Science and Technology Guests on Late Night, Week of February 3

This past week has been dominated in late night (and daytime) talk with a lot of political content.  Of note for these pages is the failure of the Iowa Democratic Party to effectively tabulate results from the state’s nominating caucuses.  Blame has been focused on an app, though the problem is more with the system that accepted an app without thorough examination and testing.

Regardless, this was a topic of interest in many late night monologues, and was even satirized in the opening of the February 4 edition of The Late Show.

The joke is not particularly novel, and certainly isn’t new, as many state and local election boards have struggled with new voting machines since at least the 2000 U.S. presidential election.  But everybody has direct experience with apps, and most probably don’t recognize the issues involved with electronic voting machines.  But enough of killing the joke trying to highlight the broader problems with technology in elections.

That was it for last week.  No guests of note, but there’s always the next shows.