Category Archives: Politics and policy

Why I’m back to filing our Virginia taxes on paper

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One of the little luxuries of life in Virginia is having more time to file state tax returns–ours, unlike those of most states, aren’t due until the first business day of May. And one of the little indignities of life in Virginia is having this annual ritual offer a reminder of how badly our state got suckered by the tax prep industry’s “Free File” con.

Rewind 20 years, and the Virginia Department of Taxation was a leader in providing direct online filing with its iFile site. You plugged in a few numbers from your federal return, the site did the math, and you could then file directly to the department. What was not to like?

A printed-out copy of a Virginia Form 760, with a pen resting on top of it.

The answer for commercial tax-prep providers was “competition.” And in 2010, they sold Richmond on a different deal: They would offer free tax prep and online filing through their apps and sites to lower-income taxpayers (as they had done for federal taxes since 2003 as part of the Internal Revenue Service signing onto this Free File proposition) if the state would first scrap its own tax-prep service.

As I wrote at the time at the Washington Post, the fiscal analysis prepared for the Free File bill introduced by Del. Kathy Byron (R.-Lynchburg) suggested this wouldn’t pencil out for the state unless almost no iFile users reverted to filing on paper. But bipartisan majorities passed Byron’s contribution to crony capitalism, after which Gov Robert McDonnell (R.) signed it into law.

The results of enabling Intuit’s rent-seeking strategy, as I wrote in the Post three years ago, have been woeful for taxpayers and the state: In 2019, more than seven times as many Virginia taxpayers filed on paper than availed themselves of Free File.

And since last year, I’ve become one of those people mailing in a Form 760 as if it were 1993. The clumsy but no-charge Free Fillable Forms option that I noted in my 2020 Post opinion piece–where I called it “the stone tablet of spreadsheets”–vanished from the Department of Taxation’s menu after 2021, which the department attributed to an unnamed software vendor (Intuit, perhaps?) dropping support for the product.

The actual work isn’t that much more than it was two years ago, except that I have to do the math myself after typing in numbers instead of clicking a “Do the Math” button (really!) in Free Fillable Forms. As before, I check my work by stepping through a Virginia return in TurboTax; I know my work isn’t done because Intuit’s app thinks we should get about $50 more in our refund, which also happens to be below the $59 Intuit wants me to pay for the privilege of filing my state taxes through that app. Figuring that out may be a hassle. Dealing with my printer probably will too.

I would love nothing more than for Virginia to renounce this failed experiment and restore something like iFile. But a bill introduced in January by Del. Kathy Tran (D.-Fairfax) to do just that instead died in a subcommittee, because recognizing past mistakes does not appear to be the high-order bit in today’s Virginia GOP.

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The value of my Twitter checkmark is just about zero now

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It cost me nothing but a little bit of my time to get a then-coveted verification badge for my Twitter account in the fall of 2014, and lately that checkmark icon seems worth nothing–if it isn’t already worth less than nothing.

In the latest of a long series of own goals by Twitter overlord Elon Musk, he’s skipped from offering verification as a new perk for people who pay $8 a month for “Twitter Blue” to dissing people with “legacy verification” badges with a “May or may not be notable” label to saying those “legacy blue checks” will go away “in a few months” to setting an April 1 date to start that expiration process to changing the label for both old-school and new-school verification badges to this uselessly vague text: “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue or is a legacy verified account.”

My phone with the Twitter app open to my profile and showing the most recent label for legacy-verified accounts, with a Twitter-logo t-shirt underneath it.

So now those of us who got our verification badges the old-fashioned way have nothing to distinguish ourselves from the chumps who handed over $8 a month ($11 a month if you paid in Twitter’s mobile apps). And the people who voted with their wallets have nothing visually setting them apart from the unelected elites who had won favor among the old regime. And random Twitter users have no way to tell an account that was subject to some human verification from one that provided a working credit card. We are all losers now.

I have less room to complain than most badge holders, having obtained this status via some in-person schmoozing of a Twitter rep at the Online News Association’s 2014 conference. I followed up over e-mail, providing links to my work at five different news sites, and 11 days later got a “Congratulations! Your account has been verified” e-mail from Twitter.

