Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Voting & Elections


'They Weaponized You Like Nobody's Ever Been Weaponized': Trump and Michael Cohen Make Peace

TIME - Tech

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?


A MAGA County's Top Election Official Wants to Hire Election Denial Superstar Tina Peters

WIRED

Tina Peters was convicted of seven counts related to election interference in 2024. Now, she's fielding an offer from a county that's become a hotbed of voting-related conspiracy theories. Last week, Clint Curtis, the top election official in Shasta County, California, publicly accused members of his own staff of bypassing security, which he later claimed was an attempt "to sabotage a federal election." Days later, Curtis announced plans to hire a new deputy: Tina Peters, the election denial superstar who was convicted of seven counts related to election interference in 2024 and sentenced to nine years in prison. Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, has yet to publicly comment on the offer, but her lawyer Peter Ticktin tells WIRED she "is giving consideration to helping in the efforts in Shasta County, as there most definitely has been monkey business in the way the election was handled."


'We're Proving It Works': Inside the DSA's Push to Remake the Democratic Party

TIME - Tech

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. 'We're Proving It Works': Inside the DSA's Push to Remake the Democratic Party Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens.


Zelenskyy Faces Pressure to Hold Elections. What Stands in the Way?

TIME - Tech

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?


AI hallucinated case law in insurance company's filings in L.A. County house fire dispute

Los Angeles Times

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Attorneys representing State Farm said they discovered "nonexistent case citations which appear to have been AI hallucinations" across a recent batch of motions.


We still don't know how people are really using AI

MIT Technology Review

AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. "There is no independent source to corroborate it," says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR) Lab. Reuel is co-lead of a new research project, called the AI Observatory, that aims to fill the gap. It's a public platform that aggregated and analyzed real AI conversations with popular models like Claude and Gemini that were collected with users' consent through seven existing datasets. The intent is to provide independent sources of information that can help researchers and policymakers assess how people are using generative AI. Highly consequential decisions about AI's benefits and risks are currently being made on the basis of very limited data, says Reuel.


Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored

The Guardian

A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. A women uses the new IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Data Processing Machine in a New York office in 1954. Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia - but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn't have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It's as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can't put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can't stop, or look back, or think straight. But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. Things could have turned out differently.


Election Officials Are Preparing for Prediction Markets to Sow Chaos in the Midterms

WIRED

From threats to the safety of poll workers to voters who can't distinguish between odds and results, prediction markets are already scrambling the political process. When Jim Allen, the elections director for Delaware County, Pennsylvania, recently ran a training session for poll workers, he began a conversation about a topic he'd never previously had to address during training: prediction markets . "There was one person who stood up, and they said, 'Well, what if we just want to make a minor bet on what turnout will be, that'll keep things interesting?' And we said: 'No, this is all bad,'" Allen, who oversees 383 precincts, recounts. As a result, Allen and the board of elections in Delaware County amended the oaths signed by people involved in elections to include "an affirmation that the workers have no direct or indirect interests in any bets, wagers, or prediction markets."


Count Binface to perform at Fringe after by-election defeat

BBC News

Novelty politician Count Binface has announced plans to perform a one-off show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The self-styled intergalactic space warrior - who finished second to Nigel Farage in the Clacton by-election - is the alter ego of comedian Jon Harvey. His 26.9% share of the vote is thought to be the highest ever for a novelty candidate. The show, called Face of the Establishment, is at the Pleasance on 26 August. Count Binface has previously stood in four parliamentary elections and two London mayoral elections.


Congress Is Headed for a Massive Turnover

TIME - Tech

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?