How Many Lashes Can One Man Take? Thousands, if they're performed correctly. By Noreen Malone There were protests in Egypt this week after an Egyptian doctor was sentenced to 15 years in prison and 1,500 lashes by the Saudi Arabian government for prescribing medicine to a princess that "drove her to addiction." The wife of the convicted doctor worried publicly that the sentence would kill him. How many lashes can one man stand? It depends on how you're lashed. It's very unlikely that the doctor will die from his sentence if it is administered in the usual Saudi Arabian way—i.e., broken up into weekly bouts of 50 lashings each. (Women are given 20 to 30 at a time.) But a string of regular punishments administered over a span of seven months could still be dangerous. After just one round of lashings, he could suffer lacerated or bruised skin. More serious problems are likely to arise after repeated, weekly abuse—including nerve damage and infection. Saudi Arabia does have some safeguards to protect the health of the person being lashed. For example, doctors inspect the medical condition of a prisoner ahead of time to determine whether he or she is fit to be lashed. (There tends not to be a post-lashing inspection.) And according to Islamic law, a flogger is supposed to hold a copy of the Quran under his arm to curb his range of motion and ensure that the strokes are not too powerful. Usually, the lashes are applied to the back, but they can also land on the legs and buttocks, according to firsthand reports. (The more varied the blows, the less likely they are to cause serious damage; hitting the same spot over and over increases the likelihood of breaking skin and causing infection.) More forceful whippings, like those often administered to slaves in pre-Civil War America, are much more dangerous. Lashes with a leather instrument or paddle and a full range of motion have the potential to cause permanent damage to the internal organs and muscles, severe blood loss, shock, and maybe death. If the doctor received his 1,500 weaker strokes all at once, rather than over a seven-month stretch, the outer layer of his skin would be shredded, and he'd be at even greater risk for serious infection. Few cases of death by lashing in the Muslim world have been reported. (People are lashed in non-Muslim countries as well—for instance, the Bahamas reinstituted flogging in 1991.) In 2004, a 14-year-old Iranian boy was killed while serving a sentence of 85 lashes; the person in charge of the punishment misfired, striking his head rather than his back, causing a brain hemorrhage. (A metal cable was used for the lashing in that case.) And in 1998, a Sudanese man was flogged to death by public-order police, but it's unclear how many lashes were administered and with what force. Saudi Arabia metes out by far the strictest lashing sentences in the Muslim world. Both Sudan and Iran employ the practice but usually stick to the more moderate 40 to 80 strokes prescribed in the Quran. The most severe lashing assigned by a modern Saudi Arabian judge took place in 2007, when two men received 7,000 strokes each as punishment for sodomy. Less

Brother, Can You Spare a Dinar? What kind of lifestyle can an Iraqi neighborhood patrol officer afford? By Brian Palmer The Iraqi government this week assumed responsibility from the United States for paying the salaries of the Sons of Iraq, the formerly disaffected Sunnis who now serve as neighborhood patrol officers in cities throughout the country. Their monthly salary is approximately $300. How well can a Son of Iraq live on $300 in Baghdad? He'll need a roommate and some help from his family. Sons of Iraq who live on their own may have to avoid indulgences like air conditioning or chicken dinners. (Many rely on support payments from clans or tribal sheiks.) Rent alone can consume most of their budget. Real estate prices in Baghdad have skyrocketed. A two-bedroom apartment in a safe area currently costs around $400 per month. A small house in a lower-middle-class neighborhood is out of reach at $150,000. Real estate prices in many areas have doubled in the past year and continue to climb due to security improvements and a housing shortage. Fortunately, basic food staples are affordable. The government's Public Distribution System supplies subsidized monthly food parcels to two-thirds of Iraqi citizens. For approximately 16 cents per month, recipients are entitled to a basket of 10 basic products, including flour, rice, sugar, salt, and cooking oil. The parcel supplies the minimum daily caloric intake requirement, but the central government has discussed steep cuts to the program. Other food items are expensive. A Son of Iraq earns less than 8 percent of the median U.S. law-enforcement officer's salary, but he pays close to the same prices for meats and vegetables. A pound of potatoes in Baghdad costs 75 cents, slightly more than the U.S. price of 67 cents per pound. A pound of chicken would cost a Son of Iraq $1.63, compared with an average U.S. price of $2.08. Electricity is supplied at low rates by the government, but it is unavailable for much of the day. During outages, residents turn to personal or neighborhood generators. The cost can run anywhere from $50 to $150 per month to run a fan, lights, and basic appliances. The cost of operating an air conditioner is too much for many Sons of Iraq, despite average highs of over 100 degrees in the hottest months. Inflation also threatens the already tenuous financial position of the Sons of Iraq. Last year, Iraq's 60 percent inflation was second in the world only to the incredible 100,000 percent inflation in Zimbabwe. In one month alone this year, Iraqi food prices rose by 13.6 percent. Relatively speaking, the Sons of Iraq are paid poorly for their line of work. Official Iraqi police officers and soldiers earn twice as much as the Sons of Iraq. The Sons' salary would be more comparable to that of a Baghdad butcher. However, many Sons of Iraq are illiterate or otherwise underqualified for official police work. The salary was also set in 2006, when the cost of living was lower, and the majority of the Sons lived in Anbar, a less expensive locale. Less

