of 2020.

When hiring a deputy, President Bartlet makes him promise to remember that a small group of dedicated people can change the world, because it is the only thing that ever has.

This is the message of “The West Wing,” intended as an inspirational rallying cry to every activist the world over.

But that presidential pledge also reveals the deeper problem underlying every interaction in the show. President Bartlet’s fortune cookie wisdom reveals a demoralizing truth about the show: In Aaron Sorkin’s Washington, power is given to the few and privileged, while the rest of us can only watch.

The lead characters of “The West Wing” are all fantastically wealthy, well-credentialed scions of the coastal upper class who claim to speak for the “little guy” without ever interacting with the average American. Sam Seaborn, deputy White House communications director and the initial male lead of the show, is a Princeton and Duke Law graduate from affluent Orange County, California, who made $400,000 a year as a liability lawyer for corporate clients before joining President Bartlet’s staff. C.J. Cregg, press secretary, made $550,000 a year working in Hollywood before her presidential appointment.

Will Bailey, Sam’s replacement, is an Eton valedictorian, the son of the supreme allied commander of NATO, a silver spoon prince who vacations at Rothschild châteaus.

The list goes on and on. Remember, these are dollar amounts from the year 2000.

Sorkin’s characters are consistently the worst type of Ivy League snobs, the kind who constantly brag about their Fulbright scholarships and SAT scores. The unbearable narcissism of the characters aside, the truth is that for a show which ostensibly attempted to demystify the Oval Office for the average

American, there are very few points of entry for the working class. Like a Middle Age or Romantic era epic — feudal and royalist apologia — “The West Wing” is a story of heroic aristocrats, nobly crusading for virtue.

Much like a Yale undergraduate, the show tries to cover up its upperclass roots by recasting itself as a working-class drama. Will Bailey, a man who vacations with Rothschilds, somehow lives in a Holiday Inn. In one episode, C.J. Cregg mentions that she only has $1,331 in her checking account. Did she so quickly spend away the $550,000 salary she had been making?

The Wisconsinite Donna Moss is one of the very few truly middle-class characters who takes a lead role, and her success is at least partially attributable to her boss’s long-running crush on her, a situation made even more uncomfortable in the #MeToo era. The rest of the female and working-class characters are simply extras to populate the background of the boisterous show.

The aristocratic snobbery also extends to the characters’ views on pop culture. When an intern wears her “Star Trek” button to work, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman mocks her obsession with the show.

The timing of his speech, the score and the body language of the scene all indicate that we are supposed to be on Lyman’s side as he beats down on cult obsessives of popular television. But in other episodes of the show, various main characters are revealed to be equally obsessed with their own hobbies. In those moments, we are supposed to be on the side of the fans, feeling the same admiration for high art as they do. In one episode, Sam Seaborn proudly declares himself the recording secretary of the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society and the main characters throw a party themed around the 19th-century playwright-composer duo. Victorian-era musical theater is to be memorized, quoted and proudly sung. A similar obsession with a more popular, more vul-

itics of aristocratic technocracy could not foresee the elite failures that brought us first Obama and then Trump. In 2008, a historically broad coalition of everyday Americans elected then-Senator Obama as an outsider candidate running against the failed establishment of Washington. The Bush administration had blundered us into a failed invasion of the Middle East that murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians and started a forever war on a flank we could not hold. Then, a Wall Street spectacle of greed, corruption and carelessness wiped out the American middle class and wrecked the global economy.

Elected as a reformer, President Obama governed as an elite, establishment moderate. The Obama administration failed to punish those responsible for the calamitous recession and failed to narrow the ever-widening chasm between the American aristocracy and everyone else. Vast swaths of America felt left behind by the technocratic tendencies of the Obama years, leading to a wave of progressive support for Bernie Sanders on the left and reactionary support for Donald Trump on the right. And ultimately, in the race between establishment and outsider, working-class white America voted for the outsider once again.

Of course, income inequality is only among many factors voters consider, but the ever-widening gap between the meritocratic aristocracy and everyone else has certainly contributed to the populist resurgence of the last decade. All around the world, working-class voters feel that the professional classes have left them behind. In France, working-class voters who feel disregarded by Emmanuel Macron’s elite technocracy powered “yellow vest” protests. In Britain, working-class exhaustion with neoliberal economics manifested itself in Brexit.

And in Syria, Western leaders across the board, wary of opening another Iraq, failed to intervene. While the elite in Washington watched impotently, the Syrian Civil War spiraled into a humanitarian crisis with global implications. The wave of six million Syrian refugees streaming from Turkey into Europe invigorated nativist concerns and built even more backlash against the tenuous center. “The West Wing” politics of “let the smart guys run everything” have failed to prevent foreign policy catastrophes and allowed elites to stand idly by while working-class wages stagnate, the cost of living soars, and the middle class crumbles.

