“But I have no idea how voting by mail will affect this.”

And we don’t know. Before the pandemic, five states regularly conducted elections by mail, but the rest of the nation is new at this.

WASHINGTON POST

There’s early evidence that more Democrats are voting by mail than Republicans in primaries this year, writes The Fix’s Aaron Blake. And that may be driven by President Trump’s unsupported allegations that mail voting leads to fraud. Recently, some Republican voters in Michigan burned their absentee ballot applications in protest of voting that way.

Perhaps the biggest concern about vote by mail comes not from partisanship but the pure logistics of how to do it, basically, nationwide. A big question: Can the U.S. Postal Service handle all these mailed ballots?

In Colorado, which has been doing voting by mail for years, officials stuff ballots into envelopes with a smart bar code so voters can track the ballots. The official who set this up told me that is one of the best practices to give voters confidence in the process.

But many state election officials are overwhelmed just trying to figure out how to hold an election in a pandemic and don’t have the time or money to set something like that up. That will leave voters reliant on trusting that the Postal Service is getting their ballot to them and back in time to be counted.

That could be a problem, reports The Post’s Michelle Ye Hee Lee. The Postal Service has already failed to deliver more than a thousand absentee ballots in Wisconsin, and voters in other states say they never got theirs.

For its part, the Postal Service is warning that states are setting up unrealistic expectations for mail voting. For example, if states allow voters just a couple of business days to request, fill out and return a ballot by Election Day, the Postal Service may not be able to handle that. And courts in states such as Michigan and Minnesota have ruled that ballots must be in by Election Day.

Voting advocates say the solution would be more money for the Postal Service and state election officials. We’ll see whether Congress comes up with that.

Mask Compliance in NYC Subways is Imperfect, Mail-in Voting is Safe, Recession is Official. UPDATES.

UPDATES:

Demonstrations continued across Brooklyn this weekend as thousands of protesters again took to the streets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to decry the recent police killings of black people across the country.  And after nearly three months, New York City is ready to make a comeback from COVID-19.

Protesters hope this is a moment of reckoning for American policing. Experts say not so fast.

WASHINGTON POST

Glimmers of hope have emerged for Americans demanding action on police violence and systemic racism in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, the black man who gasped for air beneath the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer last month.

All four officers involved have been fired and charged in his death, a far more rapid show of accountability than has followed similar killings of unarmed black people. Massive, diverse crowds have filled streets nationwide, sometimes with politicians and law enforcement officials marching and kneeling alongside. Legislation banning chokeholds and other forms of force have been passed by local governments. And on Monday, congressional Democrats plan to roll out a sweeping package of police reforms on Capitol Hill.

But there are signs that Floyd’s killing might not be the watershed moment that civil rights advocates are hoping for, some experts say.

 The extraordinary facts of the May 25 incident — the gradual loss of consciousness of a handcuffed man who cried out for his deceased mother with his final breaths — distinguishes it from the more common and more ambiguous fatal police encounters that lead to debate over whether use of force was justified. And the politics of police reform that have squashed previous efforts still loom: powerful unions, legal immunity for police and intractable implicit biases.

“We have 400 years of history of policing that tell me things tend not to change,” said Lorenzo Boyd, director of the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven. “It’s a breaking point right now, just like Trayvon Martin was a breaking point, just like Michael Brown was a breaking point. But the question is: Where do we go from here?”

It’s a familiar question for Gwen Carr, who watched her son take his final breaths on video as a New York police officer held him in a chokehold and he pleaded, “I can’t breathe.”  Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, speaks on May 28 to a group of people gathered outside the Cup Foods where George Floyd died while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minn. Carr was joined by Rev. Al Sharpton (L) and spoke about the need to hold police officers accountable for their actions. (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

Thousands of Americans filled the streets for Eric Garner in 2014 — mostly black men and women — with bull horns and protest signs in dozens of cities.

But their pleas for comprehensive police reforms took hold in only a smattering of the country’s more than 18,000 police departments. Dozens of agencies adopted training on de-escalating tense encounters. Sixteen states passed stricter requirements for use of deadly force.

