Matt Vasilogambros | (TNS) Stateline.org

Facing increased threats to election workers and superheated political rhetoric from former President Donald Trump and his supporters, more states are considering firearm bans at polling places and ballot drop boxes ahead of November’s presidential election.

This month, New Mexico became the latest state to restrict guns where people vote or hand in ballots, joining at least 21 other states with similar laws — some banning either open or concealed carry but most banning both.

Nine of those prohibitions were enacted in the past two years, as states have sought to prevent voter intimidation or even violence at the polls driven by Trump’s false claims of election rigging. At least six states are debating bills that would ban firearms at polling places or expand existing bans to include more locations.

The New Mexico measure, which was supported entirely by Democrats, applies to within 100 feet of polling places and 50 feet of ballot drop boxes. People who violate the law are subject to a petty misdemeanor charge that could result in six months in jail.

“Our national climate is increasingly polarized,” said Democratic state Rep. Reena Szczepanski, one of the bill’s sponsors. “Anything we can do to turn the temperature down and allow for the safe operation of our very basic democratic right, voting, is critical.”

She told Stateline that she and her co-sponsors were inspired to introduce the legislation after concerned Santa Fe poll workers, who faced harassment by people openly carrying firearms during the 2020 presidential election, reached out to them.

The bill carved out an exception for people with concealed carry permits and members of law enforcement. Still, every Republican in the New Mexico legislature opposed the measure; many said they worried that gun owners might get charged with a crime for accidentally bringing their firearm to the polling place.

“We have a lot of real crime problems in this state,” said House Minority Floor Leader Ryan Lane, a Republican, during a House Judiciary Committee hearing last month. “It’s puzzling to me why we’re making this a priority.”

But over the past several years, national voting rights and gun violence prevention advocates have been sounding the alarm over increased threats around elections, pointing to ballooning disinformation, looser gun laws, record firearm sales and vigilantism at polling locations and ballot tabulation centers.

National surveys show that election officials have left the field in droves because of the threats they’re facing, and many who remain in their posts are concerned for their safety.

Add in aggressive rhetoric from Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and it becomes “a storm” that makes it essential for states to pass laws that prohibit guns at polling places, said Robyn Sanders, a Democracy Program counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, a voting rights group based at the New York University School of Law.

“Our democracy has come under new and unnerving pressure based on the emergence of the election denial movement, disinformation and false narratives about the integrity of our elections,” said Sanders, who co-authored a September report on how to protect elections from gun violence. The report was a partnership between the Brennan Center and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

“The presence of guns in these places presents a risk of violence,” she added.

Increased threat environment

Over the past four years, threats have gone beyond voicemails, emails or social media posts. Armed vigilantes have harassed voters at ballot drop boxes and shown up outside vote tabulation centers. Other people reportedly have shot at local election officials.

While several states have enacted laws in recent years criminalizing threats to election officials, some states want to take it a step further through gun restrictions.

This year, primarily Democratic lawmakers in Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan Pennsylvania, Vermont and Virginia have introduced legislation that would ban most firearms in or near polling places or other election-related places. Most of these bills remain in committee.

Some of the states have seen political violence in recent years, including Pennsylvania, where a man tried to go into a Harrisburg polling place in November with a firearm and acted threateningly, confronting voters and pointing an unloaded gun at an unoccupied police cruiser.

A bill in Virginia to ban firearms at polling places got through the state legislature on a party-line vote this month, but Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has not yet acted on the legislation. His press office did not respond to a request for more information.

Two Democratic-backed bills in Michigan seek to ban most firearms at or within 100 feet of polling places, and ballot drop boxes and clerks’ offices during the 40 days before an election. They have passed the state Senate but await votes in the House.

Democratic state Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, the sponsor of one of those bills, told Stateline she expects the legislation to pass in April, after special elections fill two vacant seats.

