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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?"
Is static electricity smarter than the average, uninformed voter?
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
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 personally have no problem with black box voting machines, provided that they print out a human readable ballot, and the printed ballot is the only official ballot for the purpose of vote counting.
Open source was always a distraction from the real issue. I like open source, but we shouldn't use this issue to try to push open source. It just doesn't make sense. Open source doesn't guarantee security. If the computer is responsible for maintaining the vote total, there will be the possibility of mischief, whether the software is open source or not.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
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.
Now that's charge I can believe in!
If I am elected, all charges will be positive.
Ladies and gentlemen, my opponent wants to take away your electrons! If you value your molecular bonds - and what true patriot doesn't? - you will vote against these anti-electronist policies!
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.
I'm tired of all this damn negativity in politics nowadays.
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.
Let's not let this go negative now....
I agree that open source is a distraction from the real issue(though it is, I would argue, a likely part of the solution to the real issue, so it comes up for a reason); but I think that the real issue is slightly different. For the purpose of discussion, I propose a measure, call it the "Nixon Number". A system's Nixon Number is the smallest plausible number of people who would have to conspire in order to subvert that system successfully. The real problem with electronic voting is not closed vs. open per se, it is the fact that, thus far, we keep building systems with pitifully low Nixon Numbers in order to do the job, when what we need is the exact opposite. A system's Nixon Number depends on hardware, software, procedures, and institutional safeguards.
Open Source licencing is not necessary to build a system with high Nixon Number, nor is it assured that an OSS system will have one. However, I would argue that(barring substantial advances in static analysis of binaries, or the like) publicly auditable code, along with a publicly available trusted compiler, publicly disclosed hashes of all binaries, etc, etc. is in practice necessary to achieve a Nixon Number high enough to be considered for critical uses like voting. The code doesn't have to be under a licence allowing free reuse, or reuse at all; but it must be available for inspection by anybody, for any reason, without limitation or expense.
That alone is by no means good enough, the other main issue is hardware security. Unfortunately, techniques for assuring that hardware is doing what it ought to be are as yet immature(see this from EETimes). In practice, voting and similar critical systems should probably be conducted on minimal complexity systems, so that the necessary chips can be manufactured with oversight, in secure fabs, and optically or otherwise verified.
Even, that, though, isn't enough. Beyond hardware and software security and transparency, a high Nixon Number requires that the technology be surrounded by a robust institutional structure. We have, thus far, failed here as well. The election commissions have, on the whole, done an awful job of enforcing oversight of voting system vendors, and have rubber stamped known broken systems.
Ultimately, I think the difficulties of electronic voting have two parts. The first is that it isn't an easy problem. The second is that we don't take it nearly seriously enough. If elections are not free and fair, democracy has fallen. Period. Full Stop. No ifs, ands, or buts. E voting is not something to be done on the cheap. It is not something we can trust vendors to do. We are treating E voting like a minor IT procurement project, when we should be treating it as Democracy's Manhattan Project.
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
You have no ground!
This story has potential!
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
You don't find it at all shocking, do you?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"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
oh my god, i've just suffered a pun overload.
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.
You have my volt !