The certification of the 2024 US presidential election

Today, a joint session of the US Congress, chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris, certified the results of the 2024 US presidential election, declaring Donald Trump the winner.

This was not the result I wanted, but it is a result which honored the votes of the American people, via the system of voting in the US called the Electoral College. The length of the proceeding was less than 30 minutes, as there were no objections by any Representative or Senator. It was amazing how quickly it went, as opposed to 2021 where numerous objections were raised by Republican (see my liveblog from the 2021 certification).

Kamala Harris released a video today stating that she would fulfill her constitutional duty to preside over the electoral count today:

The House and Senate Congressional leaders held a brief ceremony to remember the events of January 6, 2021:

In CNN’s liveblog coverage for today, Jamie Raskin shared part of a conversation with fellow representative Bennie Thompson:

“I was reflecting on the fact that we can feel proud of standing up for the constitutional order and the election process as it is supposed to work, but it’s also a very tough pill to swallow” Raskin told CNN of his private conversation with Thompson.

Previously on this weblog:

Other coverage:

How to volunteer to help process election data

Now that the 2024 US election results have been certified by the states, those results have been made available to the public through the state election offices, usually part of the Secretary of State for each state.   A non-profit, Open Elections, has been working for over a decade to collect and make US election data publicly available for academic and political analysis. 

I am helping again with my home state of Oregon. For many counties throughout the US, the county election office releases a PDF file of results for each precinct. Open Elections depends on volunteers to process these files and create files in Comma Separated Value (CSV) format. The files are reviewed and then committed to a GitHub repository organized by state. Some counties also make results available directly in CSV format, but not many. Fortunately, there are several tools that can be used to capture data from PDFs in a table format (Tabula, a Java application, and Microsoft Excel). I have been using Excel this time, and it is working well for me (Tabula would not run on my Windows 11 laptop).

For more information on how to help, check out their documentation site (a little dated, still refers to 2020 election, but there is work going on for 2024 results). I feel like I am doing something positive as opposed to just feeling bad about the 2024 presidential election results. Take a look!

The end of podcasting, chapter 64

My last post in this series was in April 2024, so I have not touched this topic in a while (although I have been writing about podcasting and some issues with WordPress podcast feeds). However, in the November 2024 issue of New York magazine, an article called “How YouTube Ate Podcasting” appeared, which sounds ominous, so let’s check it out…

The pull-quotes seems to be that podcasting is moving from audio to video:

A lot has changed for podcasting in two decades, but one shift is both underrecognized and obvious: It’s not really an audio medium anymore….YouTube, typically known as the go-to platform for video content, has risen to the top as the most popular service used for podcast listening in the U.S….The trend is more pronounced among younger listeners, Edison says, citing research from earlier this year, which found that “84 percent of Gen Z monthly podcast listeners … listen to or watch podcasts with a video component.”

So – younger “podcast listeners” are “watching” more “podcasts” instead of “listening” to “podcasts”. I am using “podcasts” in quotes here, because the podcasts in question are YouTube videos. However, they are discoverable in podcast apps like PocketCasts, and there are tutorials for how to construct a RSS feed URL for a YouTube channel.

Maybe part of the problem is in the creation part, says Chuck Shotton (via Dave Winer):

Posting a video to Youtube is infinitely easier for a lot of people than understanding how to publish a podcast. That’s really the gist of it. Any dingdong with a phone camera can be a YouTube star.

So, yes, recording a video and posting it to YouTube is a skill that many people have nowadays -but is that “eating podcasting”? Is that keeping people from creating new audio podcasts? No (using WordPress is pretty simple). Is that preventing people from listening to audio podcasts in the way that they have been? No. Is it providing an easier way for people to monetize their “podcasts” using the tools that YouTube has set up? Ah, now I think we are getting closer to the nut of “How YouTube Ate Podcasting” (see “Money makes the world go ’round“). People who want to make money from podcasts definitely could be moving to YouTube to do this, as well as other services (see chapters 57, 58, and 59). However, I think the thing to do is to make great things and find ways to innovate. Let’s get out there and compete people – come on!

Followup on creating WordPress podcast feeds

In November 2024, I wrote a post about an issue I discovered in trying to create a WordPress category feed for a set of audio posts. The category feed had issues in being recognized by a podcast app. I found that when I set the post type/format as “Audio” in the WordPress editor, the category feed could be recognized by a podcast app.

Last month, I noticed a tweet by Ken Smith that some WordPress themes do not have the support in the editor interface for the post type/format. He linked to a video (shown at the end of this post) showing how to modify WordPress files to add this feature to a theme if not present. I checked some of my older WordPress websites, and found that several of them had this issue. I appreciate Ken bringing this to a wider attention.

Experimenting with manually creating podcast feeds

Earlier this year, Dave Winer began an experiment to create a podcast feed with shownotes for the Morning Coffee Notes podcasts that he created at the beginnings of podcasting in 2004. He created a Node.js app (podcastBuilder) to create the feed and the shownotes, which were in an OPML outline (both data for the feed and the shownotes). The feed is available through Apple Podcasts and, of course, Scripting News.

I was interested in trying this out, but I did not want to fire up the Drummer outliner app to create an OPML file for this app. I then remembered that Dave Winer had another Node package (rss) to create RSS feeds based on JSON data input. After some experimentation, I was able to add elements to the rss package example to create a feed with enclosures and other podcast information like the podcastBuilder app was creating. My manually created feed is hosted here, and three people have managed to load this in a podcast app and listen to the files (audio from Ken Smith’s essays for Michiana Chronicles). If you would like to try it, I have created a Github repo with the Javascript file I used for creating the feed, the output feed from the app, and some simple instructions. Enjoy!

In the US today, the Electoral College is meeting to cast electoral votes for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Per CNN, Donald Trump has already received enough votes to win the presidency. I tried to find where the Oregon Electoral College meeting is, but did not find anything. Quite a difference from four years ago, when almost all of the electoral college meetings were televised.

Follow-up on “How to get the Democratic message out there”

Recently, I wrote a post about an idea of trying to get the @kamalahq social media feeds going again. I took the following actions:

  1. Reached out to the communications contact for my county Democratic committee, sent them a pointer to my post, and asked if there was anything the county committee could do to help. The person wrote me back, said they agreed with my post, and added a link to the post in that week’s newsletter. I waited a few days, but did not get any response. I touched base with the county committee person again, the response was “there are some connected people on the mailing list. I have not written back.
  2. I signed up for a trial of LinkedIn Premium to be able to send directly email to Lauren Kopp (head person of @kamalahq feeds), asking if the feeds might be restarting. No response yet (need to remember to cancel my trial….)
  3. Sent email to the digital director for the Oregon Democratic Party, with the same info I sent to the county party committee. No response yet.

What to do next? I will follow up to the state party office (probably should write the top person) and the county committee (maybe the comms person has some other ideas). I am not surprised by the level of response, but perhaps a second try will get a little farther.

Memories of Thanksgiving parades

I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on NBC this morning while preparing for our Thanksgiving meal. There were quite a lot of Broadway show excepts and pop performers, but there were also the marching bands (both high school and college). When I was in band in high school in the 1970s, the comic strip “Funky Winkerbean” had a character who was the band director at Funky’s high school. His name was Harry L. Dinkle, and was a great entertainment to me and several of my band friends. One year, Harry’s band was going to go to the Macy’s parade in New York City. Of course, they had many obstacles to overcome, but my memory is that they made it to New York, although they may have not marched in the parade. The strip author Tom Batiuk also has a page on Harry Dinkle on his website.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!