“We want to make sure that we’re able to attract the needed election workers, and that they feel safe doing those jobs,” she said. “Sadly, we’re seeing more and more gun violence throughout our state and our nation. And I strongly believe that everyone should feel safe when they’re voting.”

But these bills are “good for headlines and nothing else,” said GOP state Sen. Jim Runestad in a statement on the Senate Republicans’ website.

“When one considers the sheer number of drop boxes placed throughout larger communities, like in the city of Detroit, these places could be nearly impossible to avoid,” he wrote, referring to gun owners.

One of his proposed amendments that failed would have exempted gun owners carrying guns for non-election-related business, such as going into a store near a ballot drop box.

In 2020, Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson attempted to ban firearms within 100 feet of polling places, clerks’ offices and absentee ballot counting centers. But Michigan courts blocked her effort, finding she didn’t have the authority.

Michigan was one of many states where election officials faced violent threats during the 2020 presidential election. Last month, a man pleaded guilty to federal charges for threatening the life of former Rochester Hills Clerk Tina Barton, saying she deserved a “throat to the knife.”

There is broad bipartisan support among voters to ban firearms at polling places. According to a 2022 poll of more than 1,000 adults commissioned by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, nearly 80% of Democrats and more than half of Republicans and independents polled thought guns should be banned at polling places. Overall, 63% of adults surveyed supported a ban.

But that cross-party support has not translated to state legislatures.

Where are the bans?

Democratic-controlled states have spearheaded the effort to ban firearms at polling places in recent years, with only a handful of Republican lawmakers joining Democrats to pass the bills in some states.

In 2022, Colorado, New Jersey, New York and Washington state passed firearm restrictions at polling places. In 2023, California, Delaware, Hawaii and Maryland joined the list.

Nevada’s majority-Democratic legislature passed a similar ban last year, but Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo vetoed it. He said the measure would have infringed on the constitutional rights of Nevadans.

Maryland’s ban is facing a legal challenge from gun rights groups and activists who argue such bans infringe on Second Amendment protections and are ineffective.

“It’s a solution looking for a problem,” said Andi Turner, a spokesperson for the Maryland State Rifle and Pistol Association, which is part of the lawsuit challenging the law. “We don’t have people threatening at polling places or going and shooting up election workers. I don’t see why this needs to be a thing.”

The states that had polling place firearm bans prior to the 2020 presidential election now have Republican-controlled legislatures: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas.

Georgia’s ban dates back to 1870, and in 1874 the state Supreme Court wrote that having a firearm at a polling place “is a thing so improper in itself, so shocking to all sense of propriety, so wholly useless and full of evil, that it would be strange if the framers of the constitution have used words broad enough to give it a constitutional guarantee.”

More Republican-led states should consider firearm prohibitions at polling places, said Jessie Ojeda, the guns and democracy attorney fellow at the Giffords Law Center, and one of the co-authors of the joint Brennan and Giffords report.

Gun safety advocates such as Ojeda see an opening for these laws, even after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that widened the definition of protected firearm access. While the court struck down New York’s law that prohibited firearms in public, it did leave open the potential for bans in “sensitive places,” specifically noting polling places.

“We need to take action before 2024,” said Ojeda. “We have a growing number of incidents when firearms are thankfully not being used to shoot people, but they are being used to intimidate and deter voters and election officials from doing their job.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

Karen Kaplan | Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Our dogs understand us better than they’ve been given credit for — and scientists say they have the brain wave evidence to prove it.

By placing electrodes on the heads of 18 pet dogs, researchers found striking evidence that the animals did not merely recognize the patterns of sound that come out of their owners’ mouths, they actually realized that certain words refer to specific objects.

The findings were reported Friday in the journal Current Biology.

“For decades there has been a debate about whether animals are capable of such a level of abstraction,” said study leader Marianna Boros, a neuroscientist and ethologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. The experiments with dogs knock down the uniqueness of humans “a little bit.”

A few exceptional dogs have been trained to learn the names of hundreds of objects. Among the most esteemed was Chaser, a border collie from South Carolina who could remember the names of more than 1,000 toys.

