Lengthy meeting heard grumbles about ‘blue wall’ policies and ‘Ming vase’ tactics but no real rancour

As political showdowns go, this week’s gathering of Liberal Democrat MPs, billed by some as a crunch moment for Ed Davey, was a touch underwhelming. “I had expected a damp squib,” one attender put it. “It was damper than I thought.”

Far from generating a mass of opposition to Davey’s leadership, let alone a formal challenge to his position, the lengthy gathering in a Commons committee room on Tuesday evening brought a few minor grumbles, but little else.

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© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

© Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

Some highlights from special collections libraries' blogs this week.
Who Counts? A History of Voting in America
Flying Squirrels and Delicious Garlic: Animals and Plants in an Illuminated Early-Modern Miscellany of Ancient Japanese Poetry
Worth a Thousand Words: The Literary Map Painting Collection
Devotion in Print – Catholic Women and Their Books, 1500-1800

It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.

Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.

Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.

After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the “CVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable.