Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-09-03 Thursday

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Democracy Now! Thursday, September 3, 2026

From New York, this is Democracy Now. As a Republican Party, you're going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in-vouts. An anonymous federal whistleblower has warned the U.S. Postal Service's new mail voting system is untested, fatally flawed, and likely to lead to a catastrophic failure if implemented ahead of November's mid-term elections. We'll speak with the whistleblowers attorney. Then Tarrant County is the third largest county in Texas. It includes Fort Worth. It votes to slash the number of voting places by a third.

At the end of the day, we are instituting barriers to making access to voting for people. It's modern-day poll taxes. And I'm not trying to be. I'm not trying to use hyperbole. This is a reality. We'll speak to Democratic Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr. Who voted against cutting almost 100 polling sites in Tarrant County, which he says will particularly affect voters of color and young people.

Then, as we continue our series on the risks of artificial intelligence, what about the benefits? So how do you trust AI to take decisions in medicine, whether it's for helping scientists, for discovering neotherapy, or for doctors who are trying to treat more and more patients effectively? We'll look at how AI is changing medicine. And finally, feminist icon Gloria Steinem has died at the age of 92. My name is Gloria Steinem. I'm here today because I wouldn't be any place else on Earth. We are taking democracy back. I mean, let's face it, it doesn't say I, the president at the beginning of the Constitution. It says we the people. All that and more coming up.

Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. Iran's claim new drone and missile attacks on U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf and retaliation for recent U.S. strikes inside Iran. Iran's military said it struck satellite communication systems, warehouses, and fighter jet hangars at Ahmed al-Jaba airbase in Kuwait. Separately, it said missiles and drones targeted U.S. troops and radar stations at al-Minhad Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. The attacks follow U.S. strikes across southern Iran Tuesday that Iran's health minister said killed 18 civilians and wounded over 100 people. The toll includes four people killed and 67 wounded when the U.S. bombed a wedding ceremony in Surique. On Wednesday, the Iranian Red Crescent asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the attack as a war crime.

At the United Nations, a spokesperson said Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez is, quote, deeply alarmed by reports of civilian casualties. The Interior General condemns all attacks against civilians. He recalls that all parties must respect their obligations under international humanitarian law, including the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution. At the White House, President Trump said Wednesday, renewed fighting with Iran will not last too long, but added the U.S. is ready to strike Iran at any time. Meanwhile, Trump claimed in a social media post that the Strait of Hormuz is under U.S. control and mused he might change the name to Trump's.

straight. The Air Force is reviewing the case of a gold star widow from Alabama who wrote she was deemed ineligible for additional benefits following her husband's death because Congress had not officially declared U.S. attacks on Iran as a war. That's according to a report and notice or news of the United States, which reports that military officials spoke Monday with Libby Clinner, the wife of Major John Alexander Clinner, one of six service members killed in. a plane crash during a refueling mission over Iraq on March 12. This comes as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik's under fire for declaring there haven't been American deaths during the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. Lutnik made the remark in a wide-ranging CNBC interview Wednesday.

The way the president is playing Iran, right? There's not. There haven't been American deaths. It's really just an economic chokeout. Nearly 5,000 U.S. sailors and Marines have arrived in Thailand for a five-day shore leave after the aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, spent a record 286 days at sea in support of the U.S. and Israeli war on Iran. The carrier had been plagued by reports of thin and poor quality rations, toilet and plumbing problems, mental health emergencies, including multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard. This comes as President Trump's nominated acting Navy Secretary Hongkau to assume the role permanently. Cow is a naval combat veteran whose led efforts to reinstate military members just charge for refusing a COVID-vaccine mandate. He's a close ally of President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegsef. During the 2024 Virginia Senate debates, he made headlines for these comments.

When you're using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that's not the people we want. What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them and ask for seconds. Cow has led the Navy in an acting capacity since April when President Trump fired Navy Navy Secretary John Phelan. His nomination comes days after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned following reports he'd repeatedly clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the Pentagon's removal of seasoned commanders and refusal to promote women and people of color.

On Wednesday, North Carolina, Republican Senator Tom Tillis praised Driscoll's tenure and called on President Trump to fire Hegseth. Tillis wrote, quote, I've never witnessed more in that management of the brave men and women who serve our country. He's intimidated by competence and retreats to just. up culture wars instead of soberly attending to the vital work of our national defense and the health and well-being of our fighting force, Senator Tillis wrote. Tillis is not seeking re-election in November.

