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Can Static Electricity Generate Votes?
artgeeq writes "A recent local election in Washington, DC resulted in 1500 extra votes for a candidate. The board of elections is now claiming that static electricity caused the malfunction. Is this even remotely possible? If so, couldn't an election be invalidated pretty easily?"
If I am elected, all charges will be positive.
... but I'm shocked.
but it once got you a free pong game.
Is static electricity smarter than the average, uninformed voter?
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Nah, it's just all those Body Thetans trying to vote Xenu into office.
Nice try, fellas. Better luck next time...
In addition, it's smarter than many of the voters.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
I can't understand how do you people accept voting with back boxes (that is, w/o access to source code).
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
The Carpeted Man wins the general election by a whopping 6.88x10^89 votes! It was surely a shrewd maneuver to choose a Van de Graaff generator as his running mate!
This is one for the record books, folks.
Paper ballots?
What?
I can see a lot of potential for this to cause problems with our current political situation. Maybe this will finally get people charged up about bringing back paper and pencil voting.
Generating static electricity isn't very difficult. I can't imagine it would be very hard to repeat this problem and prove that static was causing it. But the whole idea of the scientific method has really fallen out of favor in this country, why not just make up an explanation that feels true instead of investigating. I'm sure no one was trying to sway the elections...
Electronic voting is such a horrible, horrible idea.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Also, voters wearing paraphernalia, caps, t-shirts and stickers, for candidates to the voting precinct, the board of elections said if poll workers see it, they will throw people out.
I guess these places are not free speech zones.
What?
I don't buy it. Static can definitely frag electronic devices that aren't properly protected; but having static damage and/or random bit flipping cause 1500 extra votes to appear in an otherwise valid filesystem is the computer equivalent of a human getting cancer and, instead of a lethal tumor, growing an extra, fully functional eye.
At best, the system is seriously, seriously flawed. If there is even basic checksumming in place(never mind signing) it would be functionally impossible for static damage to imitate valid data. At bad, there is some other error entirely, and it has been decided that an idiot emitting bullshit is cheaper and easier than actually investigating the problem. At worst, which is upsettingly plausible, the system is suffering from outright fraud, and those involved don't even feel the need to lie convincingly.
for John McCain to win DC's electoral votes, considering that at least 70% of DC is going to vote for all Democrats this November...
The answer is yes, it is possible.
However, in my rather limited experience with inadvertently shocking boards, the most common result is that the board resets itself.
11 points, though:
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Can static create 1500 times the right wave patterns in order to simulate the electrical signals of a vote?... come on!
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
I'd like to know who it wrote in 1500 times. Noted candidates __________+#%#_ and @%*(DFB(_#@_!_ are probably the favorites for this electron season.
I'm tired of all this damn negativity in politics nowadays.
The title to the linked article is: 'Static' Blamed for D.C.'s Extra Votes Snafu
<Inigo_Montoya_mode>
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
</Inigo_Montoya_mode>
There are many other way that the votes would of got on there like.
The cartridge and or voting system not being reset.
People finding away to vote 2+ times in a race.
Some rigging the vote.
A hacker doing it to see if it can be done.
Some kind of buffer / overflow / bad software that adds some number to the votes.
A error code / build in testing code that some how got triggered.
A build cheat code in the voting software.
to polarize the electorate.
C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now...
What?
Republican or democrat ?
Isn't it about time we stop voting and start governing?
In this charged election cycle it is imperative that our current resistance to voting be overcome by taking the time to cool things off.
Mr. OhmBama is conducting himself fluidly and we must expand our internal capacitors to make sure that our output never fluctuates.
You already know that when the heat is on the resistance will increase! Be ready! We have a lot of ground to cover and we must always be careful not to take short cuts to that ground to avoid catastrophe.
load "$",8,1
...can generate 1500 votes in a single day during a local election. I think blizzard would have a hell of a time dealing with the billions of gold being mysteriously generated in WoW every /second/
slot machines are protected from Static shocks and other hacks and this seems like a hack job and not a static shock.
Why can't they make voting systems that are just as hard to hack?
I think that the NGC should look at the voting system to see how bad they are.
Hmm... We have all the major news networks controlled by a totalitarian government, roughly 90% of the population making serious decisions based on the opinions of celebrities, and now static electricity generating votes... George Bush must really love television.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
This looks like a job for Static Man...
manipulating votes for the common man.
