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- Trump Says Voter Fraud is Rampant. The Evidence Says Otherwise.
If you’ve ever listened to President Trump talk about our elections, you might hear something like this: Voter fraud is rampant. Noncitizens are regularly voting illegally. And our elections are rigged. The president often uses the bully pulpit to repeat these claims despite study after study showing they’re just not true. But it’s not just the president. There are many others at the ground level saying the same things to justify voting restrictions that could disenfranchise legal voters, especially voters of color. Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. One of them is J. Christian Adams. An activist and former trial attorney for the US Department of Justice, Adams was named to Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017. Today, he’s the president of Public Interest Legal Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for stricter voter ID laws and sues states and local governments to remove illegal voters from election rolls. On this week’s “More To The Story,” Adams claims there’s systemic voter fraud in the US before abruptly ending the interview after host Al Letson challenges his assertions. Al then talks with Mother Jones National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman about the lack of evidence from activists like Adams, the claims Adams and PILF have made that noncitizens are illegally voting, and what conservative activists who say election fraud is rampant are really trying to achieve. Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe. [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago - How to Govern the Pacing of the AI Frontier
As is well known by now, this summer, AI agents created by OpenAI broke out of their testing environments and coordinated an autonomous cyberattack on HuggingFace, a popular platform for sharing AI models. In our software-dependent age, where everything from power grids to hospitals to vehicles is highly susceptible to cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the incident set off alarms. Allegedly, the agents communicated among themselves, tried to cover their tracks, and abandoned their individual assignments for collective goals. In response to the HuggingFace breakout and similar incidents, leading AI companies proposed “pacing the frontier” of AI development—slowing the rate at which companies improve AI capabilities to allow safety research to catch up. At the current level of interpretability and alignment of AI models, however, “pacing” would necessarily mean a pause on development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has admitted that AI researchers “understand a tiny fraction of what goes on inside these models.” His claim is reasonable; unlike previous generations of software, where developers could point to a flaw that made a program run unexpectedly, AI systems contain trillions of pieces of information that are uninterpretable to the naked human eye. Thus, in a world of paced AI development, even small advances in model capabilities would require massive leaps in safety research before their public release. Because the pause Amodei proposes would involve a coordinated restriction of output, which is almost always illegal under the antitrust laws, AI companies say they need Washington to exempt them from those laws. “For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the U.S. government to mediate or at least enable these discussions” on safety standards, Amodei wrote in an essay also endorsed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. “They don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.” The waiver request has rightly drawn criticism as an insidious attempt at regulatory capture, including from close allies of President Donald Trump. Open-source models, often far cheaper to use than frontier offerings, pose a clear threat to AI corporations’ business models and bottom lines. Skeptics note that privately set safety standards, enabled by an antitrust waiver, may aim to shore up these corporations’ dominant market position and reduce spending on new model development ahead of their planned IPOs. A closer examination of antitrust legal precedent supports this interpretation. Coordinated output restrictions are usually illegal under… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago - Why Political Polling Seems So Unreliable
Political polling has suffered some embarrassing failures this year. In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, polls predicted a blowout for Abdul El-Sayed; he won by less than a percentage point. In Wisconsin, polls showed Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong enjoying double-digit leads in the gubernatorial primary; she narrowly lost to David Crowley. Think pieces have abounded on what’s gone wrong with political polling. In truth, polls have always been unreliable. Longtime Democratic pollster Stefan Hankin, founder and CEO of Lincoln Park Strategies, explains the myriad of challenges currently facing the polling industry, including overhyped results and the lack of professional standards. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes. Anne Kim: Before we talk specifically about what’s gone wrong with political polling, I’d love to nerd out a little bit on what makes a good poll. What is your platonic ideal of a poll? Stefan Hankin: I’ll call it in broad terms. You want a sample size that is proportional to the size of the [state] if you’re doing a state-wide election. You’re going to want a bigger sample size in California than you will in Rhode Island, let’s say, just based on the populations of those states. Now, there’s a ceiling where it doesn’t make too much sense to go much bigger on the sample size because it’s diminishing rate of returns in terms of the margin of error. So for a larger state like California, 1,200 is probably the maximum we’d ever really recommend unless you really want to get into subgroups, like we want to look at African-American women compared to Hispanic women. But in broad terms, for a smaller state, somewhere around 500 respondents for a statewide survey is your gold standard. If you’re looking at a general election, ideally you want only “likely” voters who are going to be voting that November. In a primary poll, it’s going to be focused on either Democrats or Republicans who are likely to show up. And that “likely voter” piece is where I’m going to argue 90 percent of the problems are in trying to figure out (a) who are the likely voters and then (b) getting those folks on the proverbial phone. So much more of what we do is texting people or sending out links to an online survey versus having the discussion over the phone. Anne Kim: So if I’m understanding you right, the ideal political poll is… [TheTopNews] Read More.1 day ago - Study: Shock Gloves Traumatized Army VolunteersA newly released military study paints a frightening picture of the electric shock gloves ICE recently purchased by the thousands—and which the agency and its acting head David Venturella seem eager to deploy regardless of the potential consequences. Records unearthed by the watchdog group American Oversight and first shared with the Associated Press show that in one set of trials carried out by the US Army in 2024, the electric shock gloves caused “overwhelmingly