Also joining the call for Hegg Seth to step down as Republican Nebraska Congress member, retired Air Force Brigadier General Don Bacon, among a number of other Republicans. And the occupied West Bank, two Palestinian teenagers were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers Wednesday as settlers and troops entered the village of Al-Mu Gheir. The victims were identified as 19-year-old Omar al-Nasan and 16-year-old Khalil Shahadeh. Eyewitnesses say snipers opened fire after Palestinian residents confronted settlers who were stealing their sheep. Meanwhile, Israel's raised the Palestinian village of Kyrbert Altaban in the Masafayata region. After ordering residents to evacuate their homes, Israel's military had declared the area restricted military training zone, even though settlers have been establishing outposts and farms in the area.

According to Bet Salem, the Israeli Human Rights Group, Israel has expelled 66 Palestinian communities from their homes since October 2023. This comes as retired Israeli generals are publicly accusing settlers in the West Bank of committing ethnic cleansing with government support. Asaf Agamam, a retired Air Force general, told the New York Times, quote, Once the society behaves this way, that society is doomed, unquote. Israel's defense minister Israel Katz said Wednesday he's seeking President Trump's support for plans to permanently expel Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Katz made the remarks during a conference in Jerusalem Wednesday where he declared, quote, there's no real solution for Gaza in the end without migration, unquote. In response, Maryland's Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen wrote on social media, quote,

After our trip to the Gaza-Egypt border last year, Senator Jeff Merkley and I released a report entitled, The Netanyahu government is implementing a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestine. Indians. Now the Israeli Ministry of Defense confirmed that's the goal. We must end our complicity. Senator Van Hollen wrote. In Nepal, the death toll from the deadly floods has top 1,200 people with thousands more missing. On Wednesday, Nepal's Prime Minister linked the deadly floods to climate change and urge global action. The time has come for us to forcefully make the international community. aware of the disasters we are suffering because of climate change. Climate change is a product of the whole world's contribution.

Hence, mitigating and managing its effects is the shared responsibility of the global community. Former Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, the ex-leader of Venezuela's National Assembly, Celia Flores, have asked a U.S. judge to dismiss the drug trafficking indictment against them. And papers filed in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Maduro, and Flores argue they've immunity as the leader and first lady of a foreign country. Their request came eight months after President Trump ordered their abduction during a U.S. assault on Venezuela. Meanwhile, the oil giant Chevron says it'll invest more than $7 billion

into its Venezuela joint ventures over the next five years aiming to roughly double output to about 600,000 barrels per day. Chevron's agreement was the largest involving several foreign oil and gas companies announced by U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on Wednesday. Wright was speaking from the mere of Florida's presidential palace in Caracas at a signing ceremony with Venezuela's interim president, Delsey Rodriguez. The catalyst for transforming Venezuela is energy. The catalyst for improving the life conditions of Americans, our hemisphere, and everyone in the world, is to massively expand energy production around the world.

Energy Secretary-Rights visit to Caracas comes after President Trump announced an unprecedented scheme that will grant the U.S. government an equity stake in a private oil firm in Venezuela that has concessions to operate oil fields holding an estimated 65 billion barrels of oil reserves. Open AI says its engineers are building automated shutdown capabilities for artificial intelligence systems after the company acknowledged one of its AI. tools broke out of its digital container during a safety test and hacked into the AI platform hugging face. OpenAI announced the plans for new safeguards in a letter to two House Democrats, but did not provide a log of the hack. On Wednesday, Texas Congress member Greg Kassar wrote in response to AI, quote, Your unwillingness to provide members of Congress with the information we requested is deeply

concerning and signals to us that your company is not true. treating these cybersecurity incidents with the seriousness required, unquote. This comes as the Trump administration sided with Open AI in its legal fight with the New York Times and other newspapers over the use of their journalism to train chat GPT. Graham James, a spokesperson for the New York Times, said, quote, AI companies simply need to pay fairly for the content that makes their products possible as copyright law requires. The administration's proposal to let companies take that. content without permission or compensation would undermine the sustainability of the human-created

content that a healthy society depends on in which AI needs to function, they wrote. New York City has adopted a moratorium on the use of generative AI in public schools for all students through eighth grade alongside a new scream time policy. Mayor Zaraan Mamdani announced the changes Wednesday, saying nearly 600,000 students will be affected. Children need their teachers and human connection in order to learn and in order to grow. And they need to develop skills alongside their peers, build relationships with their teachers, and wrestle with tough problems on their own.

The tech industry wants us to believe that AI in early education is not only inevitable, but that it is necessary. We do not see it that way. In Washington, D.C., workers have removed a giant statue from the grounds. of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, less than seven years after its installation. The removal of the statute known simply as blue comes after Justice Department lawyers warned in a federal court filing, the Kennedy Center could be demolished unless President Trump is allowed to proceed with renovations, including plans to inscribe Trump's name into

the building's marble edifice. And the feminist icon Gloria Steinem has died at the age of 92, According to her Instagram page, she, quote, passed away peacefully at her home in New York City, surrounded by some of the many who loved her, unquote. She was a tireless advocate for the social, economic, and political advancement of women in 1971. She co-founded Ms. Magazine, the first major publication, to be owned, run, and written by women. It focused on issues seldom covered in the mainstream press, including reproductive rights, violence against women, and workplace inequality. Gloria Steinem often said, quote, when we started, there was not even a term for sexual harassment. She also helped found the National Women's Political Caucus with a group of women, including Shirley Chisholm, Betty Ferdin, and Fannie Lou Hamer. For Esquire magazine, she went undercover in 1963 as a Playboy Bunny and wrote an expose about the poor working conditions that the servers and playboy clubs endured.

