Category: miscellaneous

Gautam's Nitro Cold Brew

Gautam’s Cold Brew Recipe

gautam 3 Comments

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My cold brew setup

As I have studied the art and craft of making good coffee (seven different brewing devices and counting!), I found cold brew to paradoxically be the most difficult one to nail down. In terms of technique, cold brew is by far the easiest to make — just throw some coffee grounds in water, put it in the fridge, and then after some time take it out and filter out the grounds. No fancy barista skills needed! But unlike other brew methods, which usually had a relatively narrow range of recommendations and a general brewing consensus, cold brew recipes online are all over the place in the following dimensions:

  • Ratio of coffee to water
  • Brew time (this was the most frustrating, because individual recipes would sometimes say “12-24 hours” which is a huge range that makes a significant impact on the final result)
  • Dilution ratio of concentrate to water/creamer
  • How to avoid coffee filters getting clogged

During the 2020 lockdowns I invested a lot of time experimenting in these dimensions and finally settled on a recipe I liked. I foolishly didn’t back it up, and after my phone got run over by a truck earlier this summer I was afraid I’d have to recreate the arduous months of experimentation.

Fortunately, I texted friends and family experiment-by-experiment updates and was able to reconstruct the recipe through those messages, so for once my habit of spamming people with minutiae they have limited interest in finally paid off! I recently made the first batch of 2021 with this recipe and upon my first sip I immediately thought “wow, this cold brew slaps!” (when did I become the person who says things “slap”? A mystery for another time…).

Nobody publishing cold brew recipes online knows what they’re doing anyway, so I’m adding mine to the mix. If you’re going to trust the recipe of some random person online, here’s one that at least has some experimentation behind it. It also serves as a convenient way of backing up my recipe in case another truck runs over my phone.

So without further ado, I present Gautam’s Cold Brew Recipe:

Ingredients and Equipment

Brewer: OXO Good Grips 32 Oz Cold Brew Coffee Maker (with the additional paper filters)

Coffee Beans: There doesn’t appear to be any consensus on a roast specifically for cold brew, so use whichever you prefer. My preference in general is lighter or medium-light roasts. Whatever you get, make sure the beans are good quality (I have liked coffee subscriptions from Atlas, Corvus, Sey, and 1000 Faces) and haven’t been sitting around too long. I use Fellow Atmos vacuum-sealed containers to maximize freshness.

Grind: A coarse grind. To get more specific, I use a 35 grind size setting on the Baratza Encore burr grinder.

Ratio: 1:9.6 coffee grounds to water (by weight). In my brewer I use 40 oz of water (~1189g of water) which translates to ~124g of grounds.

Water: Good cold brew water reminds me of the British people I met when I traveled to the UK as a college student: Cold (fridge temperature) and filtered (e.g. Brita jug). The filtered part is especially important, because the chlorine used to treat water in many municipal water systems has a noticeable impact on the taste. Your coffee is almost entirely water, so use tasty H20!

Adjust the above grounds and water based on how much cold brew you plan to make/the capacity of your brewer, making sure to maintain the 1:9.6 ratio.

Instructions

1. Load the brewer with your mesh filter and then a paper filter (the paper filter should be the second layer of filtration after the mesh filter). This setup ensures the final cold brew isn’t silty, and also filter out more of the oils and microfines. The result is a brighter, sweeter cup of coffee (and apparently may reduce the potentially negative effects of coffee on cholesterol, but I haven’t really looked into this much).

2. Add 2/5 of your water to the brew chamber.

3. Add half of your grounds to the water.

4. Add another 2/5 of your water. If you’re using the OXO Cold Brewer like I am, put the lid back over the brew chamber and then pour the water on top of the “rainmaker” in concentric circles to evenly saturate the grounds.

5. Add the other half of the grounds.

6. Add the remainder of the water as you did in step 4. If any grounds don’t look saturated, take a spoon and gently immerse them. Don’t stir too vigorously though! We want to avoid any microfines settling to the bottom and clogging the filter, which is why we layered in the grounds and water rather than dumping them all in at once.

7. Store in the fridge for 16-18 hours. This was the time I found to be optimal; remember that longer brew times will result in stronger, more heavily caffeinated coffee, and shorter brew times in weaker, less heavily caffeinated coffee. Too short a brew time could underextract, leaving the taste too sour; too long a brew time can overextract and leave the taste too bitter.

