Halloween

In our special Halloween episode of “This Just In”, Tanner talked extensively about costumes women are wearing nowadays, which usually take on an overtly sexual tone. Released today were the top selling Halloween costumes for adults and kids, and it’s no surprise that every single female costume (on the adult list) is, without having to see it in front of you, most likely sexified (except maybe the Witch costume, though if you reference the link to the women’s costumes you will find sexualized variants of this costume as well). Check out Snopes for the complete list.

Electronic Voting: or, How I Learned to Accept Fraudulent Elections Like a Good Subject

I don’t know, maybe technology should just sit this one out. It doesn’t help when fishy things have been happening either.

From Wired News:
- Due to poor chain of custody for supplies and equipment, 812 voter-access cards (which voters place in touch-screen machines to cast their ballot) were lost, along with 215 card encoders, which program the voter-access cards. Three hundred thirteen keys to the voting machines’ memory-card compartments, where votes are stored, also went missing.

- Officials set up two user accounts on the computer running vote-tabulation software, then assigned one password to both accounts and allowed multiple people to use them, thwarting any effort to identify individuals who might access and alter the system.

- Sixty Board of Election employees took touch-screen machines home a weekend before the election to test a procedure for transmitting data on election night.

- The election board hired 69 taxis to transport observers to precincts to collect memory cards and paper rolls on election night. But many cab drivers ended up gathering the materials themselves, and about half the cabs returned to the warehouse with election data, but no observer.

- In at least 79 precincts the number of voters who signed the poll books didn’t match the number of ballots cast. At least eight precincts had more ballots cast than registered voters. Because some polling places served several precincts, some of the discrepancies are explained by voters being directed to the wrong machines, an error that did not result in uncounted votes. But even when investigators tallied ballots and signatures for all precincts in a polling place, 15 locations still had mismatches. In one case investigators found 342 more voters than ballots.

Read more from the Wired News article here.