Before becoming a feminist icon, Gloria Steinem served as director. of the Independent Research Service, a nonprofit educational foundation secretly funded by the CIA. In 2013, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. I interviewed her at the historic Women's March in Washington, D.C. on January 21st, 2017, one day after Donald Trump's first inauguration. My name is Gloria Steinem. I'm here today because I wouldn't be any. place else on earth, we are taking democracy back. I mean, let's face it, it doesn't say I, the president at the beginning of the Constitution, it says we the people. And actually,

I've lived a long time, but I've never seen an outpouring of energy quite like this. You know, the Vietnam War was crucial, but it was sort of more youth-oriented because it was about the draft. And, you know, issues. Things have been about a particular issue in Washington. But this is more capacious and more about who makes decisions in general. So what does that mean right now? How are you going to take him on?

It's not only Donald Trump. There is a majority Republican House and Senate. They're vowing to take down Planned Parenthood, to defund it, to repeal the Affordable Care Act. how are you going to do this? Well, one day at a time. For instance, if they defund Planned Parenthood and defund NPR,

we can take that money out of our income tax, put a note with our return saying, sorry, I've sent it where it should go, come and get me. If enough people do that, it's very difficult to do anything about it. We did it in the Vietnam era, and then we just, it was more difficult in a way because we were just keeping the money.

This is more positive because we're actually giving the money where it should go. What does it mean to defund Planned Parenthood? You know, Planned Parenthood is, of course, necessary to women's health in this country. A very, what, 1% of it goes toward abortion, it does everything we know, breast exams and everything. else. So it would be incredibly expensive to every emergency room in the nation if they were not able to serve women and men in the way that they do. Therefore, if they defund it, we'll take money out of our income tax and send it direct. I was speaking to Gloria Steinem at the Women's March in 2017, January 21, 2017. The day after

President Trump's inauguration, the crowd at the women's march was larger than those who attended the inauguration. She spoke from the stage. This is an outpouring of energy and true democracy like I have never seen in my very long life. It is wide in age. It is deep in diversity. And remember, the Constitution does not. begin with I the president. It begins with we the people. So don't try to divide us. Do not try to divide us. If you force Muslims to register, we will all register as Muslims. I know that there are women here from corporations and media and all kinds of places that make it kind of risky

for you to say what you care about, what you feel, and what you support. And there are women here, I know, who have survived a national and global sex industry that profiteers from body invasion. We are united here for bodily integrity. If you cannot control your body from the skin in, you cannot control it from the skin out. You cannot control your lives, our lives. And that means the right to decide whether and when to give birth without government interference. Gloria Steinem speaking the day after President Trump was first inaugurated. She died on Wednesday at the age of 92.

Gloria Steinem once said women have two choices. Either she's a feminist or a masochist. Coming up, an anonymous federal whistleblower warns the U.S. Postal Service's new mailing system is untested, fatally flawed, and likely to lead to a catastrophic failure. Back in a minute. I've been a lonely girl. I've been a lonely girl. I've been a heart for hire.

I've been a heart for hire. Love's on the funeral pyre. Oh, my love's on the funeral pyre. You can't even pick me out of the correct. Hungry Ghost by Harae for the riffraffs, Alinda Sigara. This is Democracy Now, DemocracyNow. Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman.

And I'm Nermine Sheikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. With the midterm elections two months away, a federal whistleblower has warned that the U.S. Postal Service's new mail voting system is untested. fatally flawed and likely to lead to a catastrophic failure if it's implemented ahead of November's mid-term elections. Critics warned the system could disenfranchise millions of voters. In March, President Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to create federal lists of citizens and directing the Postal Service to refuse delivery of mail-in ballots to people not on those lists. Voting rights groups and state officials have sued to block the new rules. The anonymous

whistleblower shared their complaint with Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal. In the complaint, the whistleblower wrote, quote, USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1st implementation, raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug. While the whistleblower hasn't spoken publicly. Senator Blumenthal appeared on MS Now on Tuesday night to talk about the whistleblower's warning. What he reveals is not only that the White House is breaking the law overtly, but for the first time, using the postal service as an online gatekeeper with a system that screens those ballots

and then, in effect, disqualifies individual ballots based on some discrepancy. the name, the barcode, any tiny discrepancy, and the whole batch is thrown back to state officials. Now, the interesting thing and the outrageous part of it is that this online system is constructed in a way that it's designed to fail. Failure is not a bug. It's a feature. So it's sabotaging the system, which is malignly designed in the first place. That was Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut on MS Now. We're joined by David Cligerman, senior vice president and special counsel at whistleblower aid.