Yeah, static, that's it. And the dog ate my homework.
You can read the board's report on their site [pdf].
Highlights include the following:
Sequoia was the manufacturer of the machines.
They don't know why the error happened. It could have been static, or many other things. The board "accepts Sequoia's determination,reflected in its response to the board's queries, that multiple possibilities regarding the cause of the tabulation error exist, including: the speed which the Memory Packs were processed leading to some type of transient malfunction in the MPR unit; the Memory Pack not making full contact inside the MPR socket; or some type of electrical or static discharge taking place while inserting,reading or ejecting the cartridges at a rapid speed."
"Random numbers" were added to vote totals. They say nothing about write-in votes, except that their procedure calls for auditing vote tallies by looking for "large write-in vote numbers, more recorded votes than registered voters".
The errors were confined to precinct 141 in ward 2.
They recorded 4759 votes, while their audit found that only 326 were cast.
Well, what do you expect in DC?
This is the way Bi-Coloured Python-Rock-Snakes always talk.
"What we have here..." *THUMP* "...is a failure to communicate."
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I'd just like to take a moment to highlight the amazing writing skills of the reporter:
Also, voters wearing paraphernalia, caps, t-shirts and stickers, for candidates to the voting precinct, the board of elections said if poll workers see it, they will throw people out.
Not sure who wrote this; no byline.
I know it's customary to write another sentence in similar style to the prose one wishes to mock, but I don't think I can do justice to this. Rock on, anonymous reporter dude/dudette.
I always thought journalism was a refuge for people who only could pass English classes. I guess in the Web 2.0 world the whole "passing English classes" thing was dropped.
Static electricity generally has very high voteage, but not much power, due to a small current.
Although designing for static safety is non-trivial, it is a very well understood field and should be part of any electronic design.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Because it is a black box, from all I know: Yes
There needs to be a paper trail that the voter can verify his/her vote was correct.
If you allow them to say static cast votes, they'll be reusing that excuse over and over whenever they're caught rigging an election.
God spoke to me.
When I was in college at the small start up I worked for I did enter strange characters from the keyboard just by static electricity. I remember as I was about to hit the key I saw a bunch non-related characters on the terminal screen, when I did hit the key it gave more non-related characters. We thought the terminal was "possessed" so we changed the terminal but the same thing happened again later. It took us a few weeks and discovered that the manufacture of the terminal didn't properly ground the keyboard to the terminal and when we did ground the connector properly the problem went away.
Okay, no joke - I have this big "Yahoo" button that they sent me for doing search marketing with them. It's basically the same as one of those easy buttons you see from Staples.
I have it sitting on a ledge over my stairs. Every time you touch the wall and discharge static electricity, it goes off. Curious, I did some further testing. I found that if I put the button anywhere near an electrical field (such as that created by one of those lightening ball gizmos) it will go off. I cannot explain it other than they are using a very sensitive switch.
It goes to show that static electricity CAN throw a switch though.
Perhaps they are using the same electronics here?
or else!
I always post this on voting machine articles but here goes. . . Take a look at 1.020 in the attached nevada gaming regulations: http://gaming.nv.gov/documents/pdf/techstds_05nov17_adopted.pdf Slot machines are required to withstand 20,000V static shocks at 1 second intervals with no problems whatsoever. They are also required to withstand 27,000 volt static zaps which can cause them to freeze momentarily but must cause no loss of any stored data.
In contrast, when I worked on DDR SDRAM clock buffer chips for PC's, I believe the ESD test was something like 1500 volts.
In short, if voting machines cannot meet the Nevada gaming commission regulations then politicians are at best gambling with our votes.
Maybe this will finally get people charged up about bringing back paper and pencil voting.
Power to the people!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...only if all the votes went to the GOP candidate. Otherwise, it was voter fraud!
Alpha/Neutron radiation could also be the culprit. Radiation (neutrons generated from cosmic rays) may have affected voting machines in Belgium; look up the Schaerbeek elections in Brussels in 2003, where 4096 extra votes appeared. As gillbates mentioned, the more likely outcome would have been some multiple of 2, though.
Amen. Furthermore remember that gambling even without a stake is illegal in many states of the USA. Think about it...
That makes an alarming amount of sense.