8. Filter and drain the brew into a carafe through whatever mechanism your brewer has for this. In the OXO brewer this typically takes ~20-30 minutes, but before I learned the layering technique it sometimes would take hours due to the microfines clogging the filter.

9. Your carafe now contains cold brew concentrate, which should be good for a week in the fridge. When serving, serve over ice and dilute it in a 1:1 ratio of concentrate to water or creamer. If it’s still a bit too strong for your liking, you can up the dilution ratio to 2:3 concentrate to water/creamer. Conversely, you can dilute with a 3:2 concentrate to water/creamer ratio if it’s not strong enough.

10. You can be extra like I am and add this cold brew to a nitro keg to make homemade nitro cold brew! This is the keg I have used, along with nitrogen cartridges — I find 2-3 cartridges per batch keeps every cup nice and foamy. (Use the real thing, N2, rather than the many N20 cartridges offered in their place).

Gautam's Nitro Cold Brew
My homemade nitro cold brew

 

 

 

Major General R.N. Chibber

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My grandfather passed away last night, at the age of 86. I only met him three times — the summer of 1998, when I spent my fifth birthday at his house in Jammu; a week or two in 2006, when I was 13; and last in 2018, when his illness had progressed to the point where we could no longer have conversations.

So I instead knew him mostly through stories. Stories of him growing up as a British colonial subject in what is now Pakistan, and as a 13-year-old being forced to flee to the Indian side of the Partition and leave everything behind; stories of the loyalty he earned from the soldiers under his command when he stood up to corruption in the Indian army that hurt them, even at the expense of his own career; stories of how, as a man with white skin, hazel eyes, and orange hair, taxi drivers mistook him for a foreigner and tried to overcharge him until he calmly told them in Punjabi he’d have them arrested if they did so; stories of his radical feminism by mid-20th century Indian standards, quashing all attempts to “marry off” my mother and my aunt as teenagers (as was common, even among his own family) and insisting they go to college and build careers of their own; stories of his poetry translations among the four languages he spoke.

The memories I do have are conversations about politics, world affairs, and the violence and instability that rocked his adopted home state of Jammu & Kashmir; visits to the mango grove in his backyard, where we picked them off the trees together; hearing his deep voice flit effortlessly between English, Hindi, and Punjabi; the sight of him standing outside the house waiting for me to arrive on my second visit, with “WELCOME GAUTAM” written in chalk on the driveway; the stacks and stacks of books in his personal library, from which, at his insistence, I took as many books as I wanted back with me to America.

His legacy lives on in my middle name and in the faintest of orange highlights that can be seen in my hair under just the right light; the stories will live on as an aspiration to meet his example of integrity, dignity, and quiet but firm resistance against any who would mistreat those under his care, be they his soldiers or his daughters. Rest in peace, Nana.

What a Death Row Inmate Taught Me in the Days before Black Lives Matter

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It’s not just the police. The entire justice system is broken.

I was 15 years old when I met Troy Davis, a Black death row inmate, in 2008. Troy was convicted of the 1989 killing of Mark MacPhail, a white off-duty police officer, in Savannah, Georgia. In the decades after his conviction, seven of the nine trial eyewitnesses—all of them Black—recanted their testimony. Their sworn affidavits painted a chilling picture of police coercion, harassment, and intimidation. In Savannah, which was once a purgatory for kidnapped Africans before they were sold into slavery, the case deepened simmering racial tensions. As Troy put it, “The police were rounding up Black men in Savannah, threatening them and demanding information on me.”

One trial witness, Darrell Collins, was only 16 years old when he was picked up by the police and interrogated with neither a lawyer nor his parents present. Collins initially denied seeing Troy as the shooter, but in his affidavit affirms, “After a couple of hours of the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down and told them what they wanted to hear…I am not proud for lying at Troy’s trial, but the police had me so messed up that I felt that’s all I could do or else I would go to jail”.

At a later hearing, Collins testified that the police threatened to charge him as an accessory to murder if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Another witness, Jeffrey Sapp, claimed the police harassed him and “made it clear that the only way they would leave me alone is if I told them what they wanted to hear… I didn’t want to have any more problems with the cops, so I testified against Troy.”