The question of today is // VALERIE PAVILONIS how to address the crisis of Americans. The campaign between meritocracy. When the elites have President Bartlet and his Repub- failed, how do we respond? Donlican challenger is not a debate of ald Trump’s answer to meritocracy ideas, but a debate of smart ver- was feudalism: aristocracy without sus stupid. In Sorkin’s writing, the the merit. Like royal commissions in conservative position is simply a late Ancien Régime France, Trump grievance war from illiterate Amer- administration appointments and ica launched against “the New York nominations were seemingly up for Times people” (not the staff of the sale to the highest bidder. Blatantly Times but “people who can read”). unqualified aristocrats like Betsy Sorkin’s argument for the Bart- DeVos sauntered into cabinet posilet administration is simply that tions in exchange for large sums of they are smart and their Repub- campaign cash. The president set up lican counterparts are not. Presi- his family like a medieval monarchy, dent Bartlet may have endangered parceling off his dominion between national security by lying about a Jared, Ivanka, Eric and Don. After the critical illness and failed to build Trump administration, a return to any legislative record on which to Obama-era technocracy looks good. campaign, but the president is a But the Romantic vision of “The Nobel Prize-winning economist West Wing,” of a world in which a surrounded by an Ivy League staff. few meritocratic elites could pave Come on America, let the smart the path forward for the rest of us, is people run things, please. irrevocably dead. The question left In the midst of the George Bush to us is President Bartlet’s tradepresidency, and in the never-end- mark prompt: “What’s next?” ing saga of the Trump administration, “let the experts run things” Contact TIMOTHY HAN at is appealing. But the show’s poltimothy.han@yale.edu . gus show, is something of which to be ashamed.

The political philosophy of “The West Wing” is a meritocratic technocracy. If we all just let the experts be and elected smart people to govern us, our problems would be solved. Josh Lyman, the show’s central character, repeatedly disparages the electorate, angrily ranting about the limits of democracy and the idiocy of “the voters you champion and I can’t stand.”

In fact, we are supposed to see the Bartlett administration as virtuous for soldiering on in spite of a lack of popular support. The president is first elected on the narrowest of pluralities, never wins a majority in the House (during the Sorkin years) and faces chronically low approval ratings. But like any technocratic administration, democratic support is less important than the people in charge doing what they think is right.

Sorkin then writes the subsequent reelection campaign as a romantic quest of elite nobles to win over the hearts and minds of average

ONLINE THIS WEEK: WKND RECOMMENDS Abolishing the Senate.

LOOKING FOR AN ESCAPE? Jacqueline Kaskel ‘24 reviews your new favorite fantasy romance.

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2020 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND DEMOCRACY

“There’s Too Much At Stake”:

Meet the Yalies Working to Save Democracy This Fall // BY EMILY TIAN AND OLIVIA TUCKER

// DORA GUO

From his home in East Lyme, Connecticut — a state that has been faithfully blue for three decades — Conrad French ’23 has been making a lot of calls. For upwards of 10 hours each day, he’s trying to sway voters in Gaston County, North Carolina, a solidly Republican stronghold — known for its cotton mills and bog turtles — where Trump held a rally just last week. Nick Jacobson ’24, a field intern for Eugene DePasquale’s campaign in Pennsylvania’s hotly contested 10th Congressional District, shares his screen with scores of volunteers. Some of the faces he sees in gallery view are offering up their lunch hours to send texts to voters, and others are giving entire days.

Crossing a few state lines, Candice Mulinda ’24 is working on Amy McGrath’s campaign in Kentucky, while Nick McGowan ’24 also relocated this fall to reel in votes for Democratic Party candidates in three pivotal counties in north-central Iowa.

All told, these students, who were considering taking a leave of absence even before the pandemic hit, have called and texted thousands upon thousands of voters, developed policy and communications strategies and hosted countless virtual training sessions and Zoom socials for volunteers.

The News reached out to students active in a range of political groups on campus, but were not able to identify any undergraduates working on Republican campaigns this fall.

When Jacobson articulates why he’s willing to trade Zoom classes for Zoom training sessions, his explanation comes without pause. Politics seem to run in his family’s bloodlines — he said that his uncle also took time off college to work on a presidential campaign — but observing the opioid crisis and racial violence play out in his hometown over the past four years made the decision all the more intuitive.

“I have been increasingly disturbed by the failure of politicians in Washington to meet the needs of people in central Pennsylvania,” Jacobson said.

“It seemed right to take time to do something that is on my mind every day.”

