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Can Static Electricity Generate Votes?
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Oct 02, 2008 07:39 PM
from the dc-elections-crack-me-up-and-barry-too dept.
from the dc-elections-crack-me-up-and-barry-too dept.
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?"
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My friends (Score:5, Funny)
If I am elected, all charges will be positive.
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:4, Funny)
Whomever is elected, I'm sure sparks will fly.
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
Let's not let this go negative now....
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Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
You have my volt !
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GOOD (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
just as long as you're not advocating any of that ungodly same-charge attraction and strong force coupling, that queer stuff needs to stay in the closet, dammit!
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Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
I must agree! I, for one, believe that Shroedinger's closet must stay closed, so that anyone inside can remain both gay and not-gay simultaneously, thus preventing a collapse of the state!
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Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
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Lets get down to Watts what! (Score:5, Funny)
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
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
This electron was rigged!
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
You have no ground!
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
This story has potential!
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
You don't find it at all shocking, do you?
Parent
Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
Ohm my God! Don't you know that 2/3 of pun is actually P.U. and joule go to hell for one that bad.
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Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:My friends (Score:5, Funny)
I didn't have the capacity to resist. No matter watt I try, I just keep making bad puns though I'm sure I'll be charged eventually. I'm not sure what ion besides beer. Stupid beer.
*goes and hangs himself in shame*
Parent
don't know about you guys... (Score:5, Funny)
The real question is (Score:5, Funny)
Is static electricity smarter than the average, uninformed voter?
Re:The real question is (Score:5, Funny)
Yes but it's more biased.
Parent
Re:The real question is (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Religious Perspective (Score:4, Funny)
Nah, it's just all those Body Thetans trying to vote Xenu into office.
Nice try, fellas. Better luck next time...
Static electricity has a right to vote (Score:4, Funny)
In addition, it's smarter than many of the voters.
Valid election? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't understand how do you people accept voting with back boxes (that is, w/o access to source code).
Re:Valid election? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Valid election? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [eetimes.com] 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.
Parent
Re:Valid election? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [conservapedia.com]
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.
Parent
Problem already solved ELSEWHERE (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Valid election? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:Valid election? (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that a result with only a 0.001 chance of happening still does happen 1 time in a thousand, don't you? How are you going to base anything on a random sampling? You can't prove an outcome is biased, only that the likelihood has a certain probability of occurrence.
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This Just In (Score:5, Funny)
This is one for the record books, folks.
Solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paper ballots?
Re:Solution? (Score:5, Funny)
Paper ballots?
Chad disagrees. Ask him yourself - he's hanging out around here somewhere.
Parent
Re:Solution? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it difficult to believe that people cannot design and implement a reliable, electrically actuated hole punching machine usable by everyone eligible to vote in the bloody country.
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Repeat it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Repeat it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Mexico we have a quite different electoral system:
To vote, voters are given IDs with photograph to make sure they don't cheat and vote twice.
The ones counting the votes are citizens (chosen randomly, just like members of a jury), supervised by a representative of each one of the political parties, who can complain later about any bad behavior they saw.
Later, the urns with all the ballots are sent to the main office of the electoral institute, also independent from the government (but funded by it), who then take the count results - if there is a complaint, the complaint is followed and the ballots are recounted. If they can't for some reason (such as the evidence of ballots being stolen - they're numbered), the urn is declared null and its votes are not counted for the final result.
After all the complaints are addressed, the partial count results are summed by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and the winner is declared.
This procedure is expensive, slow and exhausting, but at least it's guaranteed to give honest results.
Parent
Excuse me? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, depending on just how badly designed the system is (think primary-school-level understanding of technology that most managers have) it could be plausible... Especially without any details on how the system works.
Static (when it doesn't destroy an input by shorting out the diode protection network on it) causes a signal to be received.
If you designed a basic enough cartridge (eg, 1 button on each input, with the cartridge just registering "Button Presses") then yes, I can actually imagine that causing false votes registered.
And I can also imagine vote machines using this type of technology as non-tech savvy people design this equipment and I've seen designs as stupid as this in money changing machines...
And it didn't take the kids at arcades long to figure out rub your feet on the carpet, get free coins.
If they can make this mistake on a machine giving out their own money, then beleive me, it's not that much of a stretch of imagination to beleive they would do something equally stupid in the design of a voting machine.
GrpA
Parent
Having worked with embedded systems (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
What's in a word? (Score:4, Funny)
The title to the linked article is: 'Static' Blamed for D.C.'s Extra Votes Snafu
<Inigo_Montoya_mode>
You keep using that word [wikipedia.org]. I do not think it means what you think it means.
</Inigo_Montoya_mode>
slot machines are protected from static shocks and (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:slot machines are protected from static shocks (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Both the summary and article are FUBAR (Score:5, Informative)
You can read the board's report on their site [dcboee.org] [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.
Does that make then susceptible to "clickers"? (Score:5, Informative)
Remember that sort-of James Cameron movie. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
"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
Shuffling feet.. (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how many mod points can I generate if i just touch thi
Here's the standard they should meet. (Score:5, Informative)
The Nevada Gaming Commission has been there and done that. Here are their standards for immunity to static electricity for slot machines. [nv.gov] 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.)