In the wake of the stolen disputed presidential election of 2000, and similarly disputed elections for Georgia's US Senate seat in 2002 and the Ohio presidential vote in 2004, a great deal of attention has been focused on electronic voting machines. Reformers fear that the voting machines can be (and have been) hacked into online, and altered software uploaded to allow vote totals to be skewed -- the electronic equivalent of ballot box stuffing. Of particular concern has been the spread of voting machines that leave no written record of votes cast, no "paper trail", to use the current terminology, that would allow votes to be re-counted by hand. The potential harm cannot be exaggerated, since democracy itself would be threatened if voters' choices could be electronically subverted. Fortunately, the solution to the problem of electronic vote tampering is at hand, and can be summed up in one word: thiotimoline.
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Thiotimoline is an organic chemical compound whose most unusual feature is its ability to dissolve in water up to 1.12 seconds before the water has been added. Thiotimoline, which is derived from the bark of the Rosacea Karlsbadensis rufo, or cavern rose plant, was first brought to the attention of the scientific world in 1948, when my paper "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" was first published in the March issue of the Journal of Astounding Science Fiction. In subsequent years, the science of chronochemistry has grown by leaps and bounds as new applications of thiotimoline's endochronic properties have developed.
My colleagues at the Institute for the Study and Advancement of Applied Chronochemistry (ISAAC) were contacted in the wake of the 2004 election by Mr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and tasked with developing a remedy for the problem of insecure electronic vote tabulation technology. A study group was formed under the direction of Dr. Esteban Almirante, and the problem was attacked from a variety of angles. I will skip over the next three years, with its tale of unworkable solutions and scientific dead ends (the details of which can be found in Dr. Almirante's heartbreaking series of papers in the Journal of Applied Chronochemistry). In the end, the Almirante Group was able to solve the problem of electronic election fraud.
The basic problem is one of numbers. There are currentlys over 180,000 voting precincts within the United States, each of which is the site of one or more voting machines. Most fraudulent voting takes place within a small number of machines located at strategic polling locations. Unfortunately, there is, in the normal course of events, no way of knowing ahead of time which machines in which precincts will produce questionable vote totals. This is where thiotimoline comes in.
In 1954 the team of McLaren and Michie at the University of Edinburgh developed the telechronic battery, which makes use of an interconnected series of endochronometers to extend the temporal reach of the endochronic reaction (details on the telechronic battery can be found in the October 1960 issue of Analog: the Journal of Science Fact and Science Fiction in a paper of mine entitled "Thiotimoline and the Space Age"). In the decades since McLaren and Michie's pioneering work, telechronic batteries have been developed that are capable of interacting with events up to four weeks in the future.
The Almirante Group has determined that a central location can be established with an alphanumerically equipped telechronic battery. After polls have closed and the final vote tabulations have been announced, the telechronic battery can be programed to send a message four weeks into the past listing every voting machine involved in a disputed election. At that time, four weeks before the elections, legal teams can be dispatched to each of the affected localities, in order to file legal challenges based upon the future election disputes. The legal teams will use the future disputed election to petition for the replacement of suspect voting machines with machines producing verifiable vote totals. Due to the precedent established in the 2006 legal case of Institute for the Study and Advancement of Applied Chronochemistry v. the City of Fresno (a case filed by ISAAC for the specific purpose of producing such a legal precedent), all such endochronically-based challenges must result in the replacement of suspect voting machines.
A trial run of the Almirante Solution will be conducted in the upcoming gubernatorial elections in Louisiana and Kentucky, and any unforeseen problems can be addressed before the 2008 elections. (It may even be possible to use telechronic messaging to address the problems before the 2007 elections.) If the trial run is successful, we can be assured that the 2008 elections will be the first national elections in American history to be endochronically-guaranteed free of electoral fraud.
The threat to our nation's democratic institutions will be eliminated, and American democracy will be a model and inspiration the world over.