I know many other people who should have met the nebulous verification guidelines never got awarded that “blue-check” status. (Fact check: As anybody can see, the icon consists of a white checkmark inside a blue circle.) It wasn’t a fair fight then and it isn’t one now.

It is, however, now comical that Musk has managed to make both legacy and paid verification worthless with that new label, perhaps because technical debt makes bulk-deleting legacy verification too difficult. As the Washington Post reported: “Removal of verification badges is a largely manual process powered by a system prone to breaking, which draws on a large internal database — similar to an Excel spreadsheet — in which verification data is stored.”

So far, the only notable check mark that’s actually been pulled has been that of the New York Times’ main account, which Musk apparently had yanked to show off that he could. That stunt is one more reminder–since followed by Musk applying a “state-affiliated media” label to NPR’s account, a move he now seems to be having second thoughts about–that Twitter has become the vanity project of a shitposting billionaire suffering from delusions of social-media competence.

Arlington should stop discriminating against duplexes, and so should other counties and cities in America

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While the Arlington County Board started hearing out hundreds of citizens at its Saturday meeting about its “Expanded Housing Option” proposal to liberalize zoning regulations and enable the construction of multiple-family residences in more of the county, I went on a bike ride that took me through several of those single-family-zoned neighborhoods on my way to the Donaldson Run trail.

Many of the front yards I passed featured a yellow “No Missing Middle” sign supporting the current regulations, which only permit by-right construction of single-family residences in the vast majority of Arlington.

It’s not that you can’t build a duplex, triplex, quadplex or a tiny apartment building there if you really want to–but you’d better clear your calendar and have money to pay for a real-estate lawyer to navigate your project through the county’s Site Plan Approval process and have it voted on by one or more county commissions and then the County Board.

Buildings cluster along the Orange Line, as seen from an airplane departing National Airport; north and south of them, single-family homes dominate.

That took six months for one recent proposal to build a duplex a 10-minute walk from the Ballston Metro; another, which only involved renovating a 1935-vintage duplex, has spent years grinding through this process but remains on hold.

(Disclosure: My wife works for Arlington County’s government but has no role in housing policy.)

So while Arlington has done fantastically well at nurturing dense, walkable and transit-oriented development along Metro and bus lines, outside those corridors the county remains mostly single-family homes. Which are both getting increasingly expensive and at increasing risk of being torn down and replaced by giant homes built to maximize a lot’s development potential (and a developer’s profit), and which are only affordable to the wealthiest buyers.

We could have intermediate types of development like duplexes and triplexes–what affordable housing advocates call “missing middle” housing–but county leaders, like many local governments across America, chose otherwise in a series of actions that often reeked of racial and economic exclusion. In 1938, Arlington banned row houses outright; in 1942, another zoning revision limited duplexes to a small fraction of the county; a 1950 revision further clamped down on duplexes.

So when an existing house goes up for sale here, only two things can happen to it when the default setting is single-family dwellings: Somebody buys the place to live in and hopefully fix up, or somebody buys it as a teardown and replaces it with yet another 5,000-square-foot mini-mansion. I think about this every time we get an unsolicited letter from a realtor saying they have a buyer interested in the lot occupied by our 1920 bungalow–which we could only afford because I had the good timing to buy a condo here in 2000 and have it double in value by 2004.

A "Dead End" sign in Arlington, with a series of bungalows visible behind it and then an apartment building across the street.

Lot-coverage rules can tamp down building sizes and encourage neighborhood-friendly touches like front porches, but we can’t prohibit homeowners from optimizing a sale for personal wealth. Some places can offer property-tax incentives for keeping older homes, but in Virginia we’d literally have to amend the state constitution to add a carve-out to its clause requiring uniformity in property taxation.