Many of his peers — geographically adrift, but politically anchored — spoke to the country’s existential unease (on the subject of Tuesday, grade school dicta against hyperboles and absolutes have been cast out the window). Some, like Jacobson, have been canvassing since middle school. Others, like Timothy Han ’23, who is working for Biden’s presidential campaign and Jennifer Wexton’s congressional campaign in northern Virginia, have dived headfirst into this campaign cycle without having any intention of entering the political arena in the long term.

French, who is working for several campaigns through the North Carolina Democratic Party, didn’t mince words.

“There’s no question that this is the most important election of my lifetime. What this country looks like — the way it’s governed — is at stake,” he said.

Yale College Democrats President Molly Shapiro ’21 is taking classes but still clocking countless hours to ramp up voter turnout on Yale’s campus and support Dems members scattered across battleground states. She’s buoyed by a strong sense that this semester is not just “academic,” so she’s willing to phonebank and register voters even if it means finishing an assignment later.

Emmett Shell ’23, like Mulinda, is working as a field organizer for McGrath, the Democratic challenger to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He chose the Kentucky race not only because of his enthusiasm for McGrath’s track record and platform but also out of an intense dislike of the incumbent.

“Mitch McConnell is truly an evil person who has used a tremendous amount of power to do a lot of bad in his country in the world with detrimental consequences for millions of people,” Shell said.

McConnell’s congressional office did not respond to a request for comment.

ON THE TRAIL, ONLINE Their jobs follow no set routine, but they do share a common language: Many of these

field organizers have split their time between recruiting and training volunteers and directly engaging voters via text or phone calls. Others fill more specialized positions, like tracking media coverage of their respective candidates, developing political strategy or supporting fundraising efforts.

Jacobson described two related goals in the field of campaign work: connecting with voters — which, in most years, neighborhood-to-neighborhood door-knocking is a popular and effective strategy — and drawing in volunteers, which creates a multiplicative effect that helps campaigns size their footprints up many times over. Their task over the past few months, in other words, has been to cover as much surface area as possible, without the physical maps and canvassing routes to get them there.

That very little of their field organizing is in the field at all is but one of the pandemic’s many ironies. Sadi Ghimire ’23, who is campaigning for Betsy Dirksen Londrigan in Illinois’ 13th Congressional District, said that “not having as much face-to-face contact with voters is really hard.” In rural districts, like those Mulinda is helping oversee in Kentucky, remote voter outreach presents additional challenges, like lack of in-home internet, television or phone service.

It can also be tough for volunteers to muster the same levels of enthusiasm for the campaign, when the usual rewards of their work — from in-person socials to free food — are difficult to replicate over

Zoom.

Many Democratic Party campaigns are operating totally without an in-person component, which means that childhood bedrooms are doing double duty as campaign offices.

And there’s still a persistent feeling, for Han, that some of Wexton and Biden’s Republican Party opponents — who are running traditional in-person campaigns, COVID be damned — might benefit from an unfair competitive advantage.

“It’s so much easier to knock on people’s doors,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean digital campaigning hasn’t presented its own opportunities — ones unlikely to be let go by campaign professionals even when the pandemic subsides.

Several students interviewed by the News referred to “relational organizing”: a buzzy term in campaign strategy that refers to harnessing existing social networks among voters and volunteers to cement support.

Moving online has also allowed these students to work for campaigns coast-to-coast no matter where they are currently based, though French pointed out that remote work may produce mixed effects.

“People who are not super tech-savvy would be door-knocking in a normal year — but at the same time, people who can’t go door to door have a great opportunity to be involved,” French said.

Though hours are long, the work frequently inglorious and Zoom fatigue real, students have still found value in building rapport with volunteers and voters.

“I’ve been inspired,” Han said, “by how much ordinary working people are willing to sacrifice every day.”

French added that he’s similarly inspired by one of his colleagues, who lost her job as a waitress amid the pandemic and is still “sin-

WKND RECOMMENDS Packing the court.

gle-handedly turning out votes in Gaston County.”

On Shell’s volunteer team, an octogenarian is dialing in five times a week. And when another elderly voter mentioned — on the day of Kentucky’s voter registration deadline — that he was not yet registered, Mulinda spent half an hour on the phone guiding him through the online registration process, which she described as “so fulfilling.”

For these students, there’s a chance that, come tomorrow, their phones will stop ringing. There’s also a chance that — should election results be contested — they won’t.

For the students who have given up taking classes this semester to work on political campaigns and the others who are balancing both, it’s hard to imagine what would come after the election, and when, even, that might be.

Almost all hedged when asked what anything other than victory would prefigure.

“I don’t want to contemplate loss,” Han said.

“I don’t think losing is an option,” Jacobson echoed. “There’s too much at stake.”

