According to vote totals on the Secretary of State's website 346,130 early and absentee ballots had been cast in the midterm elections by the end of the day Friday. The number was continuing to update on Saturday.

The ballot measure under consideration next month -- unusual for all that it encompasses -- would allow same-day registration, no-reason absentee ballots and straight-party voting. It also would automatically register people when they conduct business with the secretary of state unless they opt out and lock into the state constitution laws already in place such as sending absentee ballots to military or overseas voters at least 45 days before an election, ensuring secret ballots and auditing election results.

There is less a consensus on a return to paper ballots that are filled out by hand, although cybersecurity experts largely prefer them. That debate is playing out in Georgia as state lawmakers consider replacing the state's paperless machines. Democrats and voting advocates say systems that use those types of ballots are the most secure and cost-effective options.

Voting theory can provide useful insights for multiagent preference aggregation. However, the standard setting assumes voters with preferences that are total orders, as well as a ballot language that coincides with the preference language. In typical AI scenarios, these assumptions do not hold: certain alternatives may be incomparable for some agents, and others may have their preferences encoded in a format that is different from how the preference aggregation mechanism wants them. We study the consequences of dropping these assumptions. In particular, we investigate the consequences for the important notion of strategy-proofness. While strategy-proofness cannot be guaranteed in the classical setting, we are able to show that there are situations in our more general framework where this is possible. We also consider computational aspects of the problem.

There's a giant scheme afoot to disenfranchise voters in November -- it's called mail-in balloting. Mail-in voting has, like many things in our politics, taken on the aspect of tribal warfare -- if President Trump is vociferously against it, Democrats must be vociferously for it, and vice versa. Absentee voting is unquestionably less secure than in-person voting, but there's no evidence of widespread fraud. Nor is there evidence that, at least prior to this campaign, mail-in voting has favored Democrats, as the president believes. Trump shouldn't be trying to delegitimize the process, a point that journalists have often made.