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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?"
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.
We are treating E voting like a minor IT procurement project, when we should be treating it as Democracy's Manhattan Project.
I presume the "Nixon" number refers to the 1960 election, stolen in Chicago by a handful of votes?
Right idea, wrong project. The Manhattan Project was a massively funded, mad dash for survival and let's face it, E-voting just is not that important. Ideally it would be more like the mission to the moon, which was also massively funded, but each step of the way was carefully and meticulously planned and tested before being deployed.
As a matter of fact, it's really not a problem worth spending money on solving. There are some things that are done better by hand and counting election ballots is one of them.
Thomas Edison's first invention was an automatic vote recorder for legislatures. It failed to generate any interest.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Thomas_Edison
He obtained his first patent on his first "real" invention, an automatic vote-recording machine. However, as with many inventors first attempts, it was not well received and turned out to be unmarketable. This was not because it did not work; it worked well, it was because the market was not receptive to the invention.
The way I first read about this was more instructive, but I cannot find where the more detailed reference is. Edison was taken aside by one lawmaker in Washington who explained to him that if counting votes in Congress was too fast, they could well wind up voting for legislation that should not pass.
There is no need to rush the process. There is no need to declare elections over a month before votes are cast. There is no need to declare a winner before all voters have voted when votes are being cast. There is no NEED for E-voting. 12-24 hours to handcount paper ballots is sufficient and also enough to have the counting audited/supervised by independent parties.
"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 propose a measure, call it the "Nixon Number"
That was very biased. Can we call it the "Freedom Number"?
Actually there is a precedent. A decade ago there was an argument for a replacement to the "MIPS" processor performance statistic called the "MilliVAX". It was based on the MilliHelen, the argument being:
o _ Helen of Troy had beauty sufficient to launch 1000 ships. We call this amount of beauty "1 Helen".
o _ By extension, the MilliHelen is the amount of beauty sufficient to launch 1 ship.
Therefore it does appear to be known in common usage that a decimal fraction of a personal characteristic can be used as a clinical metric.
In Nixon's case (I presume you mean Richard, not Christine) the amount of integrity loss to a single political party's reputation caused by 1 person would be approx. 1:150,000,000.
Rounding this number to a convenient 1:1,000,000 ratio might give us (for example) the "MicroNixon", to point to the amount of reputation lost by 1 individual representative Republican.
Similar numbers could account for the emergence of the "NanoBush" for a particular country's international charisma, or perhaps (to underscore the fact that not all such metrics require fractional values) the MegaPalin, the amount of charisma necessary to offset one logical point during a national debate.
Quid errata demonstrandum.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
There is also no far right wing. Listen to the European far right wingers speak and you will be glad that those far right wing people are nowhere near the capitol hill.
I have figured out of US politics so far that democrats know what to do but not how. They have the ideology of new and better world where everyone has enough of everything. Republicans know how to do it, but for some reason I don't get strong sense of what they are going to do. The lack of vision means that they want to give the power to the people and these people will then reach their individual goals without common goals or greater vision for the society.
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.