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?"

Comments

Having worked with embedded systems

[gillbates]

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:

1. While it is indeed possible for static electricity to jostle bus lines, power supply lines, etc..., I find it rather unlikely that static discharge would add an extra 10111011100 (binary) votes for a candidate. I would find a power of two (such as 2048 or 4096) more plausible, but still unlikely.
2. Any engineer worth his salt is going to design the board and layout to minimize the possibility of static discharge damage. I'm not sure why any competent engineer would design the case with an electrical path from VCC or data lines to the user interface; regardless, it seems very odd that static is the culprit. Still, those who can remember the Palm cradle fiasco know that such oversights do occasionally make it into commercial products.
3. I don't for a moment believe static is to blame. Even assuming well-intentioned engineers, it is far more likely that the code has a race condition, or the box was hacked, or it was deliberate sabotage. They're probably saying static because they have no clue what happened.

Remember that sort-of James Cameron movie. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

"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

Re:The real question is

[Kumiorava]

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.

Problem already solved ELSEWHERE

[Nicolas MONNET]

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.