A third eyewitness, Dorothy Farrell, claimed the police “gave me the impression that I should say that Troy Davis was the one who shot the officer… I felt like I was just following the rest of the witnesses. I also felt like I had to cooperate with the officer because of my being on parole.”

We’ve learned that eyewitness testimony can be tampered with and mishandled like any other evidence, and the police investigation tainted the evidence in Troy’s case by violating multiple protocols used to keep eyewitness testimony reliable. The investigation did not use double-blind photo lineups, a protocol in which neither the officer administering the lineup nor the eyewitness know which photo is of the suspect. Police gathered all witnesses together to recreate the scene, ensuring their memories would merge. And they never investigated a primary alternative suspect who had a gun that night, nor did they ever even interview Troy himself. It became clear that once the police had a viable suspect, facts, witnesses and testimonials could be manipulated to arouse suspicion and railroad a target—often a young Black man—whose peers could easily be coerced with threats.

During our in-person visits on death row, Troy shared his own harrowing initial interactions with police. While he awaited trial, officers would come by his cell, yelling, “N—-r, if I had caught you in the street, I’d have blown your brains out!” If they saw him smile, they’d scream, “Why you smiling, n—-r boy?” Their hatred toward a man still presumed innocent ran so deep that, according to Troy, he had to be moved out of solitary confinement after there were multiple attempts by the police to poison his food. They regularly engaged in small actions of cruelty to make his life more miserable. He was frequently strip-searched and forced awake after midnight to shower.

No police officer involved in the Troy Davis case ever faced any consequences.

The ACLU calls the prosecutor the most powerful person in the courtroom. Spencer Lawton, the prosecutor in Troy’s case, has a checkered history of misconduct when it comes to high-profile cases. The Georgia Supreme Court overturned his conviction of Jim Williams, famously featured in the bestselling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, after it found Lawton had suppressed evidence from the defense. At Troy’s 2010 evidentiary hearing ordered by the Supreme Court, I watched with disgust as Lawton feigned forgetfulness over basic details of the case, accusations that he had instructed witnesses to “stick to their testimony” after they told him their police statements were inaccurate. Most bizarrely, he even claimed to not recall the op-ed he had written about the case just 20 months before the hearing.

Lawton’s most egregious behavior includes another conviction overturned when DNA testing exonerated the defendant, Douglas Echols, of a rape and kidnapping conviction. When Georgia’s legislature considered a bill to compensate Echols for the years he unjustly spent behind bars, Lawton wrote a defamatory letter to the legislators, falsely claiming Echols was still under indictment for rape and kidnapping. The letter ultimately killed the bill. The 11th Circuit condemned Lawton’s action as libel but opined that the doctrine of “qualified immunity” – the same that protects police officers who murder unarmed civilians—inoculates Lawton against any consequences. African-Americans, such as Echols and Davis, are more likely to be wrongfully convicted, and 15 states, including Georgia, do not have laws requiring compensation for the wrongfully convicted.

After his conviction in 1991, Troy told me, the judge declared “Mr. Davis, you will be executed by 20,000 volts of electricity until you are dead, dead, dead!” When I visited Troy on death row, he had two decades of stories to tell me—stories of guards shoving disabled prisoners against the wall and viciously beating them, making sure to wrap them in towels first so bruises don’t appear; others of guards leaving cells unlocked so inmates could attack others in their sleep, forcing inmates to take hallucinogenic drugs under the guise of mental illness and then raping them.  It was the most terrifying manifestation of what permeated throughout the American criminal justice system: no matter how much psychological or physical violence they inflicted, no matter the severity of scars or the destructive wake of their cruelty, oppressors were unconditionally shielded from the consequences of their actions.

It was only with the pro bono assistance of a white-shoe law firm—a luxury few death row inmates will ever have—that Troy had any meaningful representation in the appeals process. After several appeals, his fate rested with the five-person Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. In a 3-2 vote, the Board voted against granting clemency. But the composition of the board raises questions.

Three of the five Board members included a District Attorney and officials from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia Department of Corrections. The Board had no representation of public defenders, legal scholars, civil rights activists, or former judges—those who had witnessed and fought against courtroom injustices stemming from bias, discrimination, and corruption. Instead, a case highlighting wrongdoing by law enforcement would be decided by those who had climbed to the top of the law enforcement hierarchy.