He's representing the USPS whistleblower. David, thanks so much for being with us. The first male ballots begin to go out this Friday. That's tomorrow in North Carolina. The whistleblower that you represent revealed the Postal Service's 0% failure rate rule. I'm wondering if you can explain how it's possible that a single smudged barcode on one ballot could lead to the entire batch of tens of thousands of ballots from being counted. Explain what's going on here and the message of your whistleblower. Sure. So the message of our whistleblower is that they want the things that are being built to be built properly.

And they want the systems that are being designed to be designed in a way that's logical and fair and designed to work. The concern, and with respect to this 0% failure, is that when you, the system has a number of hoops that need to be jumped through, right? ordinarily in the past is fairly simple, very simple. The state wants to mail out blank ballots to voters. It creates them. It uploads a list into some, it manifests like any great large shipping. It brings the printed manifest down to the post office. It hands it off and they get sent, right?

And if the address of the person is to be delivered to is readable, it goes. There's a barcode. If you can scan the barcode, great. If you can't, you can enter it in manually. Normal mail processes. Well, this rule to implement President Trump's March executive order now creates a number of hurdles, right? And there's one, and the hurdles in terms of the rule and the IT hurdles merge here to really create this potential for grave catastrophic failure. The rule itself, even if the IT worked, sets up a number of problematic hoops.

First, you have to, as a states, have to go and enter into this new database called the federal ballot mail portal, right? So they enter a list of all the voters who are supposed to. to get absentee ballots and they do that enough time before they the votes go out. And then they have to, if they're going to ship ballots, because it doesn't just happen with the magic wand, right? These are millions and millions of physical blank ballots to go out, right? And they don't go out in one huge super train, right? There are truckloads that go out to the post office sometimes rural post office, sometimes large ones. And they go to these, the bulk mail facilities at these places for the most part. You have to bring them there now under the system. You need to go in and then you need to create a manifest,

a list, right? You go into a separate IT system that's supposed to connect to this original IT system, and you enter the list of the ballots that are in this batch, right? And then you take those, and if it checks out, if the system is telling you, and we'll get to the, why it's going to be hard for it to tell you, but if it works properly and it lines up and every ballot you have, the barcode matches the barcode in the initial system, then you get a green light and you can bring that truck, that bus, whatever, of ballots, down to the postal service area.

And then you're not done, because there's a spot check. And so you take a scanner, the zebra scanner or something else that the postal workers or whoever at the facility has, and you begin to test these ballots. Now ordinarily, historically, when things have been scanned, it's been to check postal rates, right? You do bulk mail and let's say there's a thousand or 10,000 ballots. You do a sampling. And if, you know, a few of them are too big or off or way more, they might adjust your postage,

but they're not withholding those things from being delivered. Now you've got a process that you scan a certain sampling, the information that the whistleblower came forward with is that, for example, for a batch of a thousand to 10,000, you may sample 300 ballots. So the problem also could be that for a thousand you're sampling 300, which is 33%. But be that as it may, you're scanning or checking one error, one smudge, one inability to read the barcode, even if the software works. We're going to get to that part in the moment. You're going to reject the whole batch. And so in Marasca County, for example, there are examples of batches a million ballots and they could go back and they have to start again, right? So one could

imagine that this process rates in a loop, an endless loop where the ballots don't go out or large tranches them go out. Now you put on top of this a software system that's been designed, the whistleblower can play the ledges, and we've seen experts who have appointed it, this kind of software development could take eight months or years, sometimes two years to do. They've done it in a matter of weeks. They allotted eight weeks, essentially, to do this, and then they actually paused work for a few weeks. So they've been at it for maybe five weeks, and there's now a software system that every phase has failed normal, basic procedures for development, right? So you've got, you've got, you develop software in silos and pieces.

One team develops this part, this part, this part, this part. I mentioned a number of systems that have to work together. Each of those has been rushed. They haven't been tested properly individually. When they put them together, they haven't been tested properly. And by the way, when they do test it, it crashes. And now it's, it's a postal service is announced it. Now it's consistent with what our whistleblower said was going to happen, that on September 1st, it's available to be tested and used by the states.

