The New Yorker: Who gets to vote in Florida?

The New Yorker: Who gets to vote in Florida?

By Dexter Filkins

    Florida is often a key election state. In 2000, it was the center of a controversy that ended in a month of recounts and the Supreme Court eventually handing the state and presidency to George W. Bush. But there are many other underlying factors that made this possible. 

    Florida was one of the states with the harshest Jim Crow segregation laws that kept Black voters out of the polls decades after the Reconstruction was over. More recently, Republican legislators have tried to keep the predominantly Black and young Democratic voters, whom they perceived as a threat, away from voting booths.

    For example, the state imposed laws saying that former felons couldn't vote, which was later revised to a requirement of thousands of dollars in fines to former felons who wanted to vote. Furthermore, the number of early voting days and voting booths on college campuses was reduced, making it harder for those people to vote. Lists of ineligible voters have been fraudulent as well. The state has been flooded with thousands of lawsuits over eligibility claims.

    This year, the governor is one who has been trying to make voting harder for years and a Trump supporter. Although he has distanced himself from the President in his recent rants about the Postal Service and calls from constituents for better voting laws, many still believe he wants to deliver victory to the President. Many analyses have said that Florida is a must-win for Trump, making the controversy more tangled.

TedEd: Why people fall for misinformation

A TedEd by Joseph Isaac

A misconception is something that is commonly believed by largely incorrect, for example, the taste map discovered by David Hänig in 1901. The simplified versions printed in many books and newspapers were incorrect. There are two common types of misconceptions. One is disinformation, which is fake information designed to mislead people. However, misinformation is more common, and it is inaccurate information that is unintentionally created. So why do we fall for misconceptions so easily? Misinformation often occurs from human error in transmission, like a game of telephone, which is what happened to Hänig's taste map. It was written in German and academic language, so it was hard to understand for most people. So, newspapers began reporting that certain flavors were imperceptible on certain parts of the tongue, whereas Hänig's research showed that flavors were present on all parts of the tongue and the areas he identified were only slightly more sensitive to certain flavors. Another factor in the spread of this misconception was the simplification of Hänig's complicated diagram, which was more approachable and fits our ideal of being able to understand the world. However, science is often more complicated than that, and a good story is often hard to ignore. So the next time you see some amazing fact, make sure you know it's really true.