Not a single piece of federal legislation passed on Capitol Hill.

The effectiveness of policy changes is blunted by police union contracts that protect officers from discipline and firing for wayward behavior.

“There are so many terms and conditions in the collective bargaining agreements that insulate police from accountability and transparency,” said Jody Armour, a law professor at the University of Southern California. “Can we know who the bad police are? Are there public records? A lot of times, that is squelched in collective bargaining.”

Even changes to training can have little effect. A growing number of police departments are providing cadets with de-escalation and anti-bias training, but once they are assigned to a field training officer — a veteran on the force — the training can fall by the wayside, according to police training experts.

One of the rookie officers who helped hold Floyd down questioned whether they should roll the gasping man over, but then-officer Derek Chauvin dismissed the suggestion and insisted on “staying put” with his knee on Floyd’s neck, according to court records.

“Seasoned officers will push away from what they learned in the academy and go to what works for them in the street,” Boyd said. “And officers will often say, ‘We have to police people differently because force is all they understand.’”

“When you give police discretion to enforce any law, it seems to get disproportionately enforced against black folk. Whether it’s curfew, social distancing,” said Armour, noting that Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill.

“Would you have put your knee on a white guy’s neck like that? Would you have a little more recognition of humanity, and when he’s screaming out, ‘I can’t breathe,’ would that have raised more concern?” he said. “That’s the deeper problem.”

The vast majority of such cases are not caught on video and therefore often go unnoticed, Boyd said. For example, Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old emergency room technician who was shot at least eight times inside her home by Louisville police in March, is often left out of the discussion of systemic injustice — in part because no one was there to record Taylor getting shot by officers serving a drug warrant, said Andra Gillespie, director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. All three remain on administrative leave, but no charges have been filed, according to the Courier Journal.

Even killings captured on video rarely lead to prosecution of police officers. Sterling had a handgun in his pocket when he was tackled by police outside a Baton Rouge convenience store, and police said he was reaching for it when officers shot him six times. The DOJ and Louisiana attorney general decided not to file criminal charges against the officers involved. Attorneys for the officer who put Garner, 43, in a chokehold argued that he probably died because he was obese and had resisted arrest. Daniel Pantaleo lost his job after a disciplinary hearing four years later, but the Justice Department declined to bring criminal charges.

Charles H. Ramsey, a former chief in the District and Philadelphia and co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, said perhaps the biggest obstacle to nationwide change is the unwieldy way in which police departments are organized. With every city, town, state and county fielding its own force, he said, it’s hard to standardize training and policies.

“Regionalizing them would be a solid first step,” Ramsey said. “But then you get into the politics. Every county and every mayor; they want their own police force, they want their own chief.”

Meanwhile, the FBI still hasn’t followed through on a pledge to aggressively track the nation’s fatal police shootings.

“It’s been five years since they promised to fix that database,” Ramsey said. “Come on. That’s enough time.”

As New Yorkers Return To Subways, Mask Compliance Remains An Open Question

SCOTT LYNCH / GOTHAMIST

As riders trickle back to the New York City subway system as Phase One of reopening gets underway and regular service resumes, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Metropolitan Transit Authority have said that face coverings are required on public transit. But whether New Yorkers will comply, especially heading into a hot summer, remains an open question.

At Atlantic Terminal, there were MTA staffers distributing free masks and free hand sanitizer bottled by state prison inmates.
While many were seen wearing masks across a span of two hours, dozens of riders were seen entering the station without a mask. Several wore the masks incorrectly, either failing to cover their noses or mouths.

Jose Martinez

✔@JMartinezNYC

Scorecard from a subway car on a Bronx-bound No. 2 train with 13 riders:

Nope: 2
Try Again: 3
That’s the one: 7
No mask: 0

52

12:57 PM - Jun 8, 2020

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Interim President of New York City Transit Sarah Feinberg reported seeing, “nearly 100% compliance on wearing masks,” on the L, F and Q lines.

