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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?
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.
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'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>
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
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.
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.
"What we have here..." *THUMP* "...is a failure to communicate."
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
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.
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
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 :)
"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
Somehow I don't see voting in pencil as a good method of preventing votes from being changed. Can I vote in pen instead?
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.