Who Stole the Cookie From the Cookie Jar? The best way to interrogate a child. By Juliet Lapidos An 8-year-old Arizona boy charged with murdering his father and another man appeared in court on Monday. Police say the boy confessed to shooting the two men with a .22-caliber gun, but his defense attorneys told reporters that "there could have been improper interview techniques done." What's the "proper" way to interrogate a kid? With kid gloves. Based on the principle that juvenile suspects may not fully comprehend a Miranda warning, most states mandate some form of added protection for children under the age of 16. In at least 20 states, police must notify the child's guardian before questioning; and in at least 13 states, either a parent or an attorney must be present. Under Arizona law, the state carries the "burden of proof" in juvenile interrogation cases. That is, there's a presumption that the child's statements were made involuntarily unless a preponderance of evidence indicates otherwise. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in State v. Jimenez that in determining whether a confession was voluntary (and therefore admissible), a court should evaluate the child's age, education, background, and intelligence, plus whether the child's parents were present, whether he was in good mental and physical health during the interrogations, and whether he has a mental illness. There's evidence to suggest that juvenile suspects are more likely than adults to make a false confession. A 2004 study of 326 exoneration cases found that 13 percent of adults had falsely confessed, compared with 44 percent of suspects under 18 years old. Among children between the ages of 12 and 15, the rate was 75 percent. After the 1989 beating and rape of a woman known as the Central Park jogger, five New York teenagers served prison sentences based on false confessions. In 1998, a 14-year-old boy named Michael Crowe admitted to stabbing his 12-year-old sister to death after he'd been interrogated for 10 hours over two days. Before the murder trial began, however, the charges were dropped, with the judge ruling that the police had made "illegal promises of leniency"—telling Michael he'd get "help" if he confessed and that he'd go to jail if he didn't. (Click here for video footage of the interrogation.) Law-enforcement officers are often trained to conduct interrogations using the Reid Technique, which involves direct confrontation, physical gestures to appear concerned, and preventing the accused from denying the crime outright. Practitioners are encouraged to use the same methods for children as for adults. This helps explain why children are more likely to offer up false confessions. Children, psychologists argue, are more suggestible than adults and thus more easily swayed by leading questions. They're also more influenced by short-term guarantees—"You can go home right away if you confess"—than by longer-term consequences like 10 years in prison. Third, juveniles are more likely to display behavior that interrogators read as "deceptive," such as saying "I swear" a lot and not making eye contact. Reformers advocate better preparation for police officers as well as mandatory recording of interrogations. Less

Cyberspace Invaders Is a cyber-attack an act of war? By Christopher Beam Chinese hackers have breached the White House computer network on numerous occasions, the Financial Times reported Thursday. Officials believe the attacks may be sponsored by the Chinese government. Is a cyber-attack by a foreign government an act of war? It depends on the context. An "act of war" is defined in the U.S. Code as any act that occurs during declared war or during armed conflict between two countries (although President Bush did call the Sept. 11 attacks an "act of war"). So, technically, if a cyber-attack occurs during a war, it's an act of war; if not, it's not. Whether or not a cyber-attack is grounds for war depends on the nature of hackers' intentions: to spy, by stealing secrets, or to disrupt national infrastructure. Most governments consider espionage—the collecting of information about another country—a crime but not a casus belli. But sabotage—say, pulling down a power grid that serves hundreds of cities—could be construed as one. So far, no cyber-attack has ever started a war. That's because the vast majority of attacks qualify as espionage. In 2007, hackers infiltrated the Pentagon's unclassified e-mail system. The World Bank, with its troves of financial information about foreign governments, has been invaded several times. When a U.S. trade official traveled to China in 2007, foreign spyware programs were reportedly discovered on some of his electronic devices. Hackers targeted both the Obama and McCain campaigns with cyber-attacks, presumably to cull strategic information about the future president. Organized crime is active online, too, but usually the goal is profit, not access to classified information. Another reason governments rarely treat cyber-attacks as acts of war is that they're so hard to trace. The 1999 "Moonlight Maze" incident, in which hackers stole files from the Department of Defense, was traced to computers in Russia. But the Kremlin denied involvement, and the case remains unsolved. There's also a risk that you'll finger the wrong guy. A 1998 investigation called "Solar Sunrise" initially led intelligence officials to suspect Iraq in a series of breaches of Department of Defense computers. It turned out to be the handiwork of two teenagers in Northern California. Compared with the rules of actual warfare—which are recognized by international treaties—the rules of cyber-warfare are murky. In 2007, the Bush administration announced a National Cyber Security Initiative that would, in part, codify the consequences of cyber-attacks on the United States. But the specifics of the doctrine remain classified. (A Senate committee criticized the initiative for its secrecy, arguing that deterrence works only if the enemy knows what the policy is.) Other countries have pushed for a more explicit cyber-doctrine. Estonia, which fell victim to a massive foreign cyber-attack in 2007, created a Cyber Defense Center in cooperation with other NATO countries and urged NATO and the U.N. to establish a doctrine that covers cyber-warfare. Meanwhile, China has been blunt about its ambitions. A Pentagon report from 2007 concluded that while China doesn't have an official cyber-doctrine, it has declared its intent to achieve "electromagnetic dominance" over its opponents and has developed viruses to attack enemy computers. Less