MTA Chairman Pat Foye, speaking on WCBS said the agency conducted a survey last week and found out of 50,000 customers, 92 percent wore masks.

“That's an incredibly high level," he said. "We want to get it even higher. It is a requirement of state law. Compliance by our employees I think it's fair to say is 100 percent.”

Aside from relying on mask-wearing and social distancing measures, the MTA has been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on extensive cleaning during the day and during overnight shutdowns (the exact figure has yet to be released).

“The tiles, the floor, and even when you go in the train system itself you can smell the complete difference,” Chad Brown, 23, an electrician from East Flatbush, said.

Brown, who was returning to work in Midtown for the first time since the pandemic began, added that he was happy with the cleanliness and the number of people wearing masks, although during the early morning there were relatively few riders.
“I really wonder how we’re going to work it out when we’re on the train and it’s rush hour and there’s a lot of people. That’s my biggest concern,” Brown said.

Platforms at several major hubs were empty Monday morning, allowing most riders to have plenty of room, with only a couple of people standing. At Union Square and Fulton, there were social distancing decals, mostly of a sneaker footprint with an MTA tread, but also others variations, including paws, horseshoes, heels, and even prosthetic limbs.

STEPHEN NESSEN / GOTHAMIST

With about 15 percent of normal ridership levels expected Monday, the MTA expects to see a nearly $8 billion deficit this year. Still, a recent report from the Tristate Transportation Campaign finds that 92 percent of those surveyed plan to return to transit.

Overnight subway service is still suspended from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m., and Governor Cuomo suggested Monday that he doesn’t see an end to that.

To tout the return of the city’s “mojo” the Governor himself broke his more than three year streak of not riding the subway, by taking a symbolic ride on the 7 train from Queens to his office in Midtown.

Minuscule number of potentially fraudulent ballots in states with universal mail voting undercuts Trump claims about election risks

WASHINGTON POST

A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.

The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.

The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims.

Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.

Current and former election officials in the three states said allegations that mail voting fosters widespread cheating are not only defied by the data, but also do not acknowledge the sophisticated and tightly controlled ways that voting operates in their jurisdictions, which have layers of security designed specifically to root out fraud and build confidence in the system.

Election officials and security experts said certain measures are important for preventing fraud in mail voting, such as accurate voter rolls and a method of authenticating ballots such as signature matching. Such safeguards have been put in place over time in the five states that currently run universal mail elections: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington.

As states move quickly to expand mail voting in response to health concerns, not all have implemented the full range of security measures.

 Critics of mail ballots say they provide a bigger opening for fraud than in-person voting because state voter registration rolls contain errors and could allow ballots to be sent to ineligible voters or wrong addresses. And vote-buying schemes may be harder to detect in by-mail elections, as would voter coercion and intimidation, they note.

Current and former election officials in vote-by-mail states said their systems are designed specifically to mitigate these risks, starting with a regular stream of mail contact with voters to establish that the address listed for them on the rolls is accurate. The ERIC system, as well as regular checks against DMV, death and other records, flag voter registration entries that may need updating. Federal law also requires states to conduct basic list maintenance.

Once voting begins, the linchpin of the process is a ballot return envelope, which typically requires the voter’s signature and includes a unique bar code linked to that voter’s record. When the ballot is returned and the bar code is scanned, no other ballot can be cast by that voter for that election.

“I hear chatter a lot about Washington state mailing millions of ballots into a black hole, into the wind,” said Julie Anderson, auditor of Pierce County, Wash., which includes Tacoma. She said many people don’t understand how the envelope design prevents double voting, comparing would-be cheaters to people who purchase a single movie ticket online and print dozens of copies with the goal of admitting others free.

“When the attendant scans your bar code, that’s it,” she said. “All the tickets you gave your friends — they’re out of luck.”[ A voter places a ballot in a secure box as Providence City Clerk Shawn Selleck observes on June 2 in Providence, R.I. (Steven Senne/AP)[

The other mainstay of election security in vote-by-mail states is the signature verification process. Election workers are trained by law enforcement agencies to detect when a signature on the ballot envelope does not match signatures in a voter’s file. Discrepancies trigger a review that could end with a voter proving his or her identity — or being reported to law enforcement for possible ballot tampering.

