THE BIG 2016 DANGER MAY BE ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES: Not this story again:

We have less than five months before the primary voting begins and, perhaps more to the point, less than 14 until the general election. The clock is ticking for the candidates, of course, but it’s also counting down for the infrastructure which will handle the tedious chore of counting all the votes. In many states, election officials are taking a very worried look at the no longer newfangled electronic voting machines which were put in place after the hanging chad debacle of the 2000 election and finding them unready for the task.

As the Professor is wont to point out, perhaps it’s time to go to back to the future: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the paper ballot: An idea whose time has come again.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Enrollment in Humanities Ph.D. Programs Declines as More Graduate Schools Slim Down.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Roomba Now Sees and Maps a Home. “iRobot is adding vision and mapping to its robot vacuum cleaners, and says its devices could eventually recognize and manipulate objects.”

BRINGING BACK CAMPUS FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Episode 17 in the How Do We Fix It? Podcast.

ARE COMPUTERS BAD FOR LEARNING? “Students are cutting and pasting answers instead of finding them.”

THE QUESTIONS WE’RE NOT ASKING ABOUT SEX ROBOTS. Well, my question is, is a vibrator a sex robot?

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nanoparticles disguised as blood-cell fragments slip past body’s immune defence: Drug-delivery systems coated in platelets used to repair damaged blood vessels.

TWEET OF THE WEEK:

IT’S PARTISAN WITCH HUNTS ALL THE WAY DOWN IN WISCONSIN: More Wisconsin emails reveal John Doe investigators targeted conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices.

Our liberal friends in Wisconsin are unhappy. They think someone is leaking emails that make the state’s partisan campaign regulators look bad. We’ll plead guilty to having sources, but the emails are news and they sure are revealing.

Today’s installment from court documents concerns how a special prosecutor and regulators at the Government Accountability Board (GAB) targeted the state’s conservative Supreme Court justices. The partisan goal was to force some justices to recuse themselves from hearing a constitutional challenge to their probe of GovernorScott Walker and his political allies. . . .

The GAB and prosecutors tried to rig [Wisconsin] Supreme Court review of a constitutional challenge to their probe. They used information they had collected through kitchen-sink subpoenas to search for information well outside their already voluminous writ. Then they targeted conservative justices while giving liberals a pass. The good news is that in July Wisconsin’s Supreme Court shut down their investigation as unconstitutional.

Kevin Kennedy, who runs the GAB, responded to our last editorial by saying his staff merely “feel passionately about ensuring that all parties comply with campaign finance laws” and partisan emails can be explained because “staff of the G.A.B. are human.” Human enough to abuse their power to punish their political opponents.

Drip, drip, drip. There’s much more partisan nastiness going on in Wisconsin than has thus far been revealed. Mr. Kennedy, his accomplices on the GAB staff, and the prosecutors involved in this cabal should lose their jobs for their blatant, partisan abuse of government power.

Tar. Feathers. Sicilian Bull.

GENDER GAP: Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2014 for 6th straight year, and outnumber men in grad school 136 to 100. A gender gap is only a problem when men outnumber women. When women outnumber men, it’s progress.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 861.

HELL, I’D BE THINKING OF BLOWING THE CHANNEL TUNNEL: Chances of Brexit Rise as Migrant Crisis Roils EU.

The migrant crisis increasingly looks like it could break the EU, with euroskepticism on the rise as the crisis continues. The biggest news: The chances of a Brexit are up, with a poll by ICM putting support for leaving the EU at 40 percent, with 43 percent in favor of staying and 17 percent undecided. The poll gives the pro-union camp an edge—unlike the Survation poll earlier this month that found a majority of respondents favored leaving—but that lead has narrowed from 11 percent to just 3 percent. The uptick in support for a Brexit comes after a change in the way the poll question was worded, but the reason for the change appears to be the migrant crisis.

And the UK isn’t the only country seeing knock-on effects from the crisis. Euroskeptics are also picking up steam in Germany. We noted in yesterday’s newsletter that support for Germany’s far-right AfD party rose to 5.5 percent in a recent poll, even as Angela Merkel’s coalition was down to 40 percent approval, a loss of 1.5 percent. But today another poll shows that AfD is tied in Saxony with the SPD, a party that belongs to Merkel’s coalition. Both are polling at 13 percent in that region.

The miserable failure of the EU governing class is becoming apparent.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Why Americans Still Think the Economy Is Terrible. “The median American household in 2014 had a lower income, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it did in 2013. The $53,657 the household in the middle of the income distribution earned last year was down 1.5 percent from the year before. . . . The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999. A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago.”