With all the bullshit politicians like to spew, voting is already a gamble.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
As the third party candidate, I'd just like to say that I'm completely grounded and I won't charge you AT ALL. Those other candidates say that a vote for me is throwing your vote away, but I say they cause Washington to be so polarized that nothing will get done.
Sure they talk about delivering a path of least resistance, but I think there is a path which will save us from charge and discharge alike.
(Also those other two guys support Islamist free radicals, and decreasing the capacitance of the middle class)
I'm the Thane of Lochaber and I support this message
Or, these lying cheating bastards got caught. Cheating, no matter who it's for is wrong.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Remember those anti-static bracelets? And how you've never worn one while working on open computers for 15 years and have never ever had any problem from static electricity? Yeah, those, let's make all voters wear them when voting with diebold machines... That'll fix this!
In my mis-spent youth, I was able to get free credits from certain arcade machines by holding the exposed part of a lighter (the piezo-ignition type) against the coin slot, and pressing button to set off the electric charge. Every 10 or so 'clicks' would result in a free credit. If these voting machines are susceptible to static electricity, using a clicker on it would likely cause some sort of mischief as well. Oh well, back to the old lead pencil and paper voting, I say :)
Casinos care more about their money then government cares about protecting the right to vote.
I know that it's popular to mix "black box voting" with Diebold and Republican corruption but I can't for the life of me figure out whether a Democrat or Republican got the 1500 "phantom votes". My suspicion is that it was a Democrat, otherwise the issue would have been made clear...
Got to love this part:
Evans said that's not good enough. "There's no excuse for slow results."
Honestly - what's the rush? I don't see any practical reason why the results need to be in any sooner than, say, within a week from the election.
It sounds to me as if Councilor Evans would rather have an inaccurate result than a slow one. Well, I have good news for him - I can whip him up a random number generator, no trouble, and at a bargain price, too. Just think of it - all the inaccurate results he could ever want, there at his fingertips, with no waiting whatsoever!
A simple answer would be that there is a flaw with the program and they are trying to cover it up. This is neither truth nor fiction but a concept so don't blow it out of proportion or flame about it.
Yea, disclaimers rock.
"Also, voters wearing paraphernalia, caps, t-shirts and stickers, for candidates to the voting precinct, the board of elections said if poll workers see it, they will throw people out."
This is kinda both lame and dumb.
Shoot Yourself In the Foot
Just shocking!
American politics is full of bullshiters, this thing shows. Media plays along.
but 1500 is not. CLEARLY 4096 IS.
Rules for Poll Workers:
1) No sneakers or running shoes to be worn on election day. Leather soled shoes only.
2) Attire for men should consist of corduroy pants and jackets, wool shirts, wool socks.
3) Women should wear the same with the substitution of nylons. Silk shirts, velvet suits are optional.
4) Good grooming is important. Bring a comb or hair brush and use it frequently during the day.
5) Try to present a happy and relaxed appearance to voters. Snappin' your fingers and shufflin' your feet would be sufficient. Balloons in patriotic colors will be provided.
6) In the event of rain or damp weather, please use the dehumidifiers provided.
7) Your election boss will instruct you in the proper handling of the sensitive electronic voting equipment.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
Dead people vote, so why not?
Let's not drag this issue over the carpet and point fingers.
"Strange Days"
Well, here we are.
I don't know if it's food poisoning or what. . . I ate some grocery store chocolate chip cookies from a box and I've had a head-ache for two straight days since while hurricane Ike or whoever has been raging outside my window playing hell with the barometrics, and the economy and politics and everything slipped past some kind of breakpoint. . .
The whole illusion of 'normal' has been filled with glitches for a long while now, but it's been really bad lately. All this week, in fact. --Partly because while looking over that whole "The Fed Borrows All Money From a Private Consortium at Interest" thing, and wondered if it applied in Canada as well. (It does, just with a little more complexity, because I think Canadians are slightly harder to fool than their American counter-parts. Not because they're any smarter, but they've just had better mind-resources.) Anyway, it's a whole giant scam, this money thing, designed to create debt-slavery.
But then I realize that there is a level above even that. Just another illusion.