The people who put those “No Missing Middle” signs in front of their 1950s-vintage homes–not to mention the one I saw in January in front of a row house built just before the county’s 1938 ban–seem blissfully unaware of this dynamic. And yet nobody here seems happy with how expensive housing has become or how bungalows keep getting replaced with giant, boxy abodes that only a couple with dual six-figure incomes can consider buying.

Partially deregulating zoning to allow more but smaller homes on one property, subject to limits about factors like parking spaces and lot coverage–also known as “giving the free market a chance to work” and “not having the government pick winners and losers”–is a feasible route out of this dead end.

It’s also the right thing to do. We don’t need to be yet another privileged place sticking with a housing policy that amounts to “Screw you, I’ve got mine”; as a pro-missing-middle editorial in Saturday’s Washington Post concludes with an icepick of a sentence, “One San Francisco is enough.”

Good Twitter, bad Twitter (latest in a series)

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Friday neatly encapsulated what I still like about Twitter and what I’ve increasingly grown to hate at the service under its new and erratic management. I know which slice of the service I want to see prevail, but I increasingly doubt that will happen.

First, let’s cover the good side of Twitter. Friday afternoon, I tweeted out my confusion at seeing Twitter owner/overlord Elon Musk declare his intention to liberate 1.5 billion usernames that had been abandoned for years. Could there be that many abandoned accounts when Twitter reported only 237.8 million monetizable daily active users in its second quarter?

Seven minutes later, tech journalist Tom Maxwell replied that he’d heard former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo say on a podcast that 80 percent of new users abandoned it after a day. I asked if he happened to remember the name of the podcast, and about half an hour later he replied with a link to the podcast episode in which former exec Ryan Sarver (see, memory can lead any of us astray) said the service had already hit a billion abandoned accounts when he left in 2013.

Twitter's bird icon, as seen on a t-shirt that I picked up at the Online News Association's conference in 2014, with a series of concentric white circles in the background.

Unexpected and fast enlightenment on a subject is always a delight, and Twitter remains remarkably effective at that.

Then came Friday’s night edition of Twitter Files, Musk’s attempt to smear the previous management’s content-moderation practices as an in-kind contribution to the Democratic Party. Matt Taibbi, one of a few writers to whom Musk has given vast access to internal documents and records, uncorked an overwrought, 67-tweet thread about the booting of President Trump from the platform after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that portrayed Trump as the real victim.

Taibbi’s unwillingness to note the essential context–that by repeatedly lying about election procedures, Trump was violating published rules in a way that would have gotten a less high-profile account booted a long time ago–makes this thread and all its screengrabs of Slack threads an infuriating read. Especially if you, like me, served as a poll worker in the 2020 election.

But Taibbi, like his Twitter Files collaborator Bari Weiss and his recent Twitter cheerleader Glenn Greenwald, seems to have made rejecting the Establishment Narrative part of a personal #brand. Even if that requires him to call a Trump tweet demanding that every mail-in ballot uncounted by the end of Election Day remain uncounted–thereby disenfranchising millions of Americans–“fairly anodyne.”

This thread and two earlier threads in this series–one Dec. 8 from Weiss, one Dec. 2 from Taibbi–have also revealed some interesting details about how content moderation decisions happen quickly behind the scenes, often on the basis of incomplete and fast-moving information, and how undocumented much of this corporate gear-grinding has been.

But as many others have noted, they don’t show a conspiracy afoot unless you think content moderation should parcel out equal pain on both parties. And that is an absurd expectation when so much of the GOP under Trump has bought into lies about elections, vaccines, climate change, trans people, all non-straight people, and so much else that have no comparable counterparts among Dems.

(I remain anxious to see party politics ease down to conversations about which problems actually require the government’s intervention and how to do that in the most efficient and effective manner.)

But because Twitter is also a context-destroying machine, and because Musk has been amplifying these alleged exposés to his nearly 121 million followers, I expect that many more people now believe this fraudulent depiction of how Twitter struggled to apply its published rules to an increasingly deranged president. And to keep its spaces palatable to the advertisers that keep it in business.