immediate” pain to soldiers playing the role of combative inmates in a mock forced cell extraction scenario, who then reported that “just seeing the glove” frightened them into obedience. GLOVEs, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are taser-like devices that look like standard work gloves, but deliver a painful electric charge when the wearer touches a person’s skin. As I’ve previously reported, they’ve been described as “low optics”—police language for a weapon that causes harm but doesn’t leave marks, making it harder for victims to sue or for public outrage to stem from visible harm. Two weeks ago, the shock gloves’ manufacturer, Jeff Niklaus, called the devices the “safest, most humane deescalatory product probably ever to come along.” The Army study found that the gloves caused “intense pain,” but didn’t significantly change the amount of time it took to control a combative prisoner, or transfer someone from one unit to another. In one trial, a participant accidentally turned the shock gloves on; in another, “inmates” were able to fight off “guards” wearing the gloves for longer than they were able to hold off unarmed ones. People with water or oil on their skin felt more pain when shocked, and one participant reported lingering pain for 30 minutes afterward. Soldiers, once shocked, were terrified to be shocked again. Army investigators reported “fatigue, soreness, and excessive apprehensiveness to being shocked again” in the soldiers playing inmates—and noted that the shock gloves gave a confidence boost to those who were playing guards, especially “smaller or less trained members.” The gloves, the study concluded, should be deployed in military prisons. In September, ICE finalized its purchase of 6,650 pairs of the shock gloves for $16.7 million from Kentucky-based Compliant Technologies. White House border czar Tom Homan said in August that it could “be a while” before the gloves are in use in the field. But ICE, according to the Associated Press, was already well aware of the Army… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
- A Trump Rally Stuck in Time
Photographs by Christopher LeeThe concerns about $4.14-a-gallon gas at the Lincoln Costco an hour and a half to the east? The worries about the war in Iran, the sort of Middle East conflagration this president promised to avoid? The disappointment over the Epstein files, which failed to bring down the alleged network of deep-state pedophiles? This was not that sort of political event. No, yesterday’s Trump rally in Grand Island, Nebraska—a raspberry-colored fleck in a jammy-red state, a couple of hours from the nearest major airport—was a distinct type of Trump rally, more 2016 than 2026. It was a Midwest way station on President Trump’s recent tour of solid Republican strongholds. And it was a chance for longtime Trump supporters to show their appreciation for the two-term president who has somehow dominated the national conversation for three terms—and, more important, for him to bask in their reflected glow. Trump, after all, is in the middle of a rough stretch. Interest rates and gas prices—all prices, frankly—are high, and his approval is low. He doesn’t seem to really care how Republican candidates fare in the midterms, but he’d rather they win than lose, if only because it would save him the headache of congressional investigations.Much like his midterm convention last month in Dallas—a Trump-a-palooza that few Republicans other than Trump particularly wanted—the Nebraska rally seemed to be less about helping his party and more about reminding himself of his immovable base, via yet another trip back through the good ol’ days. (Although Nebraska’s races for governor and Senate are closer than Republicans might like, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated them “solid Republican” and “likely Republican,” respectively.)“We won this state all three times by a landslide,” Trump said, moments after taking the stage, raising the question of what exactly he was doing here. Christopher Lee for The AtlanticI have covered Trump, in some form or fashion, since early 2016, when he dispatched the candidate I had been following (Jeb!), the first of several purported giants he slayed on his way to the White House. The scene I found when I arrived in Grand Island midmorning yesterday was, in many ways, reminiscent of those early rallies, when the lines were long, the promises had not yet been broken, and Trump really might have shot people on Fifth Avenue without losing votes. Deb Reeves, a row-crop (corn, soybeans) farmer, had come to the rally with her 17-year-old… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago - Artificial Goes After Our Silicon Valley Overlords. Just Not Very Well.The world premiere of Artificial, the new movie centered around the rise of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as he led an unstable company down a dangerous path, was packed. The recent wave of high-profile “rogue AI” security incidents, disputes over tech industry-led safeguards and regulation, and continued multibillion-dollar investments to advance development has clearly piqued public interest. The movie, directed by Challengers filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, contains scenes derived from real reporting on OpenAI and the industry: discussions on ensuring their products “align” with human values while racing competitors such as Google, and undertaking corporate restructuring to draw investment from the likes of Microsoft. It also hinges on wide public sentiment that major tech companies and their leaders hold too much power and developers should pause development of their most advanced models to mitigate risks to humanity. The people behind Artificial appear to agree. “The deeper responsibility we all felt is to try to do some interrogation of who we are giving all of our autonomy, power, and data to,” Andrew Garfield, who plays Altman, said on Monday night during the post-screening Q&A at the New York Film Festival, “that felt like the service to the greater thing.” The actor said the filmmakers were adding new scenes while shooting to create a “living document” of how the AI industry was progressing. The moral center of the film is Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist played by Yura Borisov, who sees in AI technology potential to solve humanity’s problems, but realizes too late that his idealism doesn’t fit within the constraints of the market. A former AI researcher played by Jason Schwartzman, presented as a prophet who sees the future of the tech with clarity, tells Sutskever that it could lead, if not to total human extinction, at least to life under AI subjugation. But the filmmakers also portray the tech leaders who don’t recognize this—or simply don’t care—as goofy megalomaniacs. While Garfield portrays Altman as constantly dodging confrontation to get people to be as forgiving toward him as possible, he also plays him with a cartoonish quality—with his frantic shifts in posture played as a joke, and the post-production team changing the actor’s brown eyes to a bright, inhuman blue. Even more so for others like Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, whose facial expressions and demeanor seem to lean far more silly than threatening. The intermittent comic relief… [TheTopNews] Read More.2 days ago
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