Now, technically under the injunction, they're allowing states to use it voluntarily and make use of voluntarily. But the reality is, here's a system that's not going to work. And even if it did work from an IT perspective, it doesn't work from a functional perspective. So that seems to the whistleblower, and certainly at us, an anatomy of a failure. So on Tuesday, pro-public guard reported, quote, top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting, expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway. This report was based on a source separate from your client. Could you elaborate on this, David? Sure. I mean, that goes to exactly what I mentioned, which is that and it's really good that others are coming forward, right? That what we've seen in that pro-publica piece is that it mentioned that election officials are raising these very same concerns that are individual, an insider posed in a position to see the broad swath of what's happening here has raised, right? Which is that you've really got the zero percent failure.

and it's unacceptable to a process that has human error. And by the way, it's been pointed out in disclosure, there are a number of Inspector General reports from the Postal Service over the years that talk about the error rates, worker error. And now there's a report that came out a tweet or a message from the head of the Postal Service Union or 200,000 strong unions,

and said, our people haven't been trained in this. They don't know what to do. So this is a really scary thing that's going on right now. So the whistleblower you've been working with is open to testifying in these open court cases. Can you talk about the significance of that? Yeah. You know, the individual right now has come forward,

and I think in this administration, when one comes forward, it's at grave risk, and we've seen the weaponization of inspectors general. We've seen the weaponization of processes. But this person has come forward, and I think that nothing is ruled out, right? I mean, there's nothing more central to our government democracy and there's nothing more central to democracy than free and fair elections. So I think

this individual has come forward. And while, you know, nobody wants to necessarily put themselves out there, I think if it came to the point where the testimony was the, the inflection point, was the thing that made the case turn. I can't imagine the person would necessarily say no. So I think everything's potentially on the table, but the hope is that the processes will handle it just with the information that's been provided. In fact, I've noted that already a number of states attorneys general have amended their filings in the various court cases to include our client's disclosure as part of the evidence to hopefully permanently enjoin this policy. So finally, any key point you want to make, especially around the fact that currently there

is an injunction by a judge that's halted the implementation. Trump, of course, is appealing this. But what you think the Trump administration is trying to do in these last weeks, I mean, we're talking about 60 days before the midterm elections. Yeah, I think what they're trying to do, I would imagine if I were in a situation of someone who has an allergy to voting rights who has shown that they're willing, able, and desirous of blocking folks making use of the franchise is it's win-win no matter what I do, right? This is why we, as Senator Blumenthal and our whistleblower have said, you question whether it's a bug or a feature, right? You so doubt about the voting processes. So that's a win. If people go into the portal and it doesn't work, that's a win. If you're able to have the processes sort of work, but not enough, but people think it's going to be okay, that's a win.

But regardless, what you've got here is you've got a system that the administration is win-win, because they either scare folks or it blocks folks. And I think one last point we'd like to make is no one is saying, and certainly the whistleblower is not saying, that we want folks not to exercise their rights to vote. I think they need to listen to their state's secretary generals. I think there's going to be information provided by their states into what to do. I think the hope is, and the goal is that this will be fixed, hopefully, by the courts permanently enjoining this or otherwise by Secretary of State stepping up and saying what to do. But we don't want anybody not to exercise their rights and not to use mail-in-ball voting if it's done properly. just want to inform the processes, and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, it'll be stopped either by

judges or by cooler heads that prevail. David Kligerman, want to thank you for being with us, Senior Vice President, Special Counsel Whistleblower Aid. David's an attorney currently representing the USPS whistleblower. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nirmine Sheikh. In a party-line vote, all three Republican commissioners in Tarrant County, Texas, have voted to slash the number of postings.

for November's midterm elections by nearly a third, leaving 1.3 million voters with just 224 polling sites. Civil rights groups, including the ACLU and NAACP, warned the changes will disproportionately affect voters of color in Texas' third largest county, with majority-minority areas of Arlington and Fort Worth targeted. During a marathon 10-hour hearing on Tuesday, commissioners heard from dozens of citizens who opposed the reduction. Here are some of their voices. My name is Gabe Gonzalez. The population of the city has increased and voting has increased.

He saw that in May. You do not need to make poll workers' lives harder by cutting the locations and bottlenecking our democracy. Catherine Woods, how is our budget unable to accommodate our voting needs in Tarrant County? Did you not have enough money in the budget after the hand recount that you ordered in the 2024 election, the one that confirmed the original result, or was that money spent performatively? Did you not have enough money in the budget for the redistricting? This proposal is hypocritical.

It is irresponsible. It is anti-democratic. It is anti-American. I'm Linda Northern. The right to vote is the bedrock of our democracy. Reducing the number of polling places does not uphold this right. This will make it harder for brown, black, and low-income voters who have the same right to vote as you do. This is wrong.

The two Democratic commissioners on the five-person board also spoke out forcefully against slashing the number of polling sites. This is Democratic Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr. What I hold in my hand and I want y'all to get this. It's my wife's great-grandmothers' poll tax receipt. Get a good look at it. Her name was Miss Maggie McCann. She was a married woman and a housewife who raised, 10 children.