What must those advertisers now think about Musk ransacking Twitter and letting neo-Nazis, QAnon kooks, and Charlottesville and January 6 rioters back on the platform? And how do they feel about Musk’s most recent meltdowns, in which he’s lashed out at past Twitter employees for allegedly ignoring child sex abuse on the platform and then called Twitter “both a social media company and a crime scene”?

Musk may yet realize that he has a business to run, and that business is not providing “fan service for aggrieved conservatives who exist in the Fox News Extended Universe,” as George Washington University professor Dave Karpf tweeted Friday.

But Musk has a lot of money, even if the bank loans he took on to complete the Twitter purchase he spent months trying to wriggle out of leave his new property owing more than $1 billion a year in interest. He can probably afford to stew in his rapidly-curdling delusions for a while.

Either way, it might be prudent to leave my @robpegoraro Twitter handle off my next batch of business cards.

Saying there’s nothing we can do is not a serious answer

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Two Sundays ago, I walked out of the airport terminal in Boise and stopped to gawk at the sticker on an entrance door. Illustrated with a picture of an anxious cartoon handgun, it warned travelers of the mininum $3,920 fine waiting if they tried to take a firearm through security. Then I saw a second sign with the same message on the doors leading from a parking garage to the terminal.

But on that afternoon, the apparent need for such a reminder represented one of the smallest parts of America’s gun problem.

Two Sundays ago, it had only been a day since a deranged 18-year-old excuse for a man had shot and killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo. I spent the next seven days driving through the Pacific Northwest as part of PCMag’s Fastest Mobile Networks drive testing, then flew home Monday. A day later, a deranged 18-year-old excuse for a man shot and killed 19 grade-school children and two teachers in Uvalde, Tex.

This sickening repeat led to a predictably sickening response by elected officials, most but not all Republican, that amounted to this: Whatever we do can’t touch our peculiar institution of massively distributed gun ownership.

It’s fair to point to the conduct of the local police in Uvalde–their inaction left children only a little younger than my own dying in their hour of need. But this spasm of whataboutism has also led to politicians endorsing things like rebuilding schools along the lines of prisons (presumably, the rest of us remain free to get shot elsewhere) and improving mental-health care (which would be more persuasive were it not coming from politicians who spent years trying to kill the Affordable Care Act without serious plans to replace it), and anything else but the public-health issues of what guns are on the market, how they are sold and transferred, and who winds up carrying them.

The Second Amendment’s two-part phrasing allows multiple readings, but the last time the Supreme Court pondered it and perceived an individual right to gun ownership, it still saw no absolutes.

“It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. “The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” 

Which brings me back to my first setting. Flying from D.C. to Boise via Chicago treated me to the safest way to travel–made so because the culture of safety in commercial aviation doesn’t accept excuses like “the risk is somebody else’s fault” or “this is how we’ve always done it” or “individual passengers can make their own decisions.” Many other parts of American life could use something like that culture of safety, but none more than the manufacture and distribution of devices expressly made to kill people.

A long wait for an app notification

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Twenty-one months ago, I installed the Virginia Department of Health’s COVIDWISE app on my smartphone and urged everybody reading that post in Virginia to go and do likewise. Back in August of 2020, I expected that this app developed with the Apple-Google COVID-19 exposure notifications framework would soon be warning me that I’d been near somebody else who had tested positive and had then used this app or another built on that foundation to send a thoroughly anonymized warning.

But the notifications of possible exposures didn’t appear, even as the U.S. suffered repeated waves of novel-coronavirus variants and the positive-test rate in Northern Virginia shot up above 30 percent at the start of this year. And as I got my first vaccination, second vaccination and booster shot, the continued silence of this app bothered me less and less–to the point that I briefly forgot to activate it after moving from my Pixel 3a to my Pixel 5a.

That silence ended Thursday morning, when my smartphone greeted me with a notification of a probable exposure. “You have likely been exposed to someone who has tested positive for COVID-19,” the app told me. “COVIDWISE estimates that you were last exposed 5 days ago.”

