Scientific American-Today in Science

"Voting has never been more secure than it is right now."

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 05 November 2024, 2022 UTC.

Content and Source:  https://www.scientificamerican.com

Please check link or scroll down to read your selections.  Thanks for joining us today.

Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

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November 5—This week we’re covering a leak on the International Space Station, and we explain the current crisis in election polling. Plus, here’s how to make your own zoetrope. Those and more below! --Ben Guarino, Associate Editor, Technology P.S. How are you liking this newsletter? Send me any feedback or other suggestions directly: benjamin.guarino@sciam.com.

Voting Has Never Been More Secure Than It Is Right Now Efficient machines, paper ballots and human checks make the U.S. voting system robust

Leaving the Levers Behind Most Americans will vote by paper ballots that are scanned by machines, as I wrote in a recent story about the robustness of U.S. voting. Others might use touch-screens that generate paper records. That isn’t, of course, how voting was always done. If you, like me, remember when it was possible to vote in a curtained booth by a mechanical lever, you may be wondering where those machines went. They were introduced in the late 1800s to prevent corruption with paper ballots, only to eventually be phased out for federal elections a century later by the 2002 Help America Vote Act. But why? I posed this question to Mark Lindeman, a policy and strategy director at the nonprofit Verified Voting. Here, in an excerpt from our conversation that didn’t make it into the main story, is what he says: “Lever machines have two major disadvantages. One is that they don't provide accessibility features at all. There's a non-trivial proportion of the public that has no prayer of casting their vote on a lever machine without assistance. That really amounts to someone voting on their behalf….The Help America Vote Act is very explicit about accessibility requirements. So if you're going to have lever machines, you need to have something else too. And that's not a very appealing setup. And second—[pauses]—I'm pausing because not everyone agrees about this, but: Lever voting machines don't provide individual voter-verifiable records of how people voted. So if a lever machine jams, if it malfunctions, if it has been tampered with, there's really no way to recover correct counts. So lever machines were widely believed to be highly reliable (and I really have no way of knowing), but there was no plan B.” -- Ben

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Top Stories

Why Election Polling Has Become Less Reliable Election polls are increasingly vulnerable to huge mistakes Allison Parshall

Zoetrope Animation Is Back. Here’s How to Make One Put your own spin on a zoetrope with homemade drawings—or carve one into a pumpkin Charlotte Hu

The International Space Station Has Been Leaking for Five Years Pesky leaks on the International Space Station aren’t the most serious issue facing U.S. human spaceflight Meghan Bartels

Your 2024 Election Rundown, from Immigration to Education The outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election could set the climate agenda, reshape public education and shift the dynamics of global science collaboration. Rachel Feltman; Andrea Thompson; Meghan Bartels; Gary Stix; Allison Parshall; Madison Goldberg, contract writer; Fonda Mwangi

How Superman Helped Launch the Hubble Space Telescope Long before it orbited Earth, the Hubble Space Telescope starred in a famous Superman comic Paul Cornish, contract writer

WHAT WE'RE READING

An AI that generates video games can make a rough approximation of Minecraft in real time. | MIT Technology Review A robot retrieved a granola-sized sample of melted fuel from one of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors. | Associated Press OpenAI now lets users search the Internet via the paid version of its chatbot. | The New York Times

From the Archive

AI Chatbots Are Coming to Search Engines. Can You Trust Them? Google, Microsoft and Baidu are using tools similar to ChatGPT to turn Internet searches into a conversation. How will this change humanity’s relationship with machines? Chris Stokel-Walker; Nature magazine

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SciTechDaily.com Newsletter

"Is climate change infiltrating your backyard?"

Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 05 November 2024. 1419 UTC.

Content and Source:  https://scitechdaily.com/newsletter.

Please check link or scroll down to read your selections.  Thanks for joining us today.

Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

SciTechDaily Newsletter

The latest science, space, and technology news.

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