What Happens to All the Ballots From Election Day? They'll likely be shredded by Christmas of 2010. By Jacob Leibenluft With all but a few House and Senate races decided, election officials around the country are finishing up the process of counting the vote. When all is said and done, those officials will have processed more than 120 million ballots. What happens to them after they've been tallied up? They'll be stored until at least September 2010. According to U.S. code, ballots and other records related to any federal election—that means for president, U.S. Senate, or U.S. House of Representatives—must be kept for at least 22 months. Beyond that, it's up to the state to decide what to do with them. In most cases, the details of ballot storage during that interval are left up to local election boards. In Arkansas, for example, board of election commissioners in each county keep the ballots for 20 days, after which point they can place them in a secured area in the county courthouse or a government warehouse. After two years, the ballots may be destroyed. State laws don't typically say how to destroy an old ballot. (In Maine, for example, the rule simply dictates that they be "destroyed using a method that makes the contents unreadable." [PDF]) Conversations with election officials at a half-dozen locations across the country revealed that shredding appears to be the method of choice. (Sending ballots straight to a recycling center is another option.) The Ohio secretary of state issued a more specific directive last year (PDF) requiring that voter registration materials, including personal information like absentee ballot applications, be either destroyed with a "criss-cross shredder" or sent to a "qualified, certified and bonded document disposal business." Most of the time, this process of storing and then destroying the ballots is pretty mundane. But in a couple of recent cases, critics have questioned whether 22 months is long enough. After the Florida recount, lawyers and historians made the case that the ballots should be kept for posterity's sake; today, members of the public can stop by and view them at the Florida State Archives. (See this Explainer from the days immediately following the recount for details of the original plans for storing the ballots.) In Ohio, a judge presiding over a lawsuit brought by groups alleging voter suppression and fraud during the 2004 election ordered that the county boards keep ballots past September 2006, when their 22-month period expired. But documents obtained by the plaintiffs show that in many Ohio counties, the ballots weren't all kept as mandated—an error officials blamed on miscommunications following the judge's order. Bonus Explainer: Nationally, 98 percent of precincts had reported their election results as of early Thursday afternoon, according to CNN. But Oregon and Washington are both listed as having at least 20 percent of votes outstanding. How come the Northwest states are so slow to count their votes? Because most voters there vote by mail. That makes counting the votes a much longer process, as election officials must verify more information and handle more paper. Moreover, while election results typically refer to the percent of precincts reporting, that number doesn't really apply in Washington or Oregon. In Oregon, where the ballots must arrive by Election Day, the "percent reported" number refers to the percentage of ballots counted compared with the number of registered voters in the state. So unless every voter casts a ballot, that number will never reach 100 percent. (Officials expect turnout will be closer to 85 percent this year.) In Washington, things are even more complicated; voters there only need to postmark their ballots by Election Day, so counties may have to wait a few days to receive every vote. Less

The Presidential Transition FAQ Does the president-elect get to ride around in Air Force One-elect? And other questions … By Juliet Lapidos Speaking from the White House Rose Garden this morning, President Bush promised a smooth changing of the guard between his outgoing administration and Barack Obama's incoming one: "During this time of transition," he said, "I will keep the president-elect fully informed of important decisions." The 77-day lame-duck interlude between today and Jan. 20 raised a slew of questions for Explainer readers: Who pays for the transition team? Taxpayers. Before the passage of the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, the president- and vice-president-elect and their party raised private money to support the changeover. As Rep. Dante Fascell of Florida put it during House floor debates, "It just does not seem proper and necessary to have [the president- and vice-president-elect] going around begging for money to pay for the cost of what ought to be the legitimate costs of Government." The General Services Administration, the agency tasked with doling out funds, had $7.1 million at its disposal for the 2000-01 transition, including $1.83 million for the outgoing Clinton administration, $4.27 million for the incoming Bush team, and a $1 million cushion for any additional expenses incurred. This year, the budget provides $8.52 million. Private donors contribute, too. This year, for example, the Obama campaign created a nonprofit entity called the "Obama Transition Project," which accepts donations up to $5,000 for transition-related expenses. Where does the transition team work? The GSA has already prepared a 120,000 square-foot space in downtown Washington, D.C., for Obama's committee. Since the 500 or so people who will work on the transition aren't yet federal employees, they don't have access to secure government computer networks. But the GSA has set up a separate network with access to e-mail and shared servers. Some transition team members work out of the president-elect's home-state election headquarters—in this case, Illinois. Does the president-elect get to fly around in a special plane, like an Air Force One-elect? Not really. Bush gets to keep his exclusive seat aboard Air Force One until inauguration day. The Obama team may use Transition Act funds to charter a plane or hire cars. When does the president-elect start getting intelligence briefings? Right away. Key CIA officials met on Wednesday to discuss the transition, and on Thursday National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell will give Obama his first briefing. After an initial lay-of-the-land chat, the CIA will provide Obama with critical overnight intelligence and clue him in to any ongoing covert operations. As Obama puts together his administration, the Joint Staff transition team—which includes representatives from the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy—will prepare briefings on developments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mechanics of managing the military, and disaster management. Less

Voting From the Hospital I got hit by a car over the weekend. Can I still cast a ballot on Election Day? By Nina Shen Rastogi Over the three days leading up to Election Day, close to a million Americans are likely to have been admitted to hospital emergency rooms. Many of those will end up confined to a bed throughout the course of the presidential election polling on Tuesday. Since the deadline for applying for mail-in absentee ballots was last week in most states, are these sick and injured people disenfranchised, too? No, but they'll need to get an "emergency absentee ballot." Like everything election-related, the process for obtaining one varies from state to state and sometimes from county to county. In New York, for example, you need to send a representative (like your spouse or your mom) to the Board of Elections with a regular absentee-ballot application—available online—along with a letter, signed by you, explaining your situation. Your proxy can then bring you an emergency ballot, which must be returned to the board office by 9 p.m. on Election Day. The process is more onerous in Virginia. There, you have to request an application first, then return a signed version and have it verified by local election officials before you can get your bandaged hands on a ballot. A designated representative must watch you complete your ballot and fill out a witness statement to that effect before ferrying the whole package over to the registrar's office by close of polls. (You'll also need a doctor's note.) Pennsylvania makes you or your representative go to court if your accident occurred after 5 p.m. on the Friday before elections. In West Virginia and Nevada, on the other hand, the mountain comes to Mohammed: In those states, you can request to have election commissioners dispatched to the hospital to collect your ballot. Kentucky's laws allow for a hospitalized voter's spouse to get an emergency ballot, too. A few states—Alabama, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Texas—and the District of Columbia have jumped into the digital age and offer downloadable emergency-ballot applications. However, these documents must still be printed out and submitted by mail or in person. If you can manage to get yourself into an ambulance or family member's car, you may be able to vote curbside at your registered polling place. To find out what the rules are in your county, check with your secretary of state or your local election office. Less