And she understood how important her vote was and the voice and the power that came along with and she was willing to suffer the indignity of having to pay a poll tax

for a right that belonged to her. What we are doing with reducing polling locations and we can use semantics and we can make you can make us look like we don't know what we want and we wish and watch you all you want to. But at the end of the day, we are instituting barriers to making access to voting for people. It's modern day poll taxes.

And I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to use hyperbole. This is a reality. The vote comes ahead of a critical and closely watched Senate race in Texas. with the Democratic State Representative, James Telerico, leading in the polls for Senate against Republican State Attorney General Ken Paxton. Ahead of the Tarrant County vote, Tala Rico spoke out against cutting polling sites. Well, we are here outside what used to be a polling location here in Tarrant County. The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don't want to,

us to be able to vote easily. And that's why extremist officials in Tarrant County government are trying to close 92 polling location. That's nearly a third of the polling locations in Tarrant County. And that means on election day, there will be longer commutes, longer lines, and lower voter turnout, especially in our black and brown communities. That's because the people in power don't want us to know or use our power. And nothing terrifies them more. than people who show up to vote and people who show up to hold elected officials accountable. So that's James Talariko, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Texas up against Ken Paxton. And it looks like it's a toss-up or perhaps he's ahead in the polls way raising more money than Paxton.

Support as the cuts argue, too few voters were using the sites to justify their expense. For more, we go to Fort Worth, Texas, where we're joined by Democrat Roderick, Miles. Jr. He represents precinct one of the Tarrant County Commissioner's Court. His recent piece for the Fort Worth Star Telegram is headlined, we need answers on why a growing tarant would cut voting locations. Commissioner Roderick Miles Jr., welcome to democracy. Now, the reason I talked about Tala Rico there when we played his clip is we're wondering if this is the motivation, the fact that in this red state, he is surprising so many, insurging. in the polls and the Republicans are trying to cut Democrat participation any which way.

Can you give your assessment of what's happening? And this incredible 10-hour meeting that led to a party-line vote, three Republicans, two Democrats, you were one of the Dems, who voted to cut the voting polls by, what, 92? They're cutting out from the little more than 300 across Tarrant County. That's correct. Good morning, Amy, and thank you for the opportunity to be with you today. From my perspective, this is about access and ensuring that every resident, regardless of age, disability, working families, providing access to polling locations. It's about making sure that everybody has a right to use their God-given right and their right to vote.

and they need to be able to have easy access to polling locations. This is not about fiscal responsibility. This is about making sure that every resident in Tarrant County has a right to vote. Voting belongs to the people. Elections belong to the people. They don't belong to government officials. We are just stewards of the election process, but the process belongs to the people, and the people have the right to choose who represents them.

And we don't need to make it difficult or more difficult for them to vote, we need to make it easier. And could you explain who you believe will be most impacted? What communities? I believe, for example, with these reductions, my precinct, Precinct 1 takes the brunt of those reductions. We have the most polling locations that are closed. And those communities are primarily represented by minorities, by African Americans and Latino. By reducing that, we are making it more difficult and more challenging for those communities of color to be able to go to the polls and to vote.

Voting locations are not just buildings. There's a story behind every voting location. There's history behind those voting locations. There's familiarity and there's relationships that have been formed at these voting locations. And it's our responsibility as an elected official to make sure. that they have access to places that are familiar to them, that they have historically gone to to vote. We should not be punishing communities of color by cutting away voting locations that are familiar and common to them. We should be making access easier for them and not more difficult or challenging.

When you think about working families, when you think about seniors, people with disabilities and things of that nature, when you close down and restrict polling locations, you make it harder and more of a burden on the those communities to be able to vote. One of the polling locations is being closed as on the campus, which is more progressive than the state, the University of Texas Arlington. I want to play this next clip, Tarrant County Democratic Commissioner Alyssa Simmons and Republican County Judge Tim O'Hare. They had this exchange.

Y'all redistricted saying the population is growing, correct? You need, you need a decade. You were a district. district it because we're growing, population's growing, or was it power? Which one was it? I think it was very clear from all three we did it to have a majority Republican commissioners court. Well, he was very clear about this. Republican County Judge Tim O'Hare, one of the three commissioners, Republican commissioners, and you and Alyssa Simmons were the Democrats you voted against, Republicans voted for. We just have 30 seconds. What can you do?