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ASHE SCHOW: Second GOP debate: Where Each Candidate Excelled and Faltered.

WELL, COOKED BOOKS DO SEEM TO BE THE NORM THESE DAYS: Is The IRS Undercounting Americans Renouncing U.S. Citizenship?

MEET THE NEW BOSS: “Who Really Won The Cold War?”, John Schindler asks at the Federalist:

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party has sent shockwaves far beyond Britain. There has been disbelief that the United Kingdom’s storied left-wing party opted to be led by a man so obviously contemptuous of his own society. In the wake of their recent electoral debacle under the uninspiring Ed Miliband, Labour has chosen as its leader an activist who resembles a walking leftist cliché.

* * * * * * * *

Barack Obama is the most left-wing president ever on social justice, yet he is a darling of Wall Street. Hillary Clinton, despite her belated interest in social issues, is deeply enmeshed in high finance and will never challenge it. Thus Bernie Sanders, who is an amalgam of Old and New Left, is treated like an atavism by mainstream liberals when he opens the economics can of worms.

Read the whole thing.

NICK COHEN: Why I’ve Finally Given Up On the Left: Left-wing thought has shifted towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic. It is insupportable.

I RECOMMEND TRYING SOMETHING THAT ISN’T A COMPLETE, DISMAL FAILURE: Administration searches for new approach to aiding rebels in Syria. “In comments that appeared to shock even many of those involved in Syria policy elsewhere in the government, Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the U.S. Central Command, told Congress on Wednesday that only ‘four or five’ trainees from the program, a $500 million plan officially launched in December to prepare as many as 5,400 fighters this year, have ended up “in the fight” inside Syria.”

ROGER SIMON: Who Won The Reagan Library Debate? “Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio. They both sounded smart and authoritative, assuming that matters. (It should.) Carly got in some zingers and I think by the time the third debate comes along, she may have expectation problems, the bar will be so high. (Cruz is supposed to be the hot-shot debater, but he looks fairly ineffectual by comparison.) Rubio — although I know this freaks out some commenters — is likely the future of the Republican Party, either now or in 2020. Fellas, get used to it.”

JACK SHAFER: Trump’s Fatal Gaffe Ain’t Coming. Just Ask Joe Biden.

THAT’S OKAY, SO LONG AS HE’S CAREFUL NOT TO DO IT AGAIN: Rep. Jared Polis did not misspeak, he just doesn’t like the backlash.

Colorado Congressman Jared Polis claimed in his local newspaper that he “misspoke” when he called for innocent college students to be expelled simply for being accused of sexual assault.

He can claim whatever he wants, but his actions last week tell a far different story than that of someone who merely didn’t choose his words carefully.

First, we have to go back to his original statement, made during a House hearing on campus sexual assault. During a back-and-forth with a panelist advocating for due process rights for students accused of sexual assault, Polis said it’s better to throw out accused students even if they’re likely innocent, just in case.

“I mean, if there’s 10 people that have been accused and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, seems better to get rid of all 10 people,” Polis said. “We’re not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we’re talking about their transfer to another university.”

And if Polis says he erred in making this statement, then the audience must have erred in applauding it, because that’s what they did.

But this was Polis’ second controversial comment at the hearing about lowering standards for expulsion. Shortly before he made the above comment that sparked the backlash, he argued that schools should be able to use a lower standard of evidence than the preponderance of evidence standard currently required.

“I mean, if I was running [a private institution] I might say ‘well, you know, even if there’s a 20 or 30 percent chance that it happened I wouldn’t want … I would want to remove this individual,'” Polis said. “Why shouldn’t a private institution, in the interest of promoting a safe environment, use an even lower standard than a preponderance of evidence, like even a reasonable likeliness standard?”

The preponderance standard requires college administrators — under pressure from the federal government to prove they are acting tough on campus sexual assault — to be just 50.01 percent sure a student committed the assault. A lower standard would mean expelling students when schools are more than 50 percent sure the student didn’t commit the assault.

Polis is a putz. Now he’s a chastened putz. That’s modest progress.

NO. NEXT QUESTION: Iran Deal: Should We Give Obama the Benefit of the Doubt?

BEN CARSON’S SHOCKINGLY WEAK DEBATE PERFORMANCE: “Carson currently is in second place, not terribly far behind Donald Trump and well ahead of everyone else. Trump isn’t more knowledgeable about policy than Carson (though at least he knows where he stands). Thus, although it’s still early days, the situation is becoming a little scary,” Paul Mirengoff warns at Power Line.