McCain's Secret Polls Why do a campaign's internal numbers look so different from the public data? By Jacob Leibenluft Most public polls find Barack Obama with double-digit leads in Iowa and Pennsylvania, but members of the McCain campaign cite internal numbers showing a tight race. A campaign might have its own reasons for releasing numbers that favor its cause, but is there any other reason why internal polls might differ from the ones produced for the public? Not really. In general, media organizations and private campaign pollsters compile their numbers in the same way. But there are a few key differences. First, a newspaper or TV station might be more likely find their respondents with random-digit dialing—calling any phone number that works and then asking whoever picks up whether he or she is registered to vote. Campaign pollsters often save time by pulling their samples from a list of all registered voters. In theory, the pollsters who use the voter files run the risk of missing voters whose information isn't up-to-date, but a study by two Yale professors (PDF) using data from the 2002 elections suggested that these samples were actually a little more accurate than those collected via random phone calls. Still, the difference between the two methods probably wouldn't affect the outcome all that much, particularly given all the challenges in figuring out who counts as a "likely" voter, anyway. Campaign polls may differ more in their specific focus. At the state level, public polls tend to look primarily at the "top-line" numbers—which candidate is winning overall. An internal poll may ask more questions about voters' demographics, their political leanings, and how they feel about the issues or the candidates. So even if the top-line numbers suggest that a candidate is losing, a campaign pollster could find data that suggest a shift in the race is imminent. A memo released by McCain's pollster Bill McInturff this week falls into that category: McInturff never mentions national head-to-head numbers but, instead, argues that McCain is gaining support among rural voters, non-college-educated men, and "Wal-Mart women." (Internal polls sometimes go on to test a campaign message—for example, by giving a series of statements about the candidates and seeing how voters react. A pollster following ethical standards is obligated to say so if their results are skewed by those messages.) Even if public polls and internal polls were conducted in exactly the same way, the results we hear about might still be different for a simple reason: Campaigns like to release only good news. Given that there will be a certain amount of random noise from poll to poll, the same methodology could produce several polls with different outcomes. In that case, a media organization would release all the numbers, while the campaign pollster might leak only the data that show his candidate winning. Two different analyses (PDF) using data from the early 2000s found a bias of a few percentage points among partisan polls that had been released to the public—although it's worth noting that outside pollsters can also have a so-called "house effect," favoring one party or another throughout a given year. Less

Must Obama Prove He's a Natural-Born Citizen? The flimsy rules on eligibility standards for presidential candidates. By Christopher Beam A federal judge in Pennsylvania this week threw out a lawsuit that challenged Barack Obama's eligibility for the presidency by claiming he's not a U.S. citizen. A California judge tossed out a similar lawsuit in September, after a member of the state's American Independent Party claimed John McCain was not a "natural-born citizen." Do presidential candidates have to prove their eligibility for office before they get on the ballot? No. Ballot access rules vary by state, but in general, you don't have to prove eligibility unless someone challenges it. Article II of the U.S. Constitution requires that a presidential candidate be a "natural born citizen"—in other words, a citizen born in this country (as opposed to a naturalized citizen born overseas). You also have to be at least 35 and have lived in the U.S. for at least 14 years. But none of the 50 states asks for birth certificates or long-term residency documents to prove that a candidate qualifies for a spot on the ballot. (Obama released a copy of his birth certificate, anyway.) Instead, they take the major parties' word for it. In presidential primary elections, most states put "generally recognized candidates" on the ballot automatically. California, for example, recognizes candidates who qualify for federal matching funds, appear in public-opinion polls, "campaign actively" in California, and appear on other states' ballots. Presidential electors usually do have to affirm their eligibility—by demonstrating that they are over 18, registered voters, and state residents. The candidates themselves face no such requirements. Third-party candidates, however, do have to show some ID. In Maryland, anyone who wants to get on the presidential primary ballot but isn't "generally recognized" (as vaguely defined by the state) has to sign a Certificate of Candidacy affirming, "I meet the qualification for the above mentioned office as set forth in applicable law." Illinois, too, requires independent candidates to affirm that they are "legally qualified … to hold such office." Violation is considered perjury. (If you really want to burnish your cred, Illinois has an optional loyalty oath.) Eligibility requirements are different for state and local offices. Candidates for the House of Representatives must be at least 25 years old. Senators have to be 30. Residency requirements vary: In Virginia, congressmen have to live in their district; in California, they don't. Most states require candidates to affirm that they meet the requirements. Virginia, for example, asks House candidates to swear that they're 25, they live in their district, they've never been convicted of a felony, and they've been a U.S. citizen for at least seven years. How do you challenge a candidate's eligibility for president or any other office? You have two options: report them to your secretary of state or take them to court. Some Secretary of State offices have investigation units that handle fraud, and investigations can lead to felony charges. Taking candidates to court is trickier. For one thing, you need "standing"—proof that the candidate's actions harm you. A federal judge ruled recently that ordinary citizens don't qualify for standing, and Congress would have to pass a law to change that. Political parties, on the other hand, might have a better chance in court, since they would clearly get hurt if an ineligible opponent won. Less