Boros wondered whether more dogs understood that words had meanings but just didn’t have a way to show it. Even when dogs succeed in behavioral studies, she said, “you never know exactly what happens in the brain.”

So she took inspiration from researchers who study language processing in humans and got her hands on an electroencephalogram machine. The EEG measures brain waves and can gauge the difference between the neural responses to a word that’s expected and a word that seems to come out of left field.

With a little cleanser, some conductive cream and gauze, the researchers connected the EEG electrodes to the heads of 27 dogs. Then the dogs listened to recordings of their owners using the familiar words in simple sentences like, “Luna, here’s the ball.”

After a short pause, the owner appeared behind a window with an object in his or her hand. Sometimes it was the object mentioned in the sentence; sometimes it wasn’t. Either way, the electrodes recorded small voltages from the dogs’ brains as they contemplated what they had heard and seen.

The tests went on for as long as a dog was willing to stay on its mat and participate, Boros said.

“The EEG studies with dogs are quite easy to run,” she said. “They don’t need to do anything. They just lay down.”

The 18 dogs that were able to sit through at least 10 trials were included in the analysis. With all but four of those animals, the EEGs revealed a distinct pattern: The wave signals dipped significantly lower when there was a match between the word and the object than when there wasn’t.

It was reminiscent of the difference seen in EEGs when humans are confronted with a word that seems out of place, such as a request to wash your hands with soap and coffee. Neuroscientists interpret this as a sign that the brain was expecting another word — “water” instead of “coffee” — and had to do some extra work to understand the sentence.

Boros and her colleagues posit that the same thing happens in the brains of dogs: After hearing their owner use the word for an object, they called it up in their mind in anticipation of seeing it. Then, when an object appeared, it was either the thing they expected or something that threw them for a loop. The reason the dogs could tell something was amiss was that they understood the spoken word.

The gap between hearing the word and seeing the object is key, said Lilla Magyari, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Stavanger in Norway, who worked on the study.

If a dog heard the word “ball” while looking at a ball in its owner’s hands, it might guess that the two go together because they were present at the same time, she said. But the experiment’s design prevented that from happening. Instead, the dog must have created an accurate mental representation of the spoken word.

The dog was thinking, “I heard the word, now the object needs to come,” Magyari said.

“Ball” was the most common vocabulary word among the dogs in the study. Several had words for “leash,” “phone” and “wallet.” Most had at least one name for a favorite toy, including one pet that understood four distinct words for different toys in the experiment.

Related Articles

St. Paul man charged with misdemeanors in dogs’ attack on girl, 7

Stephen L. Carter: What leash laws for dogs tell us about humans

Minnesota dog and cat breeder inspections are private. A new bill aims to make the data public.

Interior design isn’t just for humans. There are better ways to incorporate your pet too

Nearly 25% of US pet owners insure their pets. Should you?

It’s not clear from the study results whether all dogs have the capacity to learn words. The ones that participated in the experiment were volunteered by their owners, who vouched that their pets knew at least five words for objects. (One dog was said to have a vocabulary of 230 nouns.)

Marie Nitzschner spent a decade studying the cognitive abilities and communication skills of dogs at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. She said she had ever met only one dog that seemed to know words for specific objects. Even so, she said the study makes a strong case that the phenomenon is real.

“It appears to me to be conclusive,” said Nitzschner, who was not involved in the work.

She added that dogs who lack this ability have nothing to worry about “because we still have good communication options. However, if I noticed that my dog had a talent in this direction, I would probably try to encourage this talent.”

Dog lovers are sure to be intrigued by the linguistic capabilities of their best friends. But the researchers see the study as a way to investigate why humans excel at language when other animals don’t.

“It’s kind of a mystery,” Magyari said. “We don’t know why all of a sudden humans were able to use such a complex system.”

By breaking it down into its component parts and studying whether any of them are shared with animals, “we can construct a theory about how language evolved in humans,” she said.