--Because, you see, it's not just banks which create money out of thin air. Everybody does. Farmers create wealth out of the ground, and people eating food destroy that wealth, or convert it into potential, but the paper stuff continues to exist regardless of the state of the material wealth it has been attached to. It struck me that there are two economies; one made out of actual energy and material wealth, and a second one made of paper money and bank-data which is supposed to track with and serve the real economy. Right? Economics 101. But the second economy, which has never been able to keep up with the ineffable reality of true energy and wealth, has flown out of control into its own daydream, and now a nightmare. And now it is crashing, or so we're told. But so what? The material wealth is still there, right? We still grow food and eat food and do all the things we do in between, we live, but the daydream world is spinning and drowning in it's own visions. Will people starve? Will they riot and die? Why should any of that happen? Because of an illusion?
So the head-ache floats around the back of my skull and the air pressure jumps and sinks every thirty seconds, and none of it seems particularly real.
The voting system is a mess. Everybody knows that. And everybody also knows that even if it worked properly, neither candidate is up to the task of facing reality. Is Obama going to declare, "That's it. --We're printing our own money at zero interest from now on to break the chains of debt-slavery held in the fists of the old super-wealthy families which run the world! Heck, let's declare war on them. And while we're at it, let's break our ties to Israel; it's insane that our military might should be controlled by the Zionist desire to kill everybody who isn't a Jew! Heck, while we're at it, let's ditch this whole insane religion thing altogether. It's clearly making everybody nuts. Let's pull back the camera and look at what's actually happening on this globe of ours."?
Not going to happen. All the two candidates are battling over is the better way to re-establish the illusion of 'normal'.
But I'm tired of illusions! What good is an illusion? We'd all just have another few weeks, months, years to do what? Play video games and watch TV? To fart around and wish for love and the next cool gadget. Well, it looks like I'll be getting my wish. As one illusion morphs into the next, there are all these little tears and exit points where you can see what's really happening. Not that illusions are bad. They can be fun; There has been a lot of neat stuff to do here. I just don't understand why so many people are so angry, why they want their guns and their versions of their daft religions at all costs. Why the missiles, and the psychotic people, and the greed and mean-spirited behavior? If that's what they want, then fine, let the whole thing crash, because I don't want to put up with it anymore.
Heck all I really want is for life to be a happy place. With better cookies.
My head hurts.
-FL
I saw the election in question. It was 3 to 1 with the Democrats over the Republicans wearing wool sweaters into the election booths.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
With half of US voters not bothering to turn up, and the other half voting for the 2-party system, I think the entrance of static electricity to the mix would be a breath of fresh air.
I think the real question is, how is it possible to hire such consistantly incompotent people to run a "voting" process?
By the way America- John Mccain is not going to win, but he will be the next president. It WILL happen the exact same way it did in 2000,2004. There is no vote. The republicans have complete dictatorship over the election process.
Yes, it is entirely possible for static electricity to cause problems in direct recording electronic voting machines. It depends on the relative humidity on election day and on other factors such as the floor covering in the polling place.
According to the Electrostatic Discharge Association (http://www.esda.org/) the typical static voltage generated by someone walking across a rug on a dry day is 35000 volts. The voting machines are tested to only 15000 volts. The internal circuitry of the voting machines is designed to work at around 3 volts and the chips may be internally protected to about 100 volts. A human can't feel the discharge if it is below about 3000 volts.
ESD can cause latent failures in the chips. The protection gets punched through and something later triggers the actual failure.
Touch screens are vulnerable to ESD, and the cheaper the screen the more vulnerable. In some touch screens, the discharge goes around the edge of the screen and into the electronics.
The memory modules are also vulnerable. However, even though the machines are opened as part of the polling place opening and closing, the machines are not tested open, and the individual components are not tested.
Because computers have been pretty static electricity resistant for a number of years now.
I wonder how many mod points can I generate if i just touch thi
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
hahah.. yeah.. the static just happens to create a valid data value rather than garbage.
right.
where cosmic rays are a huge concern, technically it is possible. BUT the odds of this happening in a coherent manner that could change results such that a program would continue to operate and produce an erroneous error as oppsed to just crashing the system are 1:10^10^10^10 (not scientifically arrived at, but a real value would be of similar oreder or higher).
in 1973 I was living in the dorms at the University of Utah, and a Pong machine was in the lobby. I quickly discovered that if I rubbed my feet on the wool carpet and touched the Pong machine, the shock would cause it to reset with a new game, free. It was a paradise of computer gaming goodness. Of course I will be going to hell for cheating the university by playing all those games for free, but I was probably going anyway. I have no trouble believing that if I could play Pong for free through the miracle of static electricity, it can interfere with the inferior machinery of Diebold.