Will Early Voting Skew Exit Polls? No. By Juliet Lapidos More than 30 states allow no-excuse early voting, either by mail or in person, and this year one-third of the electorate is expected to cast a ballot before Election Day. (That's up from 22 percent four years ago.) Will all these trigger-happy ballot casters screw up exit polls on Nov. 4? Nope. In states with lots of early voters—like Georgia, where one-fifth of registered voters have already recorded their decisions—the same outfit that conducts exit polls for the National Election Pool starts telephone surveys about a week before Election Day. Phone numbers are generated by computer with random-digit dialing, but only respondents who have already voted, or who plan to ahead of time, are questioned fully. Then analysts merge the data collected by phone with results from interviews conducted at polling stations, keeping the early/day-of ratio pegged to that of the actual vote total. Estimates from absentee polls have been quite accurate historically. Oregon, for example, has had a vote-by-mail system in place since 1998, and pollsters haven't found big discrepancies between official results and survey answers. This year, some may worry that a Bradley effect will show up on telephone interviews but not in exit polls, since the latter are more anonymous. (For an exit poll, you just fill out a piece of paper and drop it in a box.) That would be the case only if the Bradley effect turned out to be real, something hotly contested during this campaign, and if the effect were the result of a conscious decision to dissemble rather than an unconscious one. Less

How Bad Are Electronic Voting Machines? Do they really fail one out of five times? By Nina Shen Rastogi Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit against the Pennsylvania Department of State last week calling for paper ballots to be provided in any precinct where half the voting machines fail on Election Day. The complaint asserts that 10 percent to 20 percent of the direct-recording electronic voting machines used in Pennsylvania are likely to fail on Nov. 4. The machines will be used in 34 percent of counties around the United States. Are they really so bad that they fail one out of five times? No. The 10 percent to 20 percent figure cited in the Pennsylvania lawsuit is somewhat misleading. The low estimate comes from an opinion piece published by the National Academy of Engineering last year. According to the author, Michael Ian Shamos, "it has been reported anecdotally" that 10 percent of the machines fail "in some respect" on Election Day. That means the machine required some technical intervention, not that it was necessarily taken out of service. The high estimate of 20 percent comes from a 2005 study (PDF) conducted by the state of California as part of a top-to-bottom review of its voting systems. In that paper, the authors were testing only one of the six machines used in Pennsylvania—the Diebold (now Premier) AccuVote TSX, a machine whose software has since been updated. Furthermore, 14 of the 34 documented failures were printer jams, which won't be a problem in Pennsylvania since the state doesn't produce paper voting receipts. The fact is that no one really knows how often electronic voting machines fail. The Election Assistance Commission—an independent governmental agency charged with establishing election standards—doesn't collect comprehensive statistics on failure rates. (Various nonprofits, such as Election Protection and VotersUnite!, do collect individual complaints.) However, according to federal standards set in 2002, machines may fail as often as once in 163 hours and still make certification. If the chance of a failure were randomly distributed throughout that 163-hour period, a given machine would have up to around an 8 percent chance of breaking down during regular use on Election Day. But these standards define "failure" quite broadly—a software glitch that causes the machine to freeze up for 10 or more seconds, for example, would count. (Individual states don't have to follow the federal guidelines, though many of them do.) Less

Explainer Goes in the Tank An unbiased etymology. By Juliet Lapidos A new study on media coverage of the presidential race suggests "that the press is in the tank for Barack Obama," the Boston Globe reported yesterday. Is a "top medical journal in the tank for Obama?" reads a recent Portfolio headline. John McCain, according to a story in Thursday's Guardian, "didn't even give the press a chance, trashing it on the assumption that it would be in the tank for Obama." How did in the tank come to mean supportive (when you really ought to be impartial)? Aquatics by way of pugilism. In the 19th century, Americans called swimming pools "tanks" and thus "go into the tank" was synonymous with "to dive." As far back as the 1920s, the phrase go into the tank became associated with intentionally losing a boxing match by diving onto the canvas and pretending you've been knocked out—a sense perfectly illustrated by this sentence from a 1928 New York Times article: "Pansy came out of jail and his manager, thinking him 'all washed up,' signed him up to 'take a dive,' or, more technically, 'to go into the tank' for a bird named Sailor Gray." (For more on the pugilistic origins of into the tank, see William Safire's April column on the subject.) By the mid-20th century, go into the tank, in the sense of rolling over for someone in a rigged contest, extended into political usage. Thus in 1960, syndicated columnist Bob Ruark set up a boxing metaphor to describe the run-up to that year's presidential conventions: "I am having a tiny touch of difficulty with the American news lately, having gotten it slightly mixed up with the prize-fighting business. But if I read it right, the presidential nomination conventions have been bagged in advance … with all the other competitors rigged to go into the tank for Jolting Jack Kennedy and Richard the Ripper Nixon." While taking a dive still refers to self-sabotage, the meaning of go into the tank gradually shifted toward working on someone's behalf, often with the hint of backroom deals or at least inappropriate devotion. As such, people weren't as likely to go into the tank as they were to be found there after the fact; i.e., they'd simply be in the tank. In a 1987 Boston Globe article by David Nyhan on the Robert Bork nomination process, we get: "Will he be in the tank for Reagan? Ted Kennedy says yes, Bork says no. I'm afraid Bork hasn't convinced me." And, also from the Globe's David Nyhan, a 1983 example of the phrase applied to a journalist: "It turns out [George] Will coached Reagan in debate, privately advised him on issues, regularly praised his presidency in print and on TV, and only rarely uttered the bare minimum of criticism that decency and appearance require. As a result of the recent commotion, Will bears the Scarlet Letter of having been in the tank for Reagan." Less

