First there was the “hanging chad,” then we had thousands of voters getting removed from the rolls due to technical glitches and other human errors, then the so-called three million invalid votes in the last general election that turned out to be only nineteen, and now we have the Iowa Caucus “App-gate”! Counting every precious vote accurately in a Democratic society has been a challenge that goes as far back to ancient times. Since The Tenth Sphere covers the latest trends happening in Digital Tech & Industry (among many other trendy topics), I thought it would be interesting to give my readers a brief history and discussion of voting machines, voting apps, and voting tech in general. Let’s begin with the earliest of voting machines, paper ballots, which existed as far back as the Roman Empire, ca. 139 BCE. The first use of paper ballots in the United States was in 1629, and was used in selecting a pastor for the Salem Church during the founding days of the Salem Massachusetts community. Fast forward to 1838 England. The Chartists (a working-class suffrage movement) demanded responsible election reforms. And in so doing, Benjamin Jolly of Bath invented arguably the very first voting machine. It worked like this: each voter was to cast his vote by dropping a brass ball into the appropriate hole in the top of the machine by the candidate’s name. Each voter could only vote once because they were given just one brass ball. The ball advanced a clockwork counter for the corresponding candidate as it passed through the machine. And then the ball fell out the front where it could be given to the next voter. Then came Henry Spratt (a British national) who in 1875 received the first US patent for a voting machine. It presented to the voter an array of push-button ballots. Next came American inventor Anthony Beranek of Chicago in 1881. His voting machine was...
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October 14, 2019Today’s Digital Tech & Industry section is all about the cornerstone of our civilization: cash! That’s right. For as long as there’s been human society there has been some form of currency. For most of human history it’s been more or less little bits of embossed metal called coins. However, in the 21st Century (thank goodness) we have Digital Mobile Payments, Cryptocurrencies, and Social Media Payments to enable all of our commercial indulgences! Hard to believe that there would be more than one way to pay but there it is. When we look back at 20th Century digital payments, the only examples that come to mind are wire transfers and direct deposit. However, now those seem so quiant compared to what we have going on today. A lot of hullabaloo is made over cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and others (e.g. NEO, EOS, and Monero); however, in a practical sense, trying to pay for say a pair of jeans or a latte with them still seems a bit too farfetched. But for millennials and Gen‐X/Yers, it’s as simple as taking out their smartphone (or raising their smartwatch) and tapping the POS (Point of Sale) terminal using their eWallets (i.e. Apple/Google/Samsung Pay). Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay are all pretty much the same with only a few device‐specific differences. They all use the NFC (or Near‐Field Communication) chips inside them to enable “contactless” transactions that are funded by a person’s digital wallet (or eWallet) usually linked to a bank/credit account. Samsung Pay actually has another level of mobile payment called MST (Magnetic Secure Transaction) that enables users to use their phones just like swiping a credit card—good for older POS terminals that do not have an NFC chip reader. And this is all well and good for millions of transactions...