Of all species on Earth, dogs are singular study subjects because they live their entire lives immersed in a world rich with human speech. And unlike with cats, the ancestors of dogs were selected for domestication based on their ability to communicate with humans.

“It’s super-relevant for them,” Boros said.

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

A new sober bar — one of few establishments in the Twin Cities dedicated solely to non-alcoholic beverages — is now open on St. Paul’s East Side, with proceeds going toward youth wellness programs.

The bar, called Club Throw Down, is open from 7 to 11:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, with drinks created by SIPS Drinkz, a local beverage company run by Danyelle Powell.

Even though no alcohol is served, the bar is still ages 21 and up. It’s an adult space, just a redefined one, founder Felicia Henderson said.

Felicia Henderson smiles in a 2020 headshot. Henderson is a yoni steam practitioner and reiki master in St. Paul. (Photo courtesy Felicia Henderson)

“I don’t drink — but I like to have fun, I like to feel free, I like to hear loud music,” Henderson said. “And I’m corny, so it’s going to be stuff the rest of the world might think is corny, but it’s going to be fun as hell.”

On the schedule: Dance nights, live music and open mics, karaoke every Saturday.

The small space is adorned simply with floral decor and gold accents — a compromise for Henderson, who can usually be seen sipping from a yellow mug or pulling her yellow keychain or yellow iPhone from her yellow purse. Friends had talked her out of making the sober bar yellow, too, so gold felt like a good and perhaps sneaky workaround, she joked.

As non-alcoholic drinks grow in popularity, more producers and restaurants are offering options for customers who are sober or prefer not to drink. Local breweries are creating great N/A options, and bottle shops like Marigold and Zero Proof Beverage House are opening up around the Twin Cities. And while a variety of restaurants serve N/A options, just a few — including vegan cafe Hi Flora! in Minneapolis and now Club Throw Down — are fully dry.

‘Every aspect of what it takes to live a better life’

The building that houses Club Throw Down is home to a variety of Henderson’s other initiatives, too, primarily Yoni Treats Wellness Center.

There, she offers a variety of alternative treatments including yoni steam, a practice sometimes called vaginal steaming; reiki, a type of energy healing; and other herbal detoxification remedies. Henderson is a reiki master, a certification that requires several levels of training.

A “resource tree” inside the Yoni Treats Wellness Center on St. Paul’s East Side, shown on March 19, 2024, helps connect visitors to wellness practitioners. The center is owned by Felicia Henderson, a yoni steam provider and reiki master. (Jared Kaufman / Pioneer Press)

Other wellness practitioners work in the building, too, and Henderson has created a “resource tree” to help visitors find providers who meet their needs.

Another part of the building is dedicated to a teen safe haven and the relatively new Restoring Humanity Resource Center, where Henderson offers support, mental health and past trauma counseling and necessities including clothing to local teens. Funds from Club Throw Down go to support this work, she said.

To Henderson, the sober bar is a natural match with the rest of her wellness practice.

“The goal is to create a full-functioning healing space where we can have every aspect of what it takes to live a better life,” she said.

Much of Henderson’s work is informed by her efforts to address her own physical and mental health challenges.

She experienced abuse as a child, she said, and is a suicide attempt and self-harm survivor. When she was growing up in Chicago, therapy wasn’t presented as an option, she said. A tattoo across her collarbone reads, “My story isn’t over yet.”

Within a short time span about five years ago, she developed cervical cancer and had an ectopic pregnancy, and surgeons removed the right half of her reproductive system, she said. She has also been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome. But when doctors recommended a hysterectomy and said she would be unable to have more children, she became concerned that surgery alone wasn’t sufficient to build more holistic wellness.

So she declined the procedure and discovered yoni steam, she said, and within a year, became pregnant again and safely delivered a healthy baby, her third of four children. Through various wellness practices, she has also been able to manage her panic attacks and reduce medications for mental health, she said.