U.S. economy officially went into a recession in February, ending record 128-month expansion

“The time that it takes for the economy to return to its previous peak level of activity or its previous trend path may be quite extended,” the committee’s report said.

Now, as states gradually ease pandemic restrictions, the question will be whether “reopening” fuels an economic turnaround anytime soon, or whether the downturn will extend into next year as people struggle to go back to work and the nation contends with a possible second wave of infections.

That the economy had plunged into a recession was not a surprise. As economist Ernie Tedeschi put it: “It’s now official (and utterly unsurprising).”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office expects the economic consequences of the novel coronavirus to exceed $8 trillion. It also expects unemployment to hover above 10 percent into 2021, meaning the nation could still have joblessness that is worse than the Great Recession for months.

But experts say the turnaround will hinge on controlling the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 109,000 people in the United States.

The NBER report had no effect on Wall Street, which is in the midst of a stunning three-month rally. On Monday, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index moved into positive territory for the year, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite set a record high and the Dow Jones industrial average extended its winning streak to six days.

  New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has lifted almost all coronavirus restrictions in New Zealand.HAGEN HOPKINS/POOL PHOTO VIA AP[

New Zealand eradicates Covid-19

New Zealand announced that it's eradicated Covid-19, and most pandemic-related restrictions will now be lifted. [New Zealand Herald / Amelia Wade] There have been no new Covid-19 cases in two weeks, and the last treated patient was released from the hospital 12 days ago. The country had a total of 1,154 confirmed cases and 22 deaths from the virus. [U.S. News / Michael Baker and Nick Wilson] As a result, the country it's bringing its alert system down to Level 1 –– the lowest of the four ranks. Most restrictions will now be lifted: social distancing is no longer required and people can freely gather in public. Borders, however, will remain closed, and those arriving from abroad will still have to quarantine for 14 days. [BBC] People will also have to use a government contact tracing app to scan a QR code whenever they enter a business. This will make it easier for officials to track and isolate the virus before a major outbreak occurs. [NYT / Damien Cave] New Zealand has been applauded for its swift and drastic response to Covid-19 –– which at the time was criticized for being too strict. The country went into lockdown on March 23 when there were no deaths and just 102 confirmed cases. [CNN / Ben Westcott] New Zealand now joins a small group of countries that have announced their eradication of the virus –– Montenegro, Fiji and the Faroe Islands –– and the only to do so with more than 1,000 cases. Meanwhile, Taiwan, Iceland, Cambodia, and Trinidad and Tobago say they have less than 10 actives cases. [The Guardian / Charlotte Graham-McLay]

Worldwide Virus Battle Rages On Amid Small Signs of Hope Scientists said drastic shifts in behavior appear to be having an effect, though the death toll will continue to mount.UPDATES

Bernie Sanders Drops Out of 2020 Democratic Race for President

Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist making his second run for the White House, withdrew after a series of losses to Joseph R. Biden Jr., who emerges as the presumptive nominee for the general election.



Republicans Pursue Limits on Voting by Mail, Despite the Coronavirus

Trump and his Republican allies are launching an aggressive strategy to fight what many of the administration’s own health officials view as one of the most effective ways to make voting safer amid the deadly spread of Covid-19: the expanded use of mail-in ballots.

The scene Tuesday of Wisconsinites in masks and gloves gathering in long lines to vote, after Republicans sued to defeat extended, mail-in ballot deadlines, did not deter the president and top officials in his party. Republican leaders said they were pushing ahead to fight state-level statutes that could expand absentee balloting in Michigan, Minnesota, Arizona and elsewhere. In New Mexico, Republicans are battling an effort to go to a mail-in-only primary, and they vowed on Wednesday to fight a new move to expand postal balloting in Minnesota.

