io9: voting

Absentee Ballots — In Space!

Ed Grabianowski — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:20:00 PST

Think you're facing long lines at your local polling place? At least you aren't casting your vote from over 200 miles above the Earth's surface. Astronauts E. Michael Fincke and Gregory Chamitoff will be voting from the International Space Station today, and their right to do it is the result of a relatively new law.

Astronauts who are in space at the time of an election were given the right to vote by a 1997 Texas law (astronauts tend to live in or near Houston). Fincke and Chamitoff will cast their votes, and the results will be sent to the Harris and Brazoria County Clerk via encrypted downlinks and emails. The two participatory democracy loving space travelers even made a "Get Out the Vote" video while on board the ISS.

If they're going through all that trouble to vote, wouldn't you feel like a jerk if you didn't bother? So vote already!

No word on which candidate the astronauts plan to vote for, but the ISS is sporting a "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos" bumper sticker. Image by: NASA.

Be like an astronaut: Vote! [Scientific American]

How Hackable Are the Voting Machines in Your State?

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:34:02 PDT

SciFi Channel's Dvice blog has a great chart up today that shows which states have the most unreliable and/or hackable e-voting machines. If you want to get more detailed information about what kind of voting machines are being used in your state, you can go to Dvice's javascripty map here, and visit their list of current e-voting technologies here. So what can you do about it?

Over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the guardians of digital justice are working on the Total Election Awareness project, which will track the performances of voting machines on election day. This is a software tool that allows election-monitoring organizations to track calls and emails from ordinary voters like you, reporting about everything from malfunctioning e-voting machines to other election-day incidents or concerns. Want to help with the TEA project? Download the software and start hacking.

Fear of a Chocolate Planet

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:23:26 PDT

In the lonely days after he'd packed in his bionics from Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors starred in a freaky flick called Agency. Released in 1980, after a decade of hallucinatory presidential shenanigans in the United States, the movie is about an evil advertising agency controlled by the U.S. government. Their nefarious plan? To plant subliminal political messages into television commercials for "chocolate planet," a new chocolate drink. Lee Majors is the creative director who starts to figure out that something is very wrong with the chocolate planet account, and in this scene he discovers the subliminal message that is going to be implanted in the ad.

Though ostensibly about this preposterous double-subliminal thing, where ads with subliminal messages to BUY BUY BUY are also filled with yet another layer of subliminal messages to VOTE VOTE VOTE, Agency is mainly a perfect time capsule of late-1970s culture. Everybody wears these insane floor-length fur coats and smokes. In this little bonus scene that I have for you below, from the establishing scenes at the beginning of the movie, we are treated to the "wackiness" that is the ad biz. Look, there's Lee with his fly down talking to a gay! And a kid smoking in the elevator! And a reference to pot! Crazy times, people, crazy times. If you need a dose of strange this weekend, I highly recommend Agency. It's just packed with goodness, including Robert Michum as the evil ad exec and a whole scene with Lee fighting some Hell's Angels. [Agency via IMDB]