Static huh. Interesting. I'm concerned how long the list of scandals grows.
We all know this is easy to get right. It's funny how much, much more complicated systems get implemented correctly - you know, the ones that people have a vested interest in getting right. It may well be the opposite in the case of eVoting. Or just voting, for that matter.
Anyway, I'll quote myself to provide an example. Open source evoting with central authority and some voter-doable verification...
-------------------
Funny I think that people are so cautious to trust computers here, but they're fine for everything else. Just make it open. We can gain some advantages.
-Immediately before voting, you are handed a number. How we generate these numbers is up for debate. Perhaps they are centrally generated and serial. Perhaps a hash of name + DOB + other stuff. Each choice here opens different doors.
-Barcode equivalent to said number must be scanned at the machine. Number must also be entered on an onscreen key pad.
- Number + voting choices + timestamp + voting machine id are stored in a central database. Immediately. Nothing local.
-You get a receipt with your Number + voting choices + timestamp + machine ID. It also has these other handy value on there. A digital signature, created by said central authority with its private key. The public key is well known long in advance.
-After the election, the entire result set is made available for download. Yeah, a recount is a big fucking deal. We have these neat machines that are good at math. The bigger deal here is that if you check the database after you voted and the entry for your number doesn't match, you scream bloody murder. If you don't trust the machine, any party can verify the central authority's signature.
-But in addition to 'any' party, it is critical to have a non-networked verification appliance, which does nothing but verify the central signature for you before you physically leave. If you scream bloody murder at this point, we can consider the plain-text part of the receipt trusted. You obviously couldn't have faked the entire receipt while being watched by everyone. More on this soon.
Nice huh? Let's recap some advantages here:
-You can verify that your vote was counted and correctly
-You can't determine who voted for whom, except yourself.
-The receipt actually means something
Let's elaborate on that third point.
There are several means of lying to you, which can't easily be solved without adding machines into the mix
-What if the receipt says you voted for X but the machine recorded you as voting for Y? This is as good as pressing the wrong button. The signatures will both be valid. But if the plain-text portion shows the wrong candidate, you'll notice and scream. If the plain-text portion doesn't match the the central signature (the one most directly relevant to proper recording) you will catch this at the non-networked verifier. The receipt can still be trusted having not left the polling place, so you will be allowed to vote on another machine, as meanwhile the machine you previously used is marked for a serious investigation...
-What if the central authority records whatever it wants but produces a normal signature? The receipt will be considered entirely valid and endorsed. People will notice quickly as they check the database from home. You have a paper trail that can be trusted. What if the signature is bogus? People notice before they leave the polling place.
Up to this point? Criminal negligence bordering on treason. Open source needs to step up.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
If the BOFH excuse server told me to.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
Speaking as someone who HAS done some design work, designing any machine that's going to be used by the general public without considering various modes of tampering or failure is the mark of a PISS POOR design effort. I'd expect that they'd at least approach it as if it were a video gambling device of some sort (poker, slot machine, etc) and test it for things like tampering using a high voltage discharge. If this story is true then all those machines should be pulled from use and either warehoused until the original vendor can revise the design, or completely destroyed and sent to the scrap yards.
The Nevada Gaming Commission has been there and done that. Here are their standards for immunity to static electricity for slot machines. Every slot machine in Nevada meets these standards. (Yes, they test.)
1.020 Electrical interference immunity.
In other words, short of firing a Taser at the thing, you can't interfere with a slot machine with static electricity. (And if you did fire a Taser at the thing, alarms would go off.)
Having the voter dip his/her finger in purple has been known to reduce excess votes.
Perhaps it reduces the static electricity.
You fool. You've just provided proof of Intelligent Design
Static electricity cannot generate volts!
A simple solution to the problem would be to let a consortium of disinterested countries - perhaps in the form of the United Nations - run all elections throughout the world.
Or, to look at it from another point of view: Outsource the administration of all elections everywhere.
The 'technology' should be no more complex than dropping pebbles into securely locked boxes for counting which should be done twice. Once at the polling place and then again in the County Hall.
Andy
Actually, the probability that it will happen at least 1 time in a thousand is 0.000368432 Assuming that each trial is independent, of course.
Can votes... generate electricity?
Maybe thats the solution to the energy problem!
-Woof woof woof!