“Everything I’m doing stems from a part of my journey of healing,” she said. “I have survived all that to be able to help other people overcome their trauma, too, in the ways I learned to do it for myself.”

People often remark to Henderson that she keeps herself busy, she said, and it’s true: She birdwatches every morning. She runs several parallel wellness businesses, with two toddlers at home. She gives her personal phone number to the youth in her orbit. She saw a need, and within the past couple months or so, created a sober bar from scratch to fill the gap.

“If we’re going to gripe about something, we might as well do something about it,” she said. “There’s no point in complaining or seeing an issue with things that we’re not willing to be a part of changing.”

Club Throw Down: 1440 Arcade St., Suite A, or search “Club Throw Down Sober Bar” on Facebook

Related Articles

Following a rent dispute, Tattersall’s original Northeast Minneapolis cocktail room will close at the end of the year

3 fun and festive cocktails for Valentine’s Day

Locally made nonalcoholic options are better than ever

Surly’s Taylor and Travis beers use same base, different yeasts

The family of Yia Xiong, speaking publicly for the first time since prosecutors announced they won’t charge the St. Paul police officer who fatally shot him, said they are “devastated, angry and confused” by the decision.

“But in his memory, I hope that St. Paul can learn from this,” said his daughter, Mai Tong Xiong, who called for policy changes for police at a Wednesday press conference.

Xiong, 65, was partially deaf and didn’t speak English, his family has said.

Yia Xiong in his Vietnam War uniform (Courtesy photo)

He was advancing toward officers with a 12-inch knife on Feb. 11, 2023, when Officer Abdirahman Dahir shot him, according to a summary of the investigation from the Ramsey County attorney’s and Minnesota Attorney General’s offices released March 20.

Officers were responding to 911 calls at the apartment building where Xiong lived in the 100 block of South Western Avenue near West Seventh Street. The prosecutors said Dahir and other officers “had no objective reason to believe that Mr. Xiong did not understand the multiple orders given to him by officers to ‘stop’ and ‘drop the knife.’”

Xiong’s family said he lost his hearing in one ear from serving in the Secret War in Laos, a time when Hmong generals fought alongside the U.S in the Vietnam War.

“As a refugee family, we sought refuge in this country with the hope of finding safety and a promise of justice and dignity,” said Mai Tong Xiong. “… It is painful that a veteran who … once fought for the principles this country stands for would fall victim to the very system meant to protect him.”

The Justice for Yia Xiong Coalition is demanding that officials release all data in the case, including unredacted body camera footage. The police department released footage of the encounter soon after Xiong was shot. A spokesperson for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which investigated, said last week that it would begin preparing all materials from the case file for public release as allowed by state law.

The coalition is also calling for Police Chief Axel Henry, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and their staff to meet with the community for discussions about policy changes to prevent future deadly force incidents, especially with people with limited English skills or with disabilities. Three St. Paul City Council members on Friday issued a letter about similar policy changes.

In a Friday statement from Mayor Melvin Carter and Henry, they said: “As the men and women of the St. Paul Police Department stand up to respond to dangerous and dynamic situations on all of our behalf, we remain committed to the deep work of healing from this specific incident, and partnering with law enforcement and community partners alike to reduce encounters such as these, which place both public and officer safety at risk.”

Mai Tong Xiong, who lives in Wisconsin, said it now pains her to come to St. Paul. Yia Xiong “was a great father, a loving grandfather” and had been married for more than 40 years, his daughter said.

“I miss my father every day,” she said. “… I miss his video calls to my children. …They ask about their grandfather every day.”

Related Articles

Families of men shot by law enforcement reach $165K settlement in lawsuit over obtaining BCA case files

Letters: In Cobb case, was deadly force authorized?

FBI warns of a ‘disturbing’ rise in online groups extorting children into self harm

Joe Soucheray: Reckless car thieves, streetlamp wreckers … we’re tired of this

Recently retired St. Anthony police chief dies unexpectedly