In the end, despite jurors from the original trial openly doubting their guilty verdicts and despite calls for clemency from governmental bodies, Nobel Prize winners, a President, and over half a million petitioners, Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011. When I witnessed police dogpile and tase an unarmed black protester outside death row that night, it felt like we had come full circle. The chants then were the same as now—“No Justice, No Peace”. The signs from that night—“Not in My Name”, “Stop the Execution”, “Don’t Let the Blood Be on Your Hands”– could be recycled for today’s protests. Then, as now, the administration of justice protected those with power at the expense of the innocent.

Since Troy’s execution, 27 death row inmates – over half of them Black – have been exonerated – although exoneration and irrefutable evidence of innocence has not always been enough to clear their names. Five months and five days after Troy Davis was executed, Trayvon Martin was gunned down. The acquittal of his shooter sparked a movement and a refrain that is on the signs and lips of protesters all over the country today: Black Lives Matter. Troy spoke for them when he declared, shortly before his execution: “I’m not afraid of death—just more injustice in a broken system.”

If you’d like to learn more about my friendship with Troy Davis and the story of his case, see my book Remain Free. Thanks to Mitch Rice, Nishita Morris, Ajit Acharya, and Kavita Chhibber for reviewing drafts of this piece.

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New York in the Time of Coronavirus

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NYC in the Time of Coronavirus

Both the city and the state of New York had their first confirmed case of coronavirus on March 1. In the following weeks, NYC rapidly transformed into the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States1.

I thought I’d share a few photos of what it’s been like. 

It started with (literal) half-measures, like restaurants being required to operate at no more than 50% capacity on March 12, the same day Mayor Bill de Blasio declared a State of Emergency. 

Four days later, on March 16, all public venues, bars, gyms, restaurants (except for delivery/takeout), etc. were ordered to close, as were NYC schools. 

Four days later, on March 20, all “nonessential” businesses were ordered to keep 100% of their workforce at home.

Sometimes the parks are empty, but they’re often packed. Governor Cuomo has warned they may be closed if New Yorkers fail to social distance within them.

Grocery stores have started closing (March 25) as employees test positive for coronavirus. Ironically, their new limitations on the number of people who can be inside the store at once have led to packed lines outside their doors.

(Photo taken March 21 outside Trader Joe’s, 20 minutes after open and three days before an employee tested positive)

Grocery delivery apps are backed up for days and out of stock of many basic items; sometimes you learn that in the app itself, sometimes a few days later when it shows up with only half of what you ordered.

During my rare outings (I spend roughly one hour per week outside my apartment), I’ve noticed mask usage in my neighborhood climb from 1 in 10 people to about 1 in 3, as of March 28. I’m now among them, albeit with a homemade mask fashioned from a cotton-shirt2. 

It’s quiet during my walk around the neighborhood. The avenues still have light traffic, but the streets are completely barren. They are basically an extension of the sidewalks now, useful for maintaining six feet from others. 

The normally bustling Prince St. is entirely empty save for one single food delivery person. Delivery workers make up the majority of people on the streets now.

Even the famous Prince St. Pizza, normally mobbed with a line out the door even in the wee hours of the morning, is moribund. 

Virtually all of the storefronts and restaurants are boarded up; many of the restaurants have even stopped doing takeout or delivery. It’s unclear if they’ll be back when this is all over.

I’m used to hearing a myriad of languages when I walk outside. I’m used to pushing past crowds of people, impatiently ambling behind slow walkers, and bumping into gawking tourists who’ve stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. But now I don’t hear anyone, the crowds and slow walkers are gone, and the tourists have fled.

Many of my friends and coworkers have fled the city too, for their hometowns where a house, family, and yard can make the difference between a mental break and a mental breakdown. It’s been three weeks since I’ve seen anyone I know in person.  

I’ve personally seen coronavirus end relationships, shutter local businesses, and destroy livelihoods. It’s taken nearly a thousand of us. It’s seized our greatest public space and turned it into an infirmary for its victims. It’s drained the energy from the City That Never Sleeps. 

When it’s all done, when the schools and shops reopen, when the quiet recedes into the cacophony of loud neighbors blasting music and angry horns honking and police sirens blaring,  and when the last of the dead are buried, we’ll remember how quickly the city could die — and how quickly it came back to life again. 

Get well soon, New York. 