We have been blaming computer problems on similar vague scientific theryoes for years, so why can't governments ? o wait cos we pay them billions to be fair and keep our best interests at hart, where as the bofh is his own man.
But only if it was more like 2147483648 too many votes.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
An electric discharge, changing a single byte in memory, of a value of 1500 has simply no chance of happening.
At the extreme limit, rebooting, frying components *could* happen in an extremely badly designed machine. I think that the "experts" who state such a thing should be tried, either for incompetence or, more probably, for lies. I think that at this point, it is a legal offense.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
There's no reason at all to disbelieve it. But what caused the static? I think it's produced by gnomes wearing nylon underwear.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
RTFT, it doesn't say anything about static electricity (nobody reads the actual article anyway, right?). So, I'm betting the static involved looked something like this:
public static giveExtraVotesToOurGuy(){ //actual implememtations is classified
}
Here's how voting works in France:
You're given one enveloppe. You go in the voting booth where you put the ballot of the candidate of your choice in the enveloppe. You then go to the ballot box, which is a clear acrylic box with a lever-activated trap linked to a mechanical counter. You drop the ballot and the officer says "a vote."
Counting is public, and done by volunteer voters. At the end of the day, the number on the counter is compared to the number of enveloppes delivered. First public check. Enveloppes are divided in stacks of 100, which are given to a table of four volunteers. One volunteer opens the enveloppe, another one reads the ballot aloud, the two other persons write down each count on a piece of paper. Invalid ballots are put in a special stack, and each volunteer signs the enveloppe to acknowledge the invalidity. At the end of the 100 stack, every volunteer at the table signs each piece of paper. Another stack is delivered until all votes are counted.
This mean that each vote, individually, takes quite some time to be counted; but the process is highly parallelizable. Just add more counting tables. Results are obtained within an hour or two.
Clearly this can't be used as is for complex elections, with a number of ballot initiatives and so on. But it's VERY reliable and resistant to tampering.
In short, if voting machines cannot meet the Nevada gaming commission regulations then politicians are at best gambling with our votes.
So... you think there's an element of chance involved in the voting process from the perspective of the politicians?
You know what? That's charmingly naive.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Just as the CBer with the 1000W mobile amp rolls down the street next to election headquarters, suddenly all the votes become write ins for Abraham Lincoln.
Meanwhile, in a nearby state, a high school student is tuning up his new Telsa coil for the school science fair. Election headquarters are just down the street, but suddenly become slot machines spewing out silver dollars. There is a mad dash while some woman screams "I'm voting for whoever did this!"
You mean there's a better way to encode a vote count than storing it as an accumulated charge on an insulator? Pssh!
Next time I go to my bank I am going to shuffle my feet on the carpet and see if I can get 1500 extra bucks!
What the hell does that last sentence mean?
"Also, voters wearing paraphernalia, caps, t-shirts and stickers, for candidates to the voting precinct, the board of elections said if poll workers see it, they will throw people out."
If I wore an Obama t-shirt, they're not going to let me vote?
Is that legal?
I am no professional programmer, I donÂt know how the voting actually takes place, but it doesnÂt seem like a seriously hard task to program a function that, when a person pushes one button, it adds to an integer, and when another person pushes another button it adds to another integer. even if it is done a hundred million times. (and i donÂt think it is done a hundred million times pr. machine)
I mean, we rely on such logical or physical counters in a bunch of electronics that we use every day. Like computers, operating systems, media transceivers, routers, firewalls and the likes.
how hard could it be? (seriously, i would like to know what considerations you need to think of in order to design a secure voting proces) I am not just complaining here, I honestly would like a discussion of ways to vote more securely.
I know my vote will definitely count since it's going in by optical scanner in the mail as an absentee ballot.
... starting with the electrical college.
No chance this was caused by static electricity. Not a chance in hell.
Anyone who understands how computing systems actually work will see this for the sham that it is.
It was not 1500 votes but 4759 cast, while only 326 were correct. 4759 is a PRIME number!! If that's not a conspiracy, what is? Furthermore, 4759-326=4433. 4433 is also an interesting number - it is the product of 11x13x31 - seems like lots of threes and ones, this smells to me like someone's idea of a joke.
Well, certainly it's POSSIBLE, but it all depends on how the devices are designed. It would have to be a fairly boneheaded design for a static charge to cause a bunch of extra votes to be registered, but it's not impossible.
Seems pretty unlikely though.