What's "Street Money"? Or "walking-around money"? Or "get-out-the-vote money"? By Christopher Beam Philadelphia Democrats are anxious that the Obama campaign won't be handing out "street money" for the general election. "Honestly, they'd be crazy not to do it," said one ward leader. What's street money, and who gets it? It's cash that's given to help get people to the polls. The money can go toward perks like coffee and doughnuts for door knockers, gas for volunteers to chauffeur elderly voters, or pocket money for kids who distribute fliers and sample ballots on Election Day. Also known as "walking-around money" or "get-out-the-vote money," it's most common in poor areas of Philadelphia; Chicago; Newark, N.J.; Baltimore; Los Angeles; and other big cities. Both parties use street money, but it's more common among Democrats, who tend to be better represented in the areas that rely on it. Some street money comes from party fundraisers, like the Philadelphia Democratic Party's biannual Jefferson-Jackson dinner. But most of it comes directly from the candidates. Everyone from the presidential nominee to congressmen and state representatives are expected to chip in. (The top of the ticket usually contributes the most.) In Philadelphia, the candidate sends a check to the chairman of the city's Democratic Party, who then divides the money up among the 69 ward leaders, who in turn divvy up their cash among the 50 or so committee people in each ward. In 2004, John Kerry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Philadelphia street money, and ward leaders received checks for as much as $8,000. Individual volunteers can generally expect anywhere from $10 to $200, depending on the location and the type of work they're doing. The practice is legal everywhere—it's protected by the First Amendment—but some states have tougher restrictions than others. In Philadelphia, committee people can hand out cash for any reason, as long as they're not paying someone for their vote. (The U.S. Code prohibits vote purchasing.) In New Jersey, campaign officials have to pay the workers in checks and their names, addresses, and amounts paid must be submitted to the Election Law Enforcement Commission. Presidential campaigns are always required to report the money to the Federal Elections Commission. Street money has its detractors, but most politicians accept it as a reality. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign gave $38,000 to an Ohio state legislator, who distributed the money to "get-out-the-vote" workers in Cleveland, plus tens of thousands of dollars to people in Houston and other Texas towns near the Mexican border. Obama did not provide street money then but might change his mind for the general election. In 2000, Jon Corzine paid volunteers $75 each to increase turnout for his Senate campaign. Walter Mondale described showing up to a Philadelphia Democratic committee meeting in 1980, only to have someone stand up and demand, "Where's the money?" Abuses do occur. In Kentucky, a practice called "vote hauling"—paying people to drive sympathetic voters to the polls—often translates into vote buying. Street money can also be used to suppress votes. In 1993, Republican operative Ed Rollins bragged to reporters that he had given half a million dollars in "walking-around money" to black ministers and Democratic activists in New Jersey, and in return they persuaded voters to stay home. (When the Justice Department launched an investigation, Rollins said he had been lying.) Less

Hey, That's My Lunar Uranium! Can India claim natural resources on the moon? By Jacob Leibenluft India launched an unmanned lunar orbiter Wednesday morning, marking the nation's first mission to the moon. The orbiter will, among other tasks, attempt to identify possible uranium deposits on the moon. Can India claim whatever uranium it finds up there? No. The Outer Space Treaty—which was signed in 1967 and has been ratified by almost every country with a space program—is very clear that "outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation." (That's why the American flag placed on the moon by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong was a symbolic gesture rather than an effort to claim the moon as U.S. territory.) So even if the mission—which is being conducted with the cooperation of NASA and other national space agencies—manages to find some uranium deposits, no country would be able to claim ownership. For that matter, it's highly questionable whether there are any property rights at all in space. As for those deeds for lunar land you can buy online, the legal consensus suggests they'll never hold up in court. If a country—or a private company—were to try opening a mine on the moon, it would be stepping onto uncertain legal ground. The Outer Space Treaty is silent on the question of extracting natural resources in space, and legal experts differ over what language mandating "free access" to all areas of space might mean for mining. Likewise, the treaty prohibits "harmful contamination," and this restriction might cause thorny legal issues if extensive mining operations were thought to raise environmental concerns. Another international agreement, the so-called Moon Treaty, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979, is a good deal clearer. It states that "the moon and its natural resources are the common heritage of mankind" and specifies that those resources should only be exploited under the oversight of a new international regime. But the Moon Treaty was never accepted by any of the traditional space powers, like the United States or Russia. India is among the 17 countries that have signed the Moon Treaty, but it never fully ratified the agreement. Some space-law experts contend that there may be a precedent for mining: Both the Americans and the Soviets took moon rocks back to Earth, and no one objected. More probably, any attempts to extract uranium or the potential energy source helium-3 would spur a new round of international talks. In that case, countries might look to agreements surrounding the high seas or Antarctica for guidance. In the case of Antarctica, rules on land use are determined by the few dozen nations that have signed onto a special Antarctic Treaty. In the 1990s, those countries agreed to ban mining on the continent until at least 2048. By contrast, the International Seabed Authority was set up in 1994 to administer claims by companies seeking to mine in deep-sea areas that lie hundreds of miles offshore; the United States, however, hasn't ratified the Law of the Sea Treaty that would make it part of that organization. Less

And Down the Stretch They Come … Why do polls always tighten right before an election? By Brian Palmer With the election just two weeks away, some polls show the gap closing between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama. That fits with the conventional wisdom that presidential elections tend to tighten up in the days before an election. Is end-game narrowing in the polls a real phenomenon? Yes. In 10 of the 15 presidential elections from 1944- 2000, the candidate who was leading in the polls on Labor Day saw his margin shrink by the time of the final poll. (This includes Thomas Dewey, who managed to lose to Harry Truman in 1948 despite never trailing in the polls.) If you average together all 15 of those contests, the Labor Day spread was cut in half by Election Day—although the early leader won the popular vote in every case except Dewey-Truman. In other words, while last-minute poll tightening is far from death and taxes, it is a real phenomenon. Researchers offer differing explanations for why this might happen. While some point to buyer's remorse or cold feet, there is no statistical evidence to support these claims. Others point to the decreasing margins, as well as a reduced variation among end-game polls, to suggest that voters are drifting back toward their initial biases and preferences. In this model, voters are more likely to think independently in August than in November. If a candidate makes a newsworthy gaffe in August, a large number of uncommitted or weakly committed voters move to his opponent, resulting in a surge in the polls. But months of appeals from the candidates to underlying voter allegiances has a real effect: When a voter's inner Democrat or Republican is awakened, they come home to their party's candidate. So the same gaffe in November would sway substantially fewer voters than it did before, and tightening poll margins reflect the number of committed partisans on either side. Another theory attributes poll tightening to simple mathematics. Let's say that 10 percent of each candidate's supporters decided to switch sides in the final weeks of the campaign. That same percentage would reflect a larger exodus from the candidate who started with more voters—leading to a tightening of the race. Similarly, if undecided voters broke evenly in the final days, they'd add proportionally more support to the losing candidate—and again the poll margin would narrow. But few observers believe this can account for all of the observed tightening. A related phenomenon is that the final poll, on average, overstates the actual margin of victory. From 1944-2000, the final polls predicted a margin 2.2 percent larger than the eventual outcome in the national vote. Given the short period between the final poll and the election, this is not likely the result of changing voter preferences. Rather, many believe that voters hesitate to declare their support for a losing candidate to a pollster, a tendency known as the "spiral of silence." Less