The app further informed me that “Most people who are fully vaccinated and free of COVID-like symptoms do not need to quarantine or be tested after an exposure.” Fortunately, I had already self-tested negative on an antigen at-home kit Wednesday morning to verify my health before heading to the Hack the Capitol security conference.

Because this app and others built on the Apple/Google code don’t store location data, I can only wonder when this possible exposure happened. And since five days ago was Saturday, when I flew home from Latvia via Munich and then Boston, I’m looking at thousands of miles of possibility. A second notification from COVIDWISE referencing North Carolina’s SlowCOVIDNC app suggests that my possible exposure source lives there, but the privacy-preserving design of this system ensures I’ll never know for sure.

A five-day turnaround, however, now seems quick after seeing three people reply to my tweet about this notification to report that they didn’t get their own heads-up from one of these exposure-notification apps until 10 days after the possible exposure–a uselessly long lag. My conclusion from those data points: Get vaccinated and boosted, because that will do more than anything else you could possibly undertake to ensure that receiving one of these exposure alerts remains a drama-free experience.

Brief memories of Ukraine, over 32 years later

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Until this week, my relatively limited travel around the world had not included any places that later became war zones on live TV. Thanks to Russia’s paranoid president Vladimir Putin lashing out in toxic nostalgia for the Soviet Union, that description no longer applies to Ukraine.

My mid-1989 introduction to what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was too brief. As part of a post-high-school-graduation student tour of the Soviet Union that my parents paid for (a boondoggle that I remain amazed got a green light from Mom and Dad), a few days after landing in Moscow, our group took an overnight train to the city then called Kiev.

Our compressed schedule over maybe two days there had us visit multiple museums, see a concert, and gawk at the Motherland Monument, a gigantic WWII tribute consisting of a statue of a woman hoisting a sword and a shield emblazoned with the USSR’s hammer and sickle. But we also had a limited amount of time to walk around Kyiv itself, which on our final day in the city yielded the unexpected sight of a large gathering of people next to a stadium holding signs and flags.

As in, the kind of politicial demonstration that was not supposed to happen in the country that President Reagan had fairly labeled an “evil empire.” The flags themselves–blue and yellow banners, which I knew did not match the red-and-blue flag of the Ukrainian SSR–were equally surprising.

I didn’t know what those people were protesting, and the photos I took don’t reveal enough visible text on their signs for me to type into Google Translate now. But more than three decades later, I think that the kind of people who would gather publicly under a forbidden flag in 1989 will fight like hell against Russia’s murderous incursion.

The other takeaway I retain from that trip, which also took our New Jersey contingent to Odessa, Sochi, and St. Petersburg, then still called Leningrad: The Russian people–some of whom have marched in the streets this week at considerable risk to their own safety to protest this assault against their democratic neighbor–deserve better than having any more of their future stolen by Putin and his corrupt, thuggish ilk.

Lessons from transatlantic travel during the never-ending pandemic

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Returning to Europe for the first time in close to two years reminded me of some aspects of EU life that had faded from my mind, like the endless series of GDPR-mandated privacy dialogs marring familiar news sites.

But my visit to Estonia on a sponsored press trip this week also exposed a newer difference between life here and on the other side of the Atlantic: how people are responding to the pandemic that’s now nearing its third year.

While I did not have to show proof of vaccination or a negative test result to board my flight (I took a PCR test two days prior to departure anyway and got a negative result the evening prior), I didn’t take too many steps after landing in Frankfurt before being asked for those documents to get into a Lufthansa lounge.

In Estonia–where the positive-test rate is lower than here in Virginia, while the vaccination rate is also lower but rising rapidly–I had to present my vaccination card once again to check into the hotel in Tallinn.

I faced more documentation requests to get into restaurants, a museum and a government office building. I’d call it a papers-please ritual except the Europeans among me could display EU-spec digital certificates on their phones that could be verified with a scan of a QR code, while I was left showing my paper card or a photo of it. This left me feeling like a health-tech hick, especially when one official looked at that image and said something like “I’ll have to trust you.”

(I’m told there’s an effort to build out a digital-vaccination-certificate standard across U.S. states, with California already supporting it; yes, consider the story assignment received.)