Of course static electricity can generate volts!
Oh wait...
(aside: when I see DC my first impression is Direct Current. This article is simply too electrical.)
That tag caught my attention: "thievesandliars"... is that:
a) a common English expression?
b) a reference to the Ministry song?
c) a reference to something else, which Ministry referenced?
Google did not give much info (a bunch of references to bands, movies and books with that name, but all of them more recent than the Ministry song from the late 1980s).
The filesystem is the package manager
This is far more likely to be caused by leftist voter fraud than anything else, especially considering where it happened.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080914/NEWS03/809140383
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
clever writing.
It was that pesky kid from Heroes.
No paper trail, no audit trail and a judge just blocked the release of the report saying so. Diebold machines are similar.
A friend of mine has worked for companies that design and build poker machines and other types of electronic gaming equipment for the last 20 years. Before state government gaming regulators will let them put a new type of equipment into use, it must be tested and validated. During part of this process, they take something that looks like an industrial Tazer and shock the machine all over the place; keyboard, display, bezel, coin and bill acceptor, and every screw head they can find on the machine case. All the while they are feeding it money and playing the games. If any errors come up during this process, the machine is rejected and the company has to figure out how it failed, fix it, document it and resubmit it for testing.
They also validate the software (yes, the state gets the source) and test the machine for various hacking methods, magnets (not much use on modern machines since the only moving parts are the fans on the computer), things like that. The one thing they have that the voting machines don't, is a fixed win percent programmed into the game. The state auditors can check the income vs payout and know if the machine is performing to spec when it is in the field. Of course, there is also the audit tape inside the machine that can be reviewed.
So, I'll end with a question: Why do states governments and judges at all levels feel it is more important to protect the people feeding 20s to a poker machine from fraud than it is to protect voters from fraud by these multi-national companies that produce voting machines?
Down with the Current administration! Voltage party '08!
Everyone who made an electricity pun in this thread is going to hell.
That is all.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
seriously, these are the same companies that make ATM machines....i've shocked an ATM machine before and i didn't receive any extra $ in my account. this is negligence at best, but most likely criminal.
I'll be satisfied. I wish there were no man, only lesbians...endless lesbians licking, pinching, and tribbing eachother, rimjobs and all passing along around and reproduce asexually by budding at the ripe age of cougar-69 to die.
I am not voting for ANYONE who voted for that bogus bailout bill. And I think we should all do the same. These people (The US Govt) DUPED us all again. First with WMD, then with global warming (http://www.disgussglobalwarming.com/blog), and now with this bogus bill which hasnt and wont fix ONE DAMN THING.
I say we fire them all. We need to revolt and now!
Somebody call CERN, this is clearly a new physics discovery. Flipping bits influencing an election result in a way that "might have gone unnoticed", instead of crashing the computer are beyond astronomical. With a few gigabytes of RAM, and just one bit flipping suitably, the odds of it happening are less than 1:10,000,000,000,000 - just so improbable that this new physics discovery needs to be investigated properly.
Of course, nobody in the US election commission or relevant boards would be criminally influencing the elections results. That is even less likely than this new physics discovery.
Yes, kinda sorta.
Ballots at the precinct level should be tabulated by hand, in front of witnesses.
The totals are sent up to the next highest level of government (city/county/state). They are also sent to designated representatives of every political party represented in the election across the USA.
Computers can be useful in all this for tabulating the results as they move up the system. The internet is already used for publishing the precinct totals.
As demonstrated once again in Zimbabwe this year, time is of the essence, but the difference between 12-24 hours and having everyone's vote tabulated immediately for some approximation of immediately in some computer is not worth "solving".
In the past, blood was shed to preserve freedom. This would only require some people to do a little extra work on election day evening.
Other methods of stealing elections will come into play once counting is solved - the stakes are too high. Let's solve one problem at a time and really solve it instead of throwing a vast sum of money at the people who created the problem, as the representatives of the USA did today.
why would static electricity only effect one entry on a ballot? I think they are using static electricity as a scape goat.
Start looking at life from a positive side!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
You know, the "static" that caused this incident must have been real smart. It knew to vote for only one candidate, and inserted a round number... not 1273 or 1107, but 1500. That's nice and round. Real likely...
I don't know what it will take for the US to wake up and become a democratic country again. Probably, a lot more education - but wait! Isn't that on a decline for some reason?