Can Static Electricity Generate Votes? 377
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?"
Don't know 'bout voting machines (Score:2, Interesting)
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:
BS! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
There's no way static electricity could create several thousand new rows in a database, the odds of bits being flipped randomly in the correct format are extremely low. However, if they just have a row for each candidate, with a count next to it, then it could be altered... but wouldn't you want some sort of signature to protect from this kind of accident? If a bit if flipped, the signature is invalid and you count the paper ballots to verify the count.
Re:Excuse me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, considering what the Free Speech Cage(360 degree panorama) [flickr.com] at the DNC in Denver looked like, where the Pepsi Center [flickr.com] was barely visible, that restriction doesn't surprise me.
Re:Valid election? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since they're going to use the electronic vote tallies anyway, random sampling a proportion of the votes and verifying them against the paper tallies should be a practical means of verification. Since the sampling is random, there is no predictable pattern the voting machines could exploit. And no letting them write special routines for sampling; the output should be read as if from a mini-election and the sampling performed *after* the data is acquired. The counts should have to match exactly, or at least very closely.
If they don't consistently match, the results should be invalidated, the company that creates the machine should be banned from providing machines in future elections, and they should be required to pay the government back for the machines they already bought, for the cost of the rerun election, and with a punitive damage added on. That should provide sufficient economic incentive for them to make sure they do it right, if the internal motivation to conduct a fair election is not enough.
Actually, I think it is possible, here's why: (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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.
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
Re:Valid election? (Score:2, Interesting)
> Only problem is, if they don't match, how do
> you know which one was tampered with?
>
> It's a good way to detect a problem, but you
> can't fix the problem once its detected, except
> by revoting.
Exactly. Regardless of whether the ballots are paper, ferrite, bits in the tubes, or little clay balls, somebody somewhere *will* try to tamper with the result. Prevention of tampering is not accomplishable through technology, but only through massive reform of the entire human race's ethical character, which is beyond our current capabilities.
Since we live in an imperfect world, we have to settle for making tampering as detectable as possible, first as a deterrent, and second to minimize the harm that those who are not deterred will be able to do. If we find that the election results show signs of tampering, and the actual vote count is not determinable, then the election will have to be redone. This will suck, yea, with a mighty suckage will it suck, and one hopes that the people responsible will be apprehended and remanded for a very long time to PMITA prison.
Having seen several versions of e-voting machines and procedures, I agree with the AC above. The machine should maintain an electronic record of the vote, which enables rapid tabulation and reporting of results. As a hedge against evildoers, the machine should also provide a human-readable ballot. This allows the voter to visually verify that his/her vote has been accurately recorded, and provides a tamper-resistant artifact which can be stored securely against the possible need for verification.
As for the question of which one is official, I would hope that legislation would define the human-readable version as official, since it is harder to tamper with. It wouldn't be that hard to make a ballot that would be readable by human and machine both. We have the technology, implementing it is just a question of engineering. If the electronic count is screwy, you unpack the paper ballots and run them through the scanner to check the totals. If it's still screwy, you have the option of a hand recount.
It depends on the humidity and other factors (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I call bullshit! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Valid election? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
The problem then becomes, 'How do we determine who is an independent party who is unbiased enough to give us a truthful audit?' Other than that little problem, though, I agree with you fully.
Voting machine == 6th grade science project? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Solution? (Score:1, Interesting)
What about individual ballots for individual choices? The way we do it in the civilised world.
Re:Valid election? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally after the last decade of elections with unusual problems I think it's time to call in the UN to run this one. Use US election rules but just let a third party that is not in it for profit and is able to apply the same way to do things everywhere. If you really want voting machines get them from India where they are an order of magnitude cheaper and are vastly more reliable.
At least if McCain wins by static electricity he's better than the incumbent.
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.
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.