Footnotes

  1. A bit of background: Roughly 1 in 4 confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States is here in NYC. That’s partly because we test the most (NY state will soon overtake South Korea in tests per capita), but also the unsurprising result of being America’s densest and most internationally visited city. Similarly, New Jersey has the second most confirmed cases in the country. 
  2. Homemade masks, while not as good as a “real” mask (e.g., surgical or N95 mask), are still significantly better than nothing. Stay home and save the real masks for medical professionals. But if you must go out, wear a homemade mask. 

Eight Years Ago

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Eight years ago today, Troy Davis was executed. And four years ago today, Remain Free was published.

I still remember the night of the execution: Wednesday, September 21, 2011. I was a freshman. I had just finished my very first college exam and left Myers Hall to hop in my little red Chevy, which sputtered and struggled to get me down to Death Row in Jackson, Georgia. I remember the thousands of protesters—and the dozens of counter protesters. It was a chaotic scene—laughing, screaming, crying, praying, acrimonious chants battling each other and harmonious chants sung in unison. I remember when the riot police arrived, the prickly sound of their tasers in action, the officers downing a man who crossed the line, the muscular arms hauling him off into the back of the van while helicopters whirred overhead.

I remember the sudden hush over the crowd at 7:00 PM, the moment of execution, the sun setting, the riot police in their gear staring impassively from across the divide.

I remember the jubilation when the news spread that the execution wasn’t happening tonight, that the Supreme Court had issued a one day stay of execution. I hopped in my sputtering red Chevy and drove back to Myers Hall, promising to come back the next day. I remember the horror when I learned that the execution had only been delayed for a few hours, and so all I could do was sit in the Myers lobby and watch Anderson Cooper on CNN countdown and then announce that Troy Davis had been executed. I remember the confusion, the fear, the numbness when the next day I opened Myers mailbox 382A and saw a letter from Troy, the last one I would ever receive.
—
Four years later, on September 21, 2015, Remain Free was published. There was no launch party, no fanfare. Instead, we drove to Savannah and visited Troy’s grave. He’s buried next to his mother and his sister—they all died in 2011. I wrote a note in the front cover of the book and placed it on his grave, along with a replica of the wristband I first got in Wright Square in Savannah in 2010, outside the federal courthouse where Troy’s evidentiary hearing was being held—the first time Troy had been back to his hometown since his conviction in 1991. It’s the same as the wristband I still wear today, blue with white letters illuminating two sentences:

I AM TROY DAVIS. INNOCENCE MATTERS.

Naveen and Troy

gautam 3 Comments

Today is the one year anniversary of my father’s sudden and unexpected death. It’s also the birthday of Troy Davis, my friend who was executed on death row in 2011 and whom I wrote Remain Free about. These were the two most influential men in my life, so I thought I’d share a few words on their relationship.

Both my father and I were moderate supporters of the death penalty in 2008, before we met Troy. So when we first heard about Troy’s case, we were both skeptical of this death row inmate’s claim of innocence—for me, it was because I had this naive, childlike faith in our justice system and institutions; for my father, I think there was a certain cynicism that that led him to distrust people by default, and who less trustworthy than a convicted cop killer?

Nonetheless, on September 23, 2008, the day Troy came within 90 minutes of execution, it was my father who was the first to tell me the execution had been stayed. My mother was adamant we accept Troy’s offer to visit him on death row six days later, but my father did not share her enthusiasm. By design, he had built a bubble in the suburbs for his kids—a safe, if a bit dull, life, far enough away from the city to be mostly free from the drugs, gangs, and violence that plagued Atlanta and the neighborhoods in Savannah where Troy grew up. I think he was afraid of us puncturing that bubble to enter the world that he had fought so hard to stay away from.

He came with me the first time I ever went to a Troy Davis rally, a few days before Troy faced another execution date in October 2008, I was transfixed. I was 15 years old, and captivated by these speakers talk about justice and freeing Troy. But he was unimpressed. He grew up in India, a bustling, chaotic democracy that was never bereft of rallies, protests, or the occasional bandh (general strikes and infrastructure shutdowns by political activists). For him, this was just another street corner rally.

I think his mind changed when he finally met Troy. Troy was so genuine and warm and kindthat nobody could meet him and not want to fight for him, to save him. I can’t remember exactly what they spoke about on those visits, but when I left for college, Troy, in his final letter, said, “I know he misses you more than you’d even imagine.” He was right, of course. He usually was about these sorts of things.