The Purell Defense Can hand sanitizers really affect your blood-alcohol level? By Nina Shen Rastogi Rep. Vito Fossella of New York was convicted in a Virginia court on Friday on charges of drunken driving. A second hearing will be held to determine whether Fossella's blood-alcohol content at the time of his arrest was above 0.15, which would require a five-day jail term. Defense attorneys claimed that Fossella had used Purell several times on the day he was arrested and that the ethanol in the hand sanitizer affected his blood-alcohol reading later that night. Can hand sanitizer applied to the skin really affect a breath alcohol test? Probably not. A 2006 study among Australian health care workers tested this very question. Twenty workers applied Avangard—a hand sanitizer with 70 percent ethanol (compared with Purell's 62 percent)—30 times during one hour, mimicking the usage in intensive-care units. One to two minutes after the final exposure, six of the workers did show a slight bump in breath-ethanol levels—between 0.001 percent and 0.0025 percent, about the same effect as one-tenth of a beer on an average-size male. Ten to 13 minutes after the final application, however, all the health care workers' breath-ethanol levels had returned to zero. In Fossella's case, a period of several hours separated his Purell usage and his breathalyzer test: He claimed to have used the hand sanitizer during the afternoon of April 30 and wasn't pulled over until just after midnight. It's also very unlikely that alcohol would have remained on Fossella's hands and thus affected the Intoxilyzer 5000's analysis. Except for the trace amounts that get absorbed by the skin, the ethanol in the sanitizer would have dissipated once the liquid itself evaporated. Drinking Purell is another story entirely, however. At 62 percent ethanol or roughly 120 proof, the sanitizer is about as alcoholic as some stronger kinds of rums and whiskeys. But even so, Fossella would have had to have drunk enough Purell to make himself sick in order for traces of it to remain in his blood around midnight. In recent years, defense attorneys have questioned the reliability of breath-alcohol analyzers themselves. Some have claimed, for example, that fluctuations in voltage levels can affect readings. In Tuscon, Ariz., breath tests in more than 100 cases involving the Intoxilyzer 8000 were thrown out this year because the machine's manufacturer, Kentucky-based CMI, would not release the Intoxilyzer's software source code. Last month, CMI settled with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and agreed to release the code for the Intoxilyzer 5000 model after the department filed a federal lawsuit to obtain it. Bonus Explainer: Can putting too much Purell on your skin get you drunk? Maybe. There have been cases of small children becoming intoxicated after prolonged skin exposure to alcohol—a 2-year-old girl in Germany lost consciousness after ethanol-soaked bandages were applied to damaged skin and left overnight. (Her blood-alcohol level reached a whopping 0.8.) A similar case in Italy involved a 1-month-old who developed "unexplained lethargy" after having had alcohol-soaked gauze pads applied to her umbilical stump for several days. Adult cases are extremely rare, but during the SARS epidemic, a 45-year-old Taiwanese woman died after soaking in a 40 percent ethanol bath for 12 hours in the hopes that it would rid her of the infection. Less

Why Do We Tax Corporations? Wouldn't it be easier just to tax individuals? By Christopher Beam Barack Obama and John McCain have butted heads recently over whose tax plan would benefit "Joe the Plumber" and whose would benefit large corporations. John McCain has proposed cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. Obama says he would close corporate tax loopholes but would not lower the rate. Why do we tax corporations in the first place—why not just tax the shareholders individually? Because the alternative would be even worse. There are several reasons why we have a corporate income tax in addition to the personal income tax. The first is a basic idea of taxation called the benefit principle—that people pay for the government services they consume. If you're a frequent driver, the gas tax means that you end up subsidizing roads. If you spend a lot of time in national parks, an entry fee makes sure you help pay for their upkeep. And if you're a business that benefits from legal protections and police protections and financial regulations, you're expected to pay money to support the system. Another reason to tax corporations directly is simplicity. It's a lot easier to collect taxes from a single entity than thousands of individual shareholders. Plus, if something goes wrong, it's easier to fix. Say a company reported earnings of $1 million one year, only to discover a year later that it had actually made $2 million. Currently, the IRS can go back to the company and collect taxes owed. But if all the income was distributed to individuals, the IRS would have to deal with them all separately. Another problem with eliminating the corporate tax: It would create bad incentives. Say a company wants to set aside 50 percent of its income for reinvestment and give the rest to shareholders. If the reinvestment money weren't taxed—if the government taxed only the money that went to the individuals—then the company would have an incentive to hoard it all and never pay shareholders. Also—some would say most important—taxing corporations directly can be more profitable for the government. Economists argue that under the current system, individual shareholders get taxed twice—first under the corporate income tax and again under the personal income tax. This allows state and federal governments to collect more money than they would otherwise. "Why tax just once when you can tax twice?" says Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute. To fix this "double taxation" problem, some economists propose "integration"—the fusing of the corporate and personal income taxes. One solution is to scrap the corporate income tax and instead have shareholders pay taxes based on how many shares they own. (This would basically treat shareholders like small business owners, who report income according to their stake in the partnership.) The fancy word for this is "dividend imputation," and it's used in Australia and some European countries. Another solution is to keep the corporate income tax but give shareholders a tax credit based on how much corporate tax has already been paid. That way, you're not paying tax on the same income twice. Other economists suggest abolishing corporate taxes entirely. One alternative is the flat tax, promoted most famously by Steve Forbes in 1996. This proposal would tax everyone's income at the same rate. Another option is the value-added tax, which taxes every stage of the production process of goods, which then gets passed on to the consumer. And lastly, there's the national sales tax, which would simply tax everything at the register. These ideas have their downsides—the flat tax would hurt the working poor, while some argue the national sales tax would create a black market for every good and service you can imagine. Less