The new political effort is clearly aimed at helping the president’s re-election prospects, as well as bolstering Republicans running further down the ballot. While his advisers tend to see the issue in more nuanced terms, Mr. Trump obviously views the issue in a stark, partisan way: He has complained that under Democratic plans for national expansion of early voting and voting by mail, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

In their efforts to fight expanding vote-by-mail, Republican officials are counting on a crucial and powerful ally: like-minded judges. This week, conservative majorities on the U.S. Supreme Court and the highest court in Wisconsin indicated they did not view the pandemic as cause to yield on ideology, issuing party-line rulings rejecting Democratic efforts to defer Tuesday’s vote or extend mail-in balloting.
The decisions seemed to augur a hard road for Democrats in the looming court fights over how to proceed with voting in this crisis moment.

The push to limit voting options is in keeping with Republicans’ decades-running campaign to impose restrictions that disproportionately affect people of color, the poor, and younger voters, under the banner of combating voter fraud — which is exceedingly rare. Democrats have more core constituencies among the nation’s disenfranchised, and both parties have long believed that easier voting measures will benefit Democrats.

But the current public health crisis brings new urgency to the battle, as Democrats and some Republican state officials turn to expanded voting by mail as an important way to avoid the serious health hazard of crowded polling stations amid a pandemic.

The president has embraced some of the most outlandishly false claims about voter fraud, at times proclaiming that the popular vote in the 2016 election — which he lost — was “rigged.” He has long impugned voting by mail, which, while more vulnerable to fraud than in-person voting, has proved overwhelmingly secure in states with mail-in elections, including Colorado and Washington State. (Mr. Trump had formed a special commission to investigate voter fraud in 2016 but it produced no evidence before he shut it down in 2018.)

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It's what it looks like: A refrigerated trailer serving as a temporary morgue in Brooklyn on Tuesday.Credit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times

In New York, ‘the bad news is actually terrible.’

New York, the hardest hit state in America, reported its highest number of coronavirus-related deaths in a single day on Wednesday, announcing that another 779 people had died. That brought the virus death toll to 6,268 in New York State, which Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo noted was more than twice as many people as the state had lost in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The number of hospitalizations had fallen in recent days, he said, suggesting that social distancing measures were working to flatten the steep curve of the virus’s spread, at least for now. The rates depend not only on the number of new arrivals but also on hospital admission standards.

“If we stop what we are doing, you will see that curve change,” Mr. Cuomo warned. Mr. Cuomo said that the staggering death toll could continue to rise even as hospitalization rates were falling, because it reflected people who had been on ventilators for long periods of time.

Then he pivoted to a more somber tone. “The bad news isn’t just bad,” he said. “The bad news is actually terrible.” New York State now has more confirmed cases than any single country in the world outside of the United States.



Never Seen Anything Like It’: Cars Line Up for Miles at Food Banks
Millions are flooding a charitable system that was never intended to handle a nationwide crisis.
Food banks are being squeezed by rising hunger and dwindling resources.

Demand for food assistance in the United States is rising at an unprecedented rate, as millions of Americans find themselves out of work and school closures mean that many families who counted on them for free or subsidized meals need to turn elsewhere.

The surge in need is coming just as food banks face shortages of both donated food and volunteer workers.

It’s a nationwide phenomenon:



Most New York Coronavirus Cases Came From Europe, Genomes Show

New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia.

“The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-wrote a study awaiting peer review.

A separate team at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine came to strikingly similar conclusions, despite studying a different group of cases. Both teams analyzed genomes from coronaviruses taken from New Yorkers starting in mid-March.

The research revealed a previously hidden spread of the virus that might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.

On Jan. 31, President Trump barred foreign nationals from entering the country if they had been in China during the prior two weeks.

It would not be until late February that Italy would begin locking down towns and cities, and March 11 when Mr. Trump said he would block travelers from most European countries. But New Yorkers had already been traveling home with the virus.

“People were just oblivious,” said Adriana Heguy, a member of the N.Y.U. team.