Mask compliance, however, did not seem great in the few mostly-empty restaurants and bars I ducked into; I did not linger in any crowded indoor spaces unmasked because I felt like I was pushing my luck enough already.

(For the same reason, I bought a BinaxNow antigen test at a CVS this morning and got yet another negative result.)

I had to present a negative test to board my flight home Thursday morning. That itself got checked twice, once before I could get a boarding pass and again before the gate for my flight back to the States from Munich.

And then after a long day of travel, I returned to a United States in which most people never have to produce any sort of confirmation of vaccination or a recent negative test–and some people seem violently opposed to any such mandate, even if that rugged individualism in the face of a pandemic just might put them in the grave.

Secondary thoughts on working yet another primary election

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Tuesday had a lot in common with the four days I spent last year working as an election officer for Arlington County. Just as in March, June, July and then November, I staggered through a sleep-deprived day that started with a 5 a.m. arrival at the polling place and didn’t end until around 8:30 p.m. As in all of those elections except last March’s Democratic presidential primary, the day left me with a fair amount of downtime to fill with reading a book and chatting with my fellow poll workers. And once again, it felt deeply fulfilling to help my fellow citizens do their part to hire candidates for temporary, taxpayer-funded jobs.

Lillies bloom in the foreground, while the background shows election signs in front of a community center in Arlington, Va.

But since November 3, the subject of election security–a topic I’ve been covering on and off for most of the last two decades–has fallen prey to fever-dream conspiracy theories among Donald Trump followers who refuse to believe that the former president was fired by the largest electorate in American history.

I am tempted to give this post over to yet another rant denouncing those advocates of Trump’s Big Lie–as well as the sedition sympathizers in Congress who kept pandering to those dead-enders after the deadly riot at the Capitol January 6.

But instead, I will talk about my workday Tuesday. Here are some things you should know about how we did our part in Virginia’s primary elections, which I hope map with how elections are run wherever you may read this:

• Trust paper. Arlington uses hand-marked paper ballots that each voter feeds into a scanner that will read the ballot if it’s upside-down, right-side up, forwards or backwards. (We also have ballot-marking devices for voters with disabilities.) That paper trail then becomes part of the risk-limiting audit that Virginia now conducts after each election; the audit run after November’s election (but not reported out until March) confirmed that the votes as scanned accurately recorded how people marked their ballots. If your state is among the minority to still use “direct-recording” machines that leave no paper trail (hello, Texas), direct your ire at the elected officials who haven’t fixed that problem.

• Don’t confuse voter identification with TSA Pre. I checked in one voter who did not have a Virginia driver’s license but did appear in our poll-book app as a registered voter, and I saw other voters show up with the same scenario. That was understandable, as the Virginia DMV is struggling to catch up with a pandemic-inflicted backlog. It would be unconscionable to kick those people out of polling places when one government bureaucracy can’t issue ID cards fast enough while another has already confirmed their eligibility. I should note here that this voter brought their voter registration card; should you get stuck in this situation, bringing that other piece of paper will save a tired poll worker a little time.

• Expect software to fail; design for resilience. The most reassuring paper product I saw Tuesday was the printout of the entire pollbook for our precinct, which meant that we did not have to rely on our pollbook app to stay up all day. Fortunately, that software did work, by which I mean it functioned aside from the feature that was supposed to scan the bar code on the back of a Virginia driver’s license but instead failed at least nine out of 10 times in my experience.

• Check everything at least twice. My day started with opening packs of ballots and counting them, 10 at a time. Each shrink-wrapped pack should have held 100 ballots and did, but we checked that anyway–so that there would be no discrepancy between the number of ballots handed out and the number of voters checked in. We also verified each total at the end of every hour; each time, there was no surplus of voters or ballots. And then we made one last check after polls closed to confirm that we had handed out exactly one ballot per voter.

If the above sounds inefficient, you read this right. Election administration has to suffer some inefficiency to accommodate the conflicting demands of allowing voters secret ballots and yielding an auditable paper record. Deal with it.