What's With All the "Quinnipiac University" Polls? How an obscure school in Connecticut turned into a major opinion research center. By Juliet Lapidos A Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday found Obama ahead in four battleground states: Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. These results were published on Pollster.com, by the Associated Press, and in the Denver Post, among other news outlets. How does an obscure university in Connecticut maintain a major national polling service? Easy access to a willing labor pool. The grunt work of surveys—conducting telephone interviews—is performed primarily by Q-Pac students on work-study, or those who major in a subject that dovetails with polling, like political science, communications, or psychology. For their efforts, the students are compensated $9.50 an hour. Then a small team of experts (mostly former journalists) analyze the survey results and communicate them to the press. The university foots the whole bill, funding the center like an academic department. Quinnipiac started conducting local surveys in 1988 as an outgrowth of a marketing class. In 1994, the university hired a CBS News election-night analyst to expand the relatively casual polling services into a full-time operation. It did this, at least in part, to make a name for itself. (And the "Q-Poll," as it's called by those in the know, does attract publicity. A 2007 New York Times article on the university's basketball coach noted that Quinnipiac is "best known for its polling institute.") Q-Pac started polling New Jersey in 1996 and Pennsylvania in 2002; now it partners with the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to conduct surveys in swing states. (The two papers donate money to a scholarship fund for journalism students rather than paying for services directly.) Quinnipiac wasn't the first university to get in on the survey game. Marist College (of Marist poll fame) in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., started enlisting students to conduct polls on local elections in the late 1970s and national ones in the 1980s. At the time, much of the opinion research on elections came from the campaigns, so the media cottoned to Marist as a source of independent information. The Marist poll, unlike the Q-Poll, taps into funding sources outside the college. (Trivia: John Lahey, the current president of Quinnipiac who presided over the creation of Q-Pac's survey operations, was actually vice president at Marist beforehand.) It's not uncommon for schools to have polling operations. Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., has an Institute of Public Opinion that conducts political surveys. And at dozens of colleges, students engage in less glamorous survey work—like telephone research for the state health department or the DMV—principally as an educational opportunity. Polling isn't exclusive to little-known schools, either. There's a Princeton University Survey Research Center, which was founded with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Less

$596 Trillion! How can the derivatives market be worth more than the world's total financial assets? By Jacob Leibenluft Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin issued a call on Tuesday for regulation of the "over the counter" derivatives market, which has an estimated size of about $596 trillion. By contrast, the value of the world's financial assets—including all stock, bonds, and bank deposits—was pegged at $167 trillion last year by McKinsey. How can the derivatives market be larger than the entire world's financial wealth? Because the same assets might be involved in several different derivatives. A derivative is a financial instrument whose value depends on something else—a share of stock, an interest rate, a foreign currency, or a barrel of oil, for example. One kind of derivative might be a contract that allows you to buy oil at a given price six months from now. But since we don't yet know how the price of oil will change, the value of that contract can be very hard to estimate. (In contrast, it's relatively easy to add together the value of every share being traded on the stock market.) As a result, financial experts have to make an educated guess about the total amount at stake in all these contracts. One method simply adds up the value of the assets the derivatives are based on. In other words, if my contract allows me to buy 50 barrels of oil and the current price is $100, its "notional value" is said to be $5,000—since that's the value of the assets from which my contract derives. If you make that same calculation for every derivative and add those numbers together, you get something around $596 trillion—the "notional value" of the world's over-the-counter derivatives at the end of 2007, according to the Bank of International Settlements. ("Over the counter" derivatives refer to contracts that are negotiated between two parties rather than through an exchange.) But the "notional value" isn't usually a very good representation of what a contract might really be worth to the parties involved, or how much risk they are taking. (And it isn't easily compared with other measures of financial wealth—after all, owning the right to buy $5,000 worth of oil isn't the same as actually owning $5,000 of oil.) Within that $596 trillion are derivatives that effectively relate to the same assets—if you have a contract to buy euros in January and I have one to buy euros in April, we may end up buying the same currency, but its notional value will get counted twice. Moreover, in many instances, the "notional amount" is just a benchmark that never even changes hands—as in the case of the interest-rate swap, by far the most common type of derivative. Likewise, because derivatives are often used to hedge risks, there's a good probability that many contracts in the system essentially cancel one another out. An alternative way to measure the size of the derivatives market is to calculate the instruments' market value—which refers to how much they would be worth if the contracts had to be settled today. Gross market value of all outstanding derivatives was $14.5 trillion at the end of 2007, less than one-fortieth of the $596 trillion estimate. (That number shrinks to about $3.3 trillion once you take into account contracts that directly offset one another.) Still, the concept of "notional value" is not entirely irrelevant. For one, growth in the notional value of all derivatives—which has gone up about fourfold in the last five years—does give a reasonable indication of how fast the market is expanding. And for credit default swaps, a derivative at the center of the current financial crisis, the growth has been especially large—with the total notional amount rising from just $2.69 trillion in 2003 to $54.6 trillion this year. Less