Dr. Heguy and Dr. van Bakel belong to an international guild of viral historians. They ferret out the history of outbreaks by poring over clues embedded in the genetic material of viruses taken from thousands of patients.

While conspiracy theories might falsely claim the virus was concocted in a lab, the virus’s genome makes clear that it arose in bats. There are many kinds of coronaviruses, which infect both humans and animals. Dr. Boni and his colleagues found that the genome of the new virus contains a number of mutations in common with strains of coronaviruses that infect bats.

The most closely related coronavirus is in a Chinese horseshoe bat, the researchers found. Dr. Boni said that ancestral virus probably gave rise to a number of strains that infected horseshoe bats, and perhaps sometimes other animals.

It’s entirely possible, Dr. Boni said, in the past 10 or 20 years, a hybrid virus arose in some horseshoe bat that was well-suited to infect humans, too. Later, that virus somehow managed to cross the species barrier.

“Once in a while, one of these viruses wins the lottery,” he said.



C.D.C. issues new back-to-work guidelines for essential workers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published new guidelines on Wednesday detailing how essential employees can go back to work even if they have been exposed to people infected by the coronavirus, provided they do not feel sick and follow certain precautions.

Those employees can return if they take their temperature before heading to their workplaces, wear a face mask at all times and practice social distancing while on the job, Dr. Robert Redfield, the C.D.C. director, said at the White House briefing. They should not share headsets or other objects that touch their faces, and they should not congregate in break rooms or crowded areas, he said. Dr. Redfield said that employers should send workers home immediately if they developed any symptoms. He also said they should increase air exchange in their buildings and clean common surfaces more often.

["Is this for real?" asked esco20.]



A jail in Chicago is now the largest-known source of U.S. infections.

The Cook County Jail in Chicago, a sprawling facility that is among the largest jails in the nation, has emerged as the largest-known source of U.S. virus infections, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

At least 353 cases can be linked to the jail — more than have been connected to the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt; a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash.; or the cluster centered in New Rochelle, N.Y.

The Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which operates the jail, said 238 inmates and 115 staff members had tested positive as of Wednesday. The outbreak appears to confirm the concerns of many health officials, who warned that America’s overcrowded and unsanitary jails and prisons could be a major source of spread.

Hundreds of diagnoses have been confirmed at local, state and federal correctional facilities — almost certainly an undercount, given a lack of testing and rapid spread — leading to hunger strikes in immigrant detention centers and demands for more protection from prison employee unions.

In New York City, jails like Rikers Island are also seeing infection rates grow exponentially. City and state officials have promised the mass release of inmates. But many say they are not moving quickly enough, putting inmates, staff and the city at risk.
‘

Union for food workers asks for ‘mandatory’ guidance to protect its members.

The nation’s largest union representing grocery store and pharmacy workers asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday to issue “immediate and mandatory guidance” to protect the workers, and others at food processing and meatpacking facilities.

The union president, Anthony Perrone, also asked for the C.D.C.’s help improving safety conditions at food processing facilities — for example, by requiring them to provide protective gear to their workers.

Several big supermarket chains have reported deaths of employees from Covid-19; they include workers at a Trader Joe’s in New York, a Giant in Maryland and a Walmart outside Chicago.

The C.D.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter, and it was unclear if the agency could require such actions. Its guidance is generally not mandatory.



Some college students don’t want to pay in-person tuition for online classes.

Students at the University of Chicago are organizing a tuition strike, threatening to withhold their payments for the spring quarter if the school doesn’t give them a hefty discount.

That cry is being heard on other campuses as well, as students complain that online classes don’t measure up to the real thing and say they shouldn’t have to pay the full load for a subpar experience, especially at a time when more are facing financial uncertainties.

While a number of colleges are offering refunds of room and board charges, students in a number of schools are asking them to lower tuition as well.

At the New School in New York City, students have called for a boycott of online classes this week if the school didn’t refund part of their spring tuition. Students at Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts have all started online petitions calling for partial refunds.