WHAT COMES NEXT? Eight months ago today, the United States had 21 confirmed cases of COVID19. Former Vice President Joe Biden was not yet the Democratic nominee. We were in the final crunch of midterm exams before recess, thinking about vacation plans, thinking about the Spring Fling lineup, worrying a little, perhaps, about the slow, steady creep of the virus into the country.

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Americans these past eight months have borne the collective weight of a devastating pandemic, an equally painful economic recession, racial injustice and an ever-deepening cultural-political chasm. It feels difficult to not be somewhat hardened by 2020, or, at least, changed. The events of this year might have a particularly indelible impact on young people, many of whom are voting for the first time this fall.

“I don’t think it’s possible to go back to the same person you left,” said McGowan. “[Campaign work] shapes you and reminds you of the world beyond Yale.”

In keeping with the unpredictability that’s plagued 2020, little is certain about the coming weeks. But, eventually, at some point in the near or further future, every vote will be counted. Elections will be called. And one by one, whether in February or next August, these Yalies will trickle back to campus, wholly different from the people they were when we left for spring break last March.

Most students the News spoke with said that campaign work hadn’t dramatically changed their academic aspirations, but rather shifted the context in which they’ll study. Matt Youkilis ’24, who took the term off to work on voting engagement initiatives, explained that he’s more likely to consider the practical applications of his coursework in the coming semesters.

“It’ll be harder to be a hermit at Yale and get lost in the books, in philosophy, in ancient history,” he said. “I’m more likely to see how I can apply [my classes] to career paths.”

Some added the caveat that the minutiae of their coursework might seem slightly low-

er-stakes now.

“I’m not going to change my major,” Mulinda said, “But I know for certain that when I’m sitting and analyzing the capitalization of two words in the Constitution, I will never use this.”

And while many of the students interviewed are studying political science, a handful told the News that they now believe a college degree isn’t necessary for campaign work or political organizing, as evidenced by their colleagues on the trail. Anyone, they said, can volunteer — and they want more Yalies to engage.

Four years ago, a mere 56.7 percent of eligible Yale University students voted, according to Yale Votes publicity captain Olivia Sepe ’24, who cited Tufts University’s National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. The group is pushing for 100-percent voter participation in this election, advancing their mission via the dissemination of social media infographics and the Yale Pledge to 100 campaign, which challenges different student groups to reach 100-percent voter registration.

In addition to her work with Yale Votes, Sepe has signed up to be a poll worker this election cycle. She served as a supervisor in Rhode Island’s June presidential preference primaries and as a clerk in the September primaries, earning a promotion to moderator for the general election. Her Election Day shift will start at 6 in the morning and run past 10 p.m. — a long day, to be sure, but a commitment she feels compelled to make, and a role she’s excited to play.

“Being a poll worker in my community is really important to me because I want to make sure our elections are safe and secure and that people feel comfortable voting in person if they choose to this year,” Sepe said. “I knew there was such a strong need for poll workers, so I thought, ‘Why not?’”

Indeed, the pandemic has precipitated a well-documented need for young people to serve as poll workers. In 2018, 58 percent of poll workers were 61 or older, falling squarely in a category of high risk for the virus — and causing many to sit this election out over safety concerns. Many states allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work the polls, despite not being able to vote themselves, and some counties compensate workers for their time.

Sepe said she feels it’s a COVID-safe option for young, healthy people, noting that at her June and September poll sites, everyone wore masks, Plexiglass separated workers from voters and the pens, iPads and voting machines voters used to cast their ballots were frequently sanitized. The same will be true on Tuesday.

Beyond the ballot box, there’s much students can do to lay the groundwork for the change they want to see. Many campaign staffers the News spoke with stressed the importance of phonebanking and textbanking, particularly while traditional canvassing is precluded indefinitely by the pandemic. Mulinda said that she “could never” go through another election cycle without phonebanking.

She advised students who receive texts from volunteers asking them to sign up for phone banking shifts to “just say yes to it.”

“I promise you will not regret it,” she said.

Low rates of youth voter participation is a phenomenon spanning back decades — though turnout appears to be surging this cycle — and has proven a historically challenging issue to combat. But now is not the time to be defeated by cynicism or disillusionment, Jacobson said. Young people can no longer choose to remain apolitical — he believes it was never a choice to begin with.

“The way we treat and interact with each other, how we talk to each other, that’s all politics,” Jacobson said. “Politics is something we live, not something we choose to engage with or not to.”

Contact EMILY TIAN at emily.tian@yale.edu and Contact OLIVIA TUCKER at olivia.tucker@yale.edu

ONLINE THIS WEEK: BORAT 2’S IDENTITY CRISIS: Harry Rubin ‘21 examines Sacha Baron Cohen’s foray into the Trumpverse.