at this point with almost a third of the polling places closed on election day. How are you organizing? Amy, I'll say this. Tarrant County, the eyes of the nation are on Taryn County. We have an opportunity to shift power and to change the course of this country. Democracy and the country as a whole is at an inflection point. We are not deterred. We will. We will vote, we won't miss this moment. We are mobilizing now to make sure that everybody has access to the polling locations that we currently have to work with. And we'll stand in lines, we'll wait, we'll do whatever we have to, to make sure that the people's voice is heard, and they are electing the people that they want to represent them. I want to share with you the poll tax receipt of

my wife's great-grandmother, we are going to fight against what is modern-day poll tax in this country. And just to be clear, Roger Miles, a poll tax for young people who are watching this show, who don't even know what you're talking about, a poll tax is? A poll tax was something that the government put on black people to make it difficult for them to vote. They had to pay to vote. My wife's great-grandmother had to suffer the indignity and to pay to vote. And I'm not saying that this policy is a poll tax, but history teaches us that when government makes changes and does harm to people, we need to be vigilant and we need to speak out

against it. And that's what my colleague and I are doing now. Roger Miles Jr., representing Precinct 1 and the Tarrant County Commissioner's Court, his recent piece for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram we will link to. We need answers on why a growing Tarrant would cut voting locations. Coming up, we look at how artificial intelligence is transforming health care. Back in 20 seconds. Women of the World by Amadu and Mariam in our Democracy Now studio. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org.

I'm Mimi Goodman with Nermyn Che. We end today's show with continuing our look at how artificial intelligence is changing the world. In recent weeks, we've looked at many of the risks of the latest AI technology from autonomous weapons to rogue AI models to the rapid expansion of data centers. Well, today we'll shift our focus to the medical profession and how AI is being used in clinical settings from radiology to surgery. We're joined right now by Shreya Jouhry. She's a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Just completed her PhD at Harvard Medical School last year where she studied how artificial intelligence can be used to improve medical diagnoses and accelerate biological discovery. Thanks so much for being with us. If you can start off by helping our audiences understand the different fields of medicine from surgery to radiology and how AI has helped and what you see the risks are. Absolutely. So medicine is really broad. There are surgery where doctors have to perform procedures to perform procedures on patients. There is radiology, which is a kind of diagnostic imaging modality, similar. to endoscopy also. And there are also professions in medicine where doctors are conversing

with patients to identify the symptoms of the patient, diagnosing the patients based on problems that they're having. So many different kinds of medicine, sub-medicine professions. And AI has been impacting different of these in different capacities. So for example, radiology has been one of the historically most popular subfields within medicine, which AI has impacted a lot. About 76% of the FDA approved AI models are actually for radiology, followed by cardiology and then others.

So radiology has been at the forefront of using AI for helping in different aspects of diagnosing patients. On the other hand, surgery, as you mentioned, is a little more newer in that space, because it is obviously more complicated. there is a lot of things that the doctors have to make sure when they're doing procedures on patients. Judgment. And expertise that comes over time, things that are not just visual, but also you have to have that sense of pressure and touch of how your instrument is moving.

For example, if you're conducting a brain surgery, you have to be very, very careful. A little bit of shaking of your hand could actually injure the patient a lot. And so those kind of more more critical, more high risk kind of procedures are still newer in the way AI is impacting them. And if you could talk about the difference, like what kinds of AI agents are being used from large language models to computer vision? And what other AI, you said the majority, of course, is radiology that has been approved by the FDA. What are the others? Absolutely. So there are two. kinds, broader fields of AI. Computer vision is a field in which AI models are trained by many,

many medical images. So these medical images are typically labeled by doctors that, for example, it's a chest x-ray. So a doctor will label that this chest x-ray has nemothorax or another condition. And these images are shown multiple times to these models. And the models, after seeing multiple examples, learn from these images. The other kind of, so the computer vision models are much more older in their use, and that's why most of the FDA approved models are also in this space. A large language models are actually pretty newer. So they came out in 2022. They were popularized by Chad GPD, which now almost everyone uses. And these are much more nascent in their adoption in clinic. So these models are trained by, you know, like downloading all of the

data from the internet, all of the books, articles, any blog posts that get written, and these models are trained to predict, to complete sentences. So these models would be shown partial sentence, and you would ask the models to complete this sentence. Eventually, when you show them multiple of these and you already know what a good sentence looks like, the models start to learn how language looks like and how to generate new sentences that make sense. Large language models have been less adopted so far in AI, just because it's very nascent technology, not to say that they're not evolving rapidly, They are growing a lot in capability.

But FDA right now does not have a proper protocol for how to even approve the use of these models for very important decisions like a diagnosis or a treatment decision, because these models are still not as well understood. So these models have been used in different medical practices and different hospitals for simpler tasks. So for example, summarization of a patient's history. So if a patient has been coming to the hospital for 10 years, you have many, many clinical notes, summarization of that.

They've also been used for communicating with the patient more effectively. So doctors are spending less time on maybe writing notes that capture the patient's condition, but they're also able to talk more to patients and deliver better care and express more empathy for their condition, which actually has been shown to have better outcomes for patients. So that's the broader two separate use cases of these. And if you could talk about the way in which, like, how does AI help, for instance, in a colonoscopy?

