I found this on Risk Digest as well Cosmic ray hits Brussels election - really? <"Dirk Fieldhouse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:04:14 +0100
John Miller, Dow Jones Newswires (07/26/04); seen via ACM Tech News: http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2004-6/0728w.html#item1 "European citizens and governments generally prefer traditional paper-based voting because of unresolved reliability and security issues surrounding electronic voting. ... [DF comment: what a fair summary, and in the UK issues are also being raised by the extension of postal paper voting] ... Fueling the arguments of paper ballot supporters are incidents such as a 2003 Belgian election in which almost 4,100 extra votes for Maria Vindevoghel's Communist Party were recorded in a precinct of Brussels due to a malfunction triggered by a cosmic ray. ..." I found this jaw-dropping -- not the possibility of a cosmic ray causing a computer malfunction, which is an obvious threat for space-borne systems, but how such an apparently unrepeatable external event could be accepted as the cause of a terrestrial computer malfunction. The lack of any confirmation through Google seems to support my astonishment. Can the select RISKS readership confirm whether this actually occurred, or is it an urban legend? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