After two or three visits, my father stopped coming to see Troy on death row. Not because he didn’t care, but because “it is too depressing seeing Troy in there.” From his voice, I could tell how deeply death row disturbed him. This was not the safe life in the suburbs he had worked so hard to build for us.

But he would still wake up early in the mornings on those Saturdays we visited Troy, make the 90 minute plus drive to Jackson, Georgia, and wait across the street at the Wendy’s while we met with Troy for six hours. He would still drive me to rallies, and drop me off and pick me up at the train station when I interned at Amnesty International but couldn’t drive. Like me, he was no longer a supporter of the death penalty. And on September 21, 2011, the night Troy was executed, only five years and 19 days before his own death, he was there protesting with me outside death row, chanting “I Am Troy Davis” into the setting sun.

—

If you knew my father or would like to honor his memory, please make a donation to an education-related charity of your choice—education was a cause he cared deeply about. If you’re not sure where to donate, two organizations I like are Pratham and DonorsChoose.

If you knew Troy or would like to honor his memory, please make a donation to the Innocence Project, a non-profit that helps free wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing and works to prevent wrongful convictions from happening in the first place.

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Voter Deception on Georgia’s Ballot Initiatives

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I noticed this when I voted for the first time in 2012: Georgia’s ballot initiatives, which are typically amendments to the state constitution, are frighteningly biased in their wording to push voters into voting yes.

Here are the ballot initiatives, verbatim1, for 2016, which Georgians are voting on as I type these words:

Amendment 1: 

Provides greater flexibility and state accountability to fix failing schools through increasing community involvement.

Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to allow the state to intervene in chronically failing public schools in order to improve student performance?

Amendment 2: 

Authorizes penalties for sexual exploitation and assessments on adult entertainment to fund child victims’ services.

Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to allow additional penalties for criminal cases in which a person is adjudged guilty of keeping a place of prostitution, pimping, pandering, pandering by compulsion, solicitation of sodomy, masturbation for hire, trafficking of persons for sexual servitude, or sexual exploitation of children and to allow assessments on adult entertainment establishments to fund the Safe Harbor for Sexually Exploited Children Fund to pay for care and rehabilitative and social services for individuals in this state who have been or may be sexually exploited?

Amendment 3:

Reforms and re-establishes the Judicial Qualifications Commission and provides for its composition, governance, and powers.

Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to abolish the existing Judicial Qualifications Commission; require the General Assembly to create and provide by general law for the composition, manner of appointment, and governance of a new Judicial Qualifications Commission, with such commission having the power to discipline, remove, and cause involuntary retirement of judges; require the Judicial Qualifications Commission to have procedures that provide for due process of law and review by the Supreme Court of its advisory opinions; and allow the Judicial Qualifications Commission to be open to the public in some manner?

Amendment 4:

Dedicates revenue from existing taxes on fireworks to trauma care, fire services, and public safety.

Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to provide that the proceeds of excise taxes on the sale of fireworks or consumer fireworks be dedicated to the funding of trauma care, firefighter equipping and training, and local public safety purposes?

 

Given the very low proportion of voters who actually research these initiatives in-depth, who would actually vote against these? Look at the title of Amendment 1! Yet deeper examination, especially on Amendment 3, reveals disturbing aspects of some of these amendments that are obscured by their biased phrasing. (Just start Googling if you’re curious)

While voters should research what they’re voting on, that shouldn’t give the state a free pass to deceive them. I’d be surprise if any of these amendments fail to pass; in the future, if you’re a Georgia voter and haven’t researched the ballot initiative, leave it blank, or, if you’re going to vote on something you haven’t researched (which the vast majority of people voting “yes” are doing”), just vote no, regardless of what the amendment is. Don’t let the state deceive you2.

Footnotes:

  1. View the text of the ballot initiatives at http://sos.ga.gov/admin/uploads/2016_Proposed_Constitutional_Amendments.pdf
  2. Perhaps the solution is to implement something like California’s State Voter Guides, which features, “an impartial analysis of the proposal and the potential costs to taxpayers as prepared by the Legislative Analyst’s Office, arguments in favor and against it prepared by proponents and opponents, the text and a summary prepared by the Attorney General or the Legislature, as well as other information.” While certainly there is opportunity for bias in this system, it’s still an order of magnitude better than Georgia’s current ballot deception.

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