How does it help with a mammogram? And how widely is AI being used, at least here in the U.S., for those two tests? Of course. I can talk about a colonoscopy first. So in colonoscopy, typically, there's a monitor which has a live video feed of the patient's colon. And the endoscopist looks at that in real time to, identify masses of cells that have out overgrown. So these are called polyps and they are typically either cancerous or precancerous

and it's very important to treat them. The way AI has been deployed right now and it's also FDA approved is anytime the in the real time videos stream, the model detects abnormality. The model makes a box around it. So the doctor can continuously see that box whenever the. there is some abnormality. So just in case, if it's a very subtle abnormality, no one misses it. So that has been used in colonoscopy, especially for colon polyps, so colon cancer detection, and colon cancer screening is done for everyone who are 45 years of age. In mammograms,

chest x-ray, CD scans, which is the scope of radiology, typically AI models have been used as either a second reader. So a radiologist would read the same image or the chest x-ray and the AI would read the same. And the people have tried to see how AI can help in either triaging of cases. For example, if it's a high-risk case, a doctor reads it, if it's a low-risk case, and AI plus a doctor reads it. And so there are multiple studies that have explored how it can be used. Can you talk about the Swedish study that just came out on breast cancer? Yes, yes, of course. So in the Swedish study, they had a lot of patients who they divided into two groups. One group was, in one group, the mammograms were read by AI first and

then by a radiologist. In the other group, the mammograms were read by two radiologists. And they try to compare if AI plus radiologists separately led to a higher detection of cancer and what happened to the false positive rates across these two groups. And they found a very nice finding that the radiologist followed by a human review actually led to more cases that were being detected. This is the radiologist and AI. Yes. And then the false positive rates were actually similar. It's a very promising study.

It actually shows that you can have AI as a second reader and still have really good results. One of the things, although to note, is that the final decision was still made by the radiologist. The AI was not autonomously acting here. and the radiologist read it after the AI. So radiologist was like the final decision maker. So I think those are nuances to keep in mind as we think about how AI will be deployed in medicine and how we are making sure that humans are taking decisions, in decisions for a diagnosis or a treatment plan for a patient.

Yeah, and just to clarify about that study, there were over 100,000 women. So it was a large-scale study. And also last week, another major development, the first brain surgery using live artificial intelligence assistance was performed successfully last week in London. So if you could talk about the significance of that, how important is that? Yeah, I think it's a really big milestone, I think, especially in the field of surgery, which is a very complicated field. In that clinical trial that was being done, the researchers had developed an AI model. that could basically detect a small part of the intersection between a pituitary clan and the bone. And they were trying to make sure that whenever the surgeon reaches that part,

they are able to see clearly that this is where the pituitary gland is, this is where the bone is, so they don't accidentally nick any of them. It's very interesting because if you look at the way they had deployed it, if you read into the details, it is non-trivial to have a really big AI model work in real time in the way that it was assisting in surgery. So I think it was a very good example of how you can use AI that gets developed in a research lab, deploy it on hardware that is in the hospital in a responsible way and have doctors use it to perform surgeries. One interesting thing about the study was that the AI could be switched on and off at any point in time by the doctors,

which is a way in which you established trust. So, for example, a doctor, there were a couple of patients in that study. In two of the cases, the doctor did not decide to use an AI because they felt that they wanted to do it without the AI. And they were able to switch off the AI using a pedal at the bottom. So it allows doctors to be still in control, but use the AI to the maximum benefit. So this is a critical point, is the doctor's intervention. And I'm wondering if you can talk about, I mean, in breast cancer, it was stunning.

something like the AI-supported screening detected 29% more cancers. That was a Swedish study. Yes, in a Swedish study. And yet, what about the risks of people just relying on AI to diagnose themselves and your concerns about this being used as a way to actually not help doctors, but to replace doctors? Yeah, I think in real life, medical cases are quite complex. So a lot of the times we see accuracy being reported, but those are accuracy on cases which are simpler sometimes. It's very important to note that doctors, when they make medical decisions, are looking at sometimes a lot of complexity of cases. For example, for mammograms, if someone has dense breast tissue, it is much more harder to detect that breast cancer. If it's a non- Not as dense. We have 20 seconds.

If it's not that much of a dense tissue, then it becomes easier. So I think it's really important to note that doctors have to be responsible, have to take the responsibility of this until we are more confident. We have like frameworks developed that can, you know, like deploy these AI models and are more responsible. Well, this is clearly the beginning of an extended discussion. Shreya Drury, we want to thank you so much for being with us. postdoctoral fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who studied how artificial intelligence can be used to improve medical

diagnoses and accelerate biological discovery. That does it for our show. I'll be in Madison, Wisconsin on Saturday night. It's Baramore Theater. Two events on Sunday in Chicago. Check out DemocracyNow.org. I